Word: nebbishness
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...broke through in 1966's "The Wrong Box" and 1967's "Bedazzled," the recently remade careful-what-you-wish-for comedy that starred Moore as the lovelorn nebbish and Cook as a mod-clad Satan. In 1969 Moore wrote and arranged the music for "30 is a Dangerous Age"; in 1972 Moore played the Dormouse - what else? - in a live-action "Alice in Wonderland" alongside established Brit stars Ralph Richardson, Michael Crawford and Peter Sellers...
...just fill in some connections and breaks the show makes with the movie. For a start, the Broadway version gives a backstory to the film's 36 hours. It wants to tell how J.J. got Sidney into his awful career commitment: by discovering him, when he was just a nebbish - Sidney Falcone, dazzled by the Hunsecker hubris - and educating him in the ways of venality. (It's basically "The Producers," but without the gaiety, the color or the synchronized goose-stepping.) As played by Brian D'Arcy James, who has the young Neil Sedaka's face and prepubescent tenor singing...
...Sidney Falco - what underworld poetry that name expresses! What an amalgam of Jewish brain and Italian muscle! What a collision of the scurrying nebbish (Sidney) and the soaring predator (falcon)! Sidney is the protagonist of "Sweet Smell of Success," originally a novelette by Ernest Lehman, published in 1950 in Cosmopolitan. Seven years later, the story, rewritten by playwright Clifford Odets, was made into a film directed by Alexander Mackendrick and starring Curtis as Sidney and Lancaster as the Winchellesque columnist J.J. Hunsecker - another fabulous name, for an Attila who sucks the honey out of his minions and spits it into...
...insufferable nebbish. An underdog so far under, so beset with frailties, neuroses and beta-male tics he made it difficult to root for him on-screen, even on those rare occasions when he got the girl or achieved some other cinematic redemption...
...branch of government to write about. We already see plenty of the world of White House staffers, after all, every time an insider quits and writes an overremunerated memoir. But the Court, now there's an intriguing world. The sex-scandal-haunted black conservative! The mysterious, John Cage-like nebbish who infuriates his Republican sponsors by going liberal on them! The plucky woman jurist coming back from cancer! Make 'em all 40 years younger and tighten up those robes and you've got ratings gold. POTUS, make room for SCOTUS...