Word: perelman
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Director Ed Berman moves the evening along with stopwatch precision. Because of his gift for parody and incessant wordplay, Stoppard's own affinity may be not so much with Wilde and Coward as with S.J. Perelman, a writer whom he greatly admires...
...pyre composed of thousands of feet of film and scripts drenched with Chanel Number 5 awaited the torch of Jack Holt who was to act as master of ceremonies..." I wish that when John Schlesinger had made Day of the Locust he had paid a little attention to S.J. Perelman (see above) so that he could understand at least a little bit about satire. Satire is not soap opera, which this new movie is. I wish he had taken West's Images and terseness somewhere, anywhere. I wish he had a sense of the crazy and of the really grotesque...
...writers can get away with first-degree malice as well as Perelman: "I drew a deep breath, brushed a small, many-legged Arab off my sleeves and went down to unpack." Most of the other lines, though, could have been written for Groucho Marx and perhaps were: "I was tempted to fling him a lakh of rupees with a princely gesture. Not knowing how many ru pees there were to a lakh, though, I had to content myself with the princely gesture...
Firm Believer. Anatomists of the Perelman corpus may detect a slight twice-breathed air here, as well as in "Nostasia in Asia," the five-part piece that concludes the collection. Some of the ground and most of the mock dudgeon are reminiscent of Westward Ha! (1948). That magnificent Middle Eastern curse, "May you live a thousand years and a trolley car grow in your stomach annually!" appeared at least once before in The Rising Gorge...
...long enough been acquainted with your eminence in the belletristic sphere," Andre Malraux writes him in English. "Now we are overturned to un cover you as a painterly ace ..." This is Perelman at his best, inspired by the pompous, the fake and tawdry, and hell bent for leatherette...