Word: pryor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ALTHOUGH ORIGINALLY CAST with the late Peter Sellers in the lead, Unfaithfully Yours works largely because of Moore's tremendous comic talent. Without resorting to the clownish absurdity of a Steve Martin or the profanity punctuated anger of a Richard Pryor. Moore delivers a comic performance rich in warmth and charisma. Even at slapstick, Moore delivers, pathetically catching his foot in a wall that he kicks in. In some jokes, you just have to be there, in Unfaithfully Yours, just Dudley Moore has to be there...
There is a certain Panglossian spirit, sweet and fatuous, always at play in the margins of any discussion of forgiveness. Comedian Richard Pryor, in one of his routines, describes how he went to Arizona State Prison in order to make a 1980 movie called Stir Crazy. Before that experience, he said, he had recited a standard liberal line about the injustice of prisons. But after he met some of the homicidal brutes there and found out what crimes they had committed to earn their tuition, he said he was glad they had prisons with great big bars to hold people...
...letter language (the commonest four-letter obscenity is, by conservative count, uttered 181 times), that originally won Scarface the poisonous X rating from the Motion Picture Association's ratings board. It was a bum rap and was overruled on appeal. Scarface is no fouler of mouth than Richard Pryor on a good day, and less graphic than the last three dozen splatter movies. It is a serious, often hilarious peek under the rock where nightmares strut in $800 suits and Armageddon lies around the next twist of treason. The only X this movie deserves is the one in explosive...
This may not seem front-page news, except on the Star; it is a most unpromising premise for an 80-minute monologue. But Pryor deals in shock therapy, self-applied. He exorcises his demons by turning them into imps from the underworld. And so he gives his impression of Old Richard emerging from the utopia of inebriation to "wake up in a car drivin' 90" and then wallpaper his bathroom with last night's dinner. His enactment of a heroin addict killing himself with a fix is no joke; it is a flat-out, Oscar-time horror show...
...Pryor's jokes are impudent, but not all are fresh. A routine about visiting Africa is recycled from Live on the Sunset Strip; the warmup baiting of the audience was done in Live in Concert; the junkie serenade recalls Pryor's role in his 1973 melodrama Some Call It Loving. It can also be tough to maintain your underdog snarl when you've just signed a movie contract worth $40 million. (This is a pose Pryor's sassy "godson," Eddie Murphy, avoided in his delirious HBO concert last month, the better to strut his glitter...