Word: reelers
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...scene is from a 1929 two-reeler starring, as the salesmen, those two heroes of the harebrained, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. To the uninitiated, the mayhem may seem just a grand exercise in slam-bang slapstick. But to a fan club called the Sons of the Desert, it is a classic example of the high comedic art of "reciprocal destruction" and worthy of scrutiny down to the last double take. Described as "an organization with scholarly overtones and heavily social undertones," the Sons of the Desert (named after an L. & H. film) was founded two years...
...Gwen Verdon is the dancer assoluta of the U.S. musical stage. She moves to the impulsive music of instinct as a child laughs and a dolphin leaps. She is Terpsichore's darling and yet fortune's foil. She is a wistful waif out of a Chaplin two-reeler, a Broadway gamin skipping along the harsh pavements of defeat with perky gallantry, one of nature's eternally winning losers. Verdon is verdant, and it is lucky that all is well with her, for all is not so well with her musical...
...Austrian powder store and burn the fodder of the enemy cavalry. Instead of perishing superbly in the attempt, Angelo just does the job very efficiently-and comes prancing back for more, as insatiable for adventure as Don Quixote, as indestructible as the comic hero of an old one-reeler...
FLASH AND FILIGREE, by Terry Southern (204 pp.; Coward-McCann; $3.50), recalls the two-reeler comedies of the silent movies, in which scenes would begin prosaically-with a tea party or dinner in a restaurant-and then break into paroxysms of action. This technique underlies this first novel by Texan Terry Southern, 34, who lives and writes in Switzerland. The book opens quietly at a posh Los Angeles clinic where Dr. Frederick Eichner, "world's foremost dermatologist," listens to the symptoms of a new patient, Felix Treevly. Six pages later the calm is shattered by a verbal and physical...
Traffic in Souls, a 1913 five-reeler about white slavery, was New York-born Harry Cohn's first picture. Returning 79 times its $5,700 cost, it taught him that 1) big money could be made from a small investment and 2) "the public wants sex." In 1920, with brother Jack and Joe Brandt, he founded the C.B.C. Company, forerunner of Columbia, on an initial outlay of $250. After the Cohns had bought out Brandt's interest in 1929, Harry took over as president...