Word: reiner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...expression of comic extremity. His body, too, was surprisingly lithe, as if his physical dexterity defied his size. Caesar's comedy was a wild assault, with nothing especially cunning about it. As carefully planned as it must have been, Caesar and his wonderfully talented cronies (Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris) always gave it that crucial feeling of spontaneity, a hint that somehow everything might just break apart...
...silent film called The Sewing Machine Girl. Finally there is a cli max of unsparing hilarity: a send-up of From Here to Eternity entitled From Here to Obscurity, starring Caesar as Montgomery Bugle; and a devastating reworking of a TV show called This Is Your Story, with Reiner as an impervious M.C., Caesar as an overwrought, reluctant guest, and Howard Morris as an absurdly lachrymose relative given to clutching convulsions...
...Reiner and Mel Brooks have gone on, separately and together, to become two of the most important comic creators in film; Reiner's Where's Poppa? and Brooks' The Producers, with their free wheeling antic absurdity, still show the strong influence of their mutual apprenticeship...
...WORLD'S GREATEST ATHLETE. In Carl Reiner's antic Where's Poppa? (1970), a football coach from a large Southern university admitted to recruiting his teams by kidnaping nine-year-olds and training them mercilessly until they came of competition age. One longs for the inspired insanity of such a notion during this slack and dreary comedy from Walt Disney studios. The idea here is that the coach of a smalltown college (John Amos) and his cretinous assistant (Tim Conway) stumble on a kind of peroxide Tarzan (Jan-Michael Vincent) and import him from Africa to bring...
Nasty Man. As for the other conductors who worked for him, Bing has a quick quip for all. Stokowski? "He went around the house correcting the way people pronounced each other's names." Reiner? "Not among the naturally light-at-heart." Bernstein? "He wanted us to do Cav after Pag, to give him the final curtain." Szell? "He was a nasty man, God rest his soul. I remember somebody once said to me, 'George Szell is his own worst enemy.' I said, 'Not while I am alive...