Word: reiner
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...Where's Poppa?. Carl Reiner's manic and excruciatingly funny film about what a son is to do when his aged mother just won't leave him alone. The whole movie operates at a hyped-up level that does not so much ignore reality as compress it. Reiner has also succeeded in finding a visual equation for his primarily verbal humor on occasion. George Segal is the son, Ruth Gordon is Mom, and there are awfully nice bits by character actor Ron Leibman and an ingenue named Trish Van Devere...
...serve the purpose of marking time rather than moving on), two major (and generally successful) works expressing the funereal feeling of the decade ahead have arrived in time to brighten up the holiday season. I say brighten up because while these two films-Paul Morrissey's Trash and Carl Reiner's Where's Poppa? -are mainly about death, they are comedies about death...
...WHERE'S POPPA?, directed by Carl Reiner from a screenplay by Robert Klance, is another modern screwball comedy, which, like Trash, evokes the kind of desperate laughter we associate with the film farces Hollywood churned out in the thirties. Also like the Morrissey film, its humor is built around the characters' anticipation of the end. To be specific, Where's Poppa? tells about Gordon Hocheiser's (George Segal) anticipation of the death of his mother (Ruth Gordon). Actually, Gordon does not so much anticipate his senile mother's demise as pray for it. He even tries to help her along...
...occasion, Director Carl Reiner offers an ingenious sight gag, and the energy of his cast is never allowed below the manic level, producing some legitimate, if frantic laughter. It was not for nothing that Reiner was the greatest second banana in TV history; it was for next to nothing. His film is but a single joke, and the punch line is the commonplace twelve-letter obscenity...
...wonder that Brooks praised his old partner this week because Reiner always kept him "in a state of panic." Panic is the durable essence of Brooks' humor: the panic of being born into a world that demands us to "partake in social activities" rather than be privately ourselves...