Word: reiners
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...routines, done with partner-interviewer Carl Reiner, are dissections of American role-playing and our susceptibility to the put-on. What Brooks' creations tell us about this country is painful-but the creations endure because they are not built on the comedy of cruelty, but on the comedy of love...
...hilarious Brooks-Reiner albums, we get a brave chauvinistic astronaut who suddenly, desperately admits, "I don't stand a chance. I'm gonna lose my life." Or a heavily-accented Greek painter named Corin Corfu who turns out not to be Greek at all but would merely "like to be Greek." Or a New Wave film director named Federico Fettucinni who fills his movies with rape not for commercial reasons but so people will learn how evil rape...
...vaudevillian, Billy Bright (Dick Van Dyke), clicks in silent two-reelers and becomes a national figure. Producer-Director-Writer Carl Reiner gives Van Dyke almost enough of this plot line to hang himself by strutting and capering in the manner of Mack Sennett's mute screwballs. Such flickering shenanigans are the most comical part of The Comic, but they are also the most derivative. The film gains its validity and poignance when Billy Bright reaches a crossroads and veers to the wrong. Sound movies are bunk, he decides, and abruptly the humor fades to black...
...that of the late Stan Laurel. The bitterness of The Comic arises from an incident in 1963, two years before Laurel's death, when Van Dyke decided to mimic Stan in his TV series. "We wanted to pay him for the rights to use his character," recalls Reiner, then producer of the show. "And we found that the rights belonged to another human being. The rights to the man's own personality! It was easy to get angry after that." It is to Reiner's credit that he was able to propel his anger with so much...
Undaunted by Chicago's reputation, Conductor Georg Solti has decided that if Reiner could win that kind of fray, he can too. Perhaps the fact that Solti is also a Hungarian with distinct Germanic musical preferences had something to do with his decision to sign on for three years. Certainly, any conductor would think twice before turning down the Chicago offer. It reportedly pays $90,000 a year, and though Solti will be responsible for planning the orchestra's entire year, he will only have to conduct three months of subscription concerts. But the overriding reason...