Word: scripted
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Onionhead (Warner) is Andy Griffith, who buckled the nation at the midriff as the corn-pone Army private in No Time for Sergeants. This time Hollywood has cast Able Comedian Griffith as a cook's assistant in the Coast Guard, and served him up on a script about as funny as an eyeful of bilge water...
...Sunset Strip (ABC, 9:30-11 p.m.). Girl on the Run, a new detective series, has a main character no more novel than an ex-OSS officer. But with Marion (See Here Private . . .) Hargrove to write the script, the show has its moments...
...wouldn't be hard to guess that Ritchard also directed, since he has blocked himself downstage and as the locus of attention all the time, even when he should not be front and center. But it's a neat job of direction. There is some claptrap in the script, trying to impute deeper meanings to a few of the characters, but it's not bothersome. Also a lot of the jazzy repartee reminds one of an old Montgomery-Lombard movie...
Irwin Shaw has taken Patate from the French of Marcel Achard, and he would be well advised to put it back. As a laugh show, this "New Comedy" suffers from a paucity of laughs. And since the script is not a gimmick adorned by gags, in the fashion of most American comedies, but a closely plotted dramatic whole, there seems very little possibility of its being rewritten and rescued by skillful gagsmithing...
Role Fitters. It was almost easy to fit actors to the roles as they emerged in the script. Actor Thomas Gomez was a natural; without a bit of special makeup he was Georgy Malenkov's double. Luther Adler fitted smoothly into place as Molotov, Oscar Homolka as Khrushchev, E. G. Marshall as Beria. Stalin was harder to cast. After considering Laurence Olivier and José Ferrer, Coe decided on Melvyn Douglas, whom he had admired as Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind...