Word: showfolks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Life's a rage these days for Playwright John Osborne. Earlier this year he chastised the governing council of London's Royal Court Theater, calling them "a clique of amateurs who know nothing about the theater." He is still unhappy with some fellow showfolk, and has now placed an ad in the London Times calling for formation of a writers' "fighting unit" to combat unfriendly reviewers. The group will be a "British playwrights' Mafia," according to Osborne, who penned a playlet describing their imaginary first meeting. "Critics are a dissembling, dishonest, contemptible race of men," says...
...maybe Puritan Frost was merely reverting to form. The only son of a church-mouse-poor Methodist minister, he was at 17 a spellbinding lay evangelist. He preached love and practiced thrift. He still does. Almost uniquely among showfolk, Frost seldom has been known to throw tantrums. He is almost as solicitous toward employees as he is toward celebrities, and treats autograph hunters as tenderly as his audiences or his relatives. He is indiscriminately ingratiating. Not since Ed Sullivan has anyone on television back-patted, hugged and smooched so rapturously. His wide-eyed, basset-unctuous, hand-kneading style...
...custom of kissing has spread from showfolk to the general population, it has raised innumerable, if minute, questions of rite and protocol. Who initiates the kiss? In a kiss between a man and woman, quite often it is the woman who makes the first move - offering her hand, inclining her cheek. But if the man is, say, the woman's boss or her husband's boss, she may wait until he leans forward into that critical distance with in which the kiss occurs...
...certain sense, The Front is an easy movie to criticize; almost everything it does could have been done better. On the other hand, it is a very difficult movie to judge because it takes up a previously forbidden subject-the blacklisting of showfolk suspected of Communist leanings during the early '50s-and has the nerve, and grace, to take an absurdist view of that deplorable era. For that, and for Woody Allen's fine performance (against his usual comic grain) in the title role, it deserves respectful attention...
...Showfolk love martyrology as much as political people do. Fearing and loving the audience which has so much power over them, the temptation to present someone like Bruce as a misunderstood genius, an artist ahead of his reactionary times is irresistible. So Director Fosse cops out, buying and selling, without insight or irony, his protagonist's own version of his life and hard times. As he proved in Cabaret, he has a fine eye for the gritty details of the grimiest levels of show business, but here realism (the film is shot in grubby black and white) reinforces...