Word: showfolks
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...Couple of Comedians, Narrator David Ogilvie-gagman of the title team -makes a list, in descending order of status, of the Los Angeles hotels favored by showfolk. He does it perfectly, beginning with the Bel-Air, ending with the Montecito. This may seem a small felicity, but it is precisely the sort of thing that writers of parboiled Hollywood romans à clef usually get wrong or skip altogether in their haste to get to the casting couch and the boudoir...
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...