Word: skidoo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BRINGS us to the Awards--thankfully lacking the moral righteousness of last year's, and making up for a general dearth of humor by being more-or-less accurate for a change. Our tuxedoed crusaders have played it safe by avoiding controversial art (Faces) or excellent but vulnerable Americana (Skidoo, The Legend of Lylah Clare), and have instead gone after sacred cows--The Lion In Winter, rosemary's Boby, Star!, Barbarella-- truly wretched films in need of a little deflating. For this we thank them, although somehow the point of a Movie Worsts issue tends to get lost when...
Harpo and Chico are dead, and Zeppo has been retired for 36 years. Groucho is confined to occasional cameos in such humorless atrocities as Skidoo. In lieu of a reel of their films, this book is the best possible way to meet the Marx Brothers when they had all their energy, all their laughs and all their feet...
Have you heard the one about the hippies, the mobsters, the convicts, the politician, the warden, the moll', LSD, the balloon and the gangster chief called "God"? Well, that's it. End of joke. It's called Skidoo, and the only conceivable reasons to see it are 1) to hear each and every credit, from cameraman to copyright date, sung on the sound track; 2) to see actors like Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Burgess Meredith, Peter Lawford and even Groucho Marx make fools of themselves; and 3) just to believe that it exists. Ostensibly a comedy, Skidoo...
...abberation, and class distinction had much to do with the ultimate failure of Preminger's struggling protagonists. But increasingly, external dramatic pressures play a less important part--the determining factor becoming instead Preminger's own camera treatment of space, his cross-cutting techniques, his ultimate vision. No one seeing Skidoo can deny that the Mafia threat (central to the plot) is secondary in moving the action to the power of Preminger's decision to control personally the behavior of his characters and the structure of his film, disregarding saner methods of storytelling. The abrupt insertion of musical numbers, for example...
Preminger has always used photographic space as a prison to trap his characters. In Skidoo the brilliant opening confirms beyond a doubt that Preminger's art is visionary (note the shot, when Gleason and Arnold Stang go upstairs, consisting entirely of croped details of frame elements, showing nothing as an independent whole). More simply, Preminger films the wide-angle claustrophobia of a Hippie bus to contradict their professed freedom, just as the immaculately confident space of the California courthouse is violated by the encroaching teen-agers. If we know how to read the content of Preminger's images, Skidoo...