Word: slapstick
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This simple story, however, would have turned out to be a cipher without the admirable handling which the Dramatic Club has given it. Judiciously mixing slapstick farce with the comic-ballet technique developed by the Moscow Art Theatre, director Ted Squier '43, has done a superb job. The caricatures of the officials are finely conceived and executed, while the final scene is a masterpiece of dramatic staging. The director had good actors to work with and the result is one of the most well rounded casts that H. D. has presented. Most of the actors are unrecognizable under their astounding...
Whether your tastes in comedy run to subtle wit or to custard-pie slapstick, "The Man Who Came To Dinner" is your meat. And since it's scheduled to run for a full week at the U.T., you'll have plenty of time to satisfy your appetite...
...Itching Parrot's further pages include a cruelly realistic marriage, a gruesome, slapstick try at corpse robbing, harsh satire on civil and priestly extortion, some Swiftian dialogues with a Chinaman on law, religion, medicine, the rich. At length he meets repentance head-on in the dead person of an old pal: "I saw hanging to a tree the impaled corpse of an executed man in his white gown and tall cap adorned with a red cross, his hands bound." Towards the virtuous end of his life Poll finds a new pal-"One Lizárdi . . . a sorry writer...
...brittle warmth of Miss Hepburn's acting. For the firs half of the picture the tricks are new, the surprises come fast and furiously, the acting adds tempo and supplies authenticity. Then the script writers seem to run out of ideas, and begin to fall back on old, familiar slapstick. You keep remembering how well; everything had started out and looking for a twist, a turn, a climax that doesn't come. When the lights turn up you go out laughing, but a little sorry that the most promising comedy in a long time had to flatten into just...
...night her big wigs and his sports cronies clash in a bedroom scene that takes every cake Hollywood ever baked. Up to this point, the picture is fast moving, crisp and new. The last half loses the delights of contrast and lapses into the faked-up tricks of mechanical slapstick that provide only artificial life to an old plot...