Word: slapstick
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...humor--and he got just that. Credit must not be denied Allegretti for the laughs at which he aimed: he got them, acting, indeed, with more skill than anyone else in the cast if also with more mugging and audience-facing. But his comedy was of an almost slapstick variety at times, never fulfilling its tragic implications for his family and his country, his style ranging as far as bombast toward the middle of the last act and mawkishness toward the close...
...product and despise Chaplin for producing it. He has replaced his beloved, sure-fire tramp with an equally original, but far less engaging character-a man whose grace and arrogance alone would render him suspect with the bulk of the non-Latin world. He has gone light on pure slapstick and warm laughter, and has borne down on moral complexity, terror and irony with an intensity never before attempted in films. At a time when many people have regained their faith in war under certain conditions and in free enterprise under any conditions whatever, he has ventured to insist...
...majority of Manhattan critics found the film baffling, disappointing, offensive, and, in stretches, plain boring. But a few enjoyed the subtle, tragicomic ironies germinated by Chaplin's powers of intuition, of pure feeling, and of observation. The set pieces of pure slapstick are as skilled and delightful, and as psychologically penetrating, as any Chaplin has ever contrived. The casting (including Victim Margaret .Hoffman) is excellent and there are a couple of dozen fine pieces of characterization and acting, notably by Isobel Elsom and Martha Raye. Working with a new character, and adapting his old, mute artfulness to a medium...
...Brains." Fred's durability as a comedian has not depended solely on the obvious externals of slapstick. His voice, to be sure, sounds as if it might be filing his teeth down as it issues from his spigot mouth. And his face ("the sharpest knife," says Ludwig Bemelmans, "I have ever seen") is rather like a very large red pear that the ants have been at. Fred Allen has other gifts as well. John Steinbeck considers him "unquestionably the best humorist of our time ... a brilliant critic of manners and morals." Jack Benny, his private friend and public enemy...
Though this is a film that should draw a guffaw or two from all but the most sedate, the humor all too frequently descends to either the crudest of slapstick or aged witticisms of the "who was that lady I saw you with last night" ilk. But Hope seems to have the uncanny ability of wringing a smile of some sort out of the Himsiest of material, by means of a sidelong leer, a sucer, or a facial contortion. And it's pleasant to see Hollywood give one of its standard plot formulas a genuine kidding for a change. They...