Word: slapstick
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...Tanaka is campaigning as the defender of ancient Japanese virtues and patriotism (TIME, June 17). At the same time, he has tried to enhance the party's box office appeal by jazzing up the ticket with a strange lineup of candidates, including a well-known television interviewer, a slapstick comedian, Actress Akiko Santo and a skin-flick producer...
...scamp of a servant. He is sassy, resourceful and clever, the sort of endearing rogue who puts his fat, pompous and moneyed betters in their places. At the behest of two lovelorn sons with two miserly fathers, Scapino engineers an endless repertory of deceptions with a blazing battery of slapstick. Whether mimicking the two dunderheaded old fossils, or mulcting them, or pretend-hiding them in sacks and flailing the daylights out of them with a cloth truncheon shaped like an oversize bologna, there is no stopping Scapino. Eventually caught out by the two old fogies, the superscamp gains their pardon...
...those periodic efforts to save the ailing theater. The god Dionysus (Larry Blyden) resolves to go down to Hades and bring back Euripides. In the Shevelove version, Bernard Shaw substitutes. As his companion, Dionysus takes along his obese, grumbling Sancho Panza-like servant Xanthias (Michael Vale). They have their slapstick encounters, not only with the cranky Charon, who speaks like a movie gold prospector, but with enticing houris, underworld strong-arm men, termagants, drunks and, finally, the haughty, unamused Pluto (Jerome Dempsey), god of the underworld. It seems that Shakespeare sits on the throne of honor...
...plastiglob toy set to jiggle from the rearview mirror. She seemed almost threatening, as though her super-tapered body slimmed down to huge hidden webbed fins at the extremities. In Musketeers she gets to exude a natural clumsiness--she steps into buckets and falls down stairs. The slapstick here works as it does for the rest of the film--every time Welch starts to get sexy she wipes out. She turns her ingenuousness into a style...
...Three Musketeers takes the Dumas novel's action line, a star-studded cast, and an Errol Flynn swashbuckle approach, with slapstick sloshed in every few minutes to douse whatever drama or gravity or sentimentality might begin to smolder. Lester and screenwriter George MacDonald Fraser don't play with any matches here--no pretensions, no messages, no appearance of over-exertion. It's all plot and pretty faces. This approach becomes more than just a safety precaution because it brings out a wholesome sense of exhilaration in the actors. as if they all finally have a chance to show their skills...