Word: slapsticker
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Unlike the pseudo GI celluloid tripe dished out by Abbott and Costollo. "Hargrove" is an easy to look at picture of a home town rookie who can't get "on the ball" but who has enough natural intelligence to add four and four and get more than a headache. Slapstick is present, of course, but is held to a minimum as poor Hargrove progresses from cleaning garbage cans at Fort Bragg, North Carolina to cleaning garbage cans aboard a convey bound for action...
...Here is a thin (80-page), close-cropped (5-by-7-in.) book of ferocious, slapstick, sometimes disturbing gag-drawings plus a short introduction by Magazine Writer Kyle (Redder Than the Rose) Crichton. "Virgil Partch is nuts," writes Crichton, ". . . but nuts in a nice American way." Partch fans found little that was Nelly-nice, less that was especially American. But they did find a fresh-cartoon humor, based on a slambang, explosive brand of fantasy. Example...
...world and being chased by policemen. As a young man he had won a number of competitions when, one day in Budapest, he noticed that a guy who couldn't skate for beans, but was highly accomplished at pratfalls, kept the crowd in an uproar. Quickly deciding that slapstick paid off better than mere skill, Trenkler went out and bought a pair of baggy pants. He studied music-hall comics and adapted their tricks, next thought up tricks of his own. He decided to concentrate on clowning because, he says, "clowning and figure skating are like trying...
...tank up and pursue three slick chicks. Some of the action is more like expert pantomime than dancing. The pantomime is often nearly as funny as that of the late great Joe Jackson, the Tramp Bicyclist. The dancing is superb -acrobatic, "specialty," rumba, softshoe, adagio, eccentric, jitterbugging, knee-drops, slapstick, and a violent, half-hidden free-for-all on the floor behind the bar. Fancy Free's success has its 25-year-old choreographer in a state of amaze. Sharp-faced pint-sized Jerome Robbins a dancer with the Ballet Theatre since 1940, is featured in his own ballet...
There is also a prolonged slapstick struggle with murderers aboard an old ship. And at one nightmarish juncture M.G.M.'s scripters manage to hang Skelton, Rags Ragland, Ann Rutherford and Jean Rogers, in a gently swinging human chain, from the top of an elevator shaft. High comic moment: Red Skelton, as anchor-man for this gibbering pendulum, decides to rest his hands by letting go and standing on the shoulders of Rags Ragland, who is desperately clinging to Skelton's ankles...