Word: slapsticker
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...into a film required virtual scrapping of the Behrman version. Scripters Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein proceeded to remodel Hero Gaylord Esterbrook (James Stewart) into a country bumpkin with an odd flair for bright comedy. His hesitant romance and marriage with Actress Linda Paige (Rosalind Russell) becomes a slapstick backstage burlesque containing the only fun in the film. From then on Epstein gets tangled with Behrman in a confusing hodgepodge of drawing-room wit heavily weighted with dramatic overtones...
...burlesque show of the very best sort, with the same sort of humor--reasonably clean, of course--and the same sort of vaudeville. Unlike the Old Howard, it also displays some beautiful and seductive women. For the rest, however, it consists of the usual acrobats, guitar players, slapstick comics, and tap dancers. The De Marcos come down from the St. Regis and live to do a very nice bit of dancing. A troupe of jugglers awes very efficiently. Jane Pickens is lovely to look at and O.K. for listening, too, except when she teams up with some tenor fellow...
This year their troubles start when they go to a hospital with suitcases labeled M.D. (Mule Drivers), are mistaken for two medicos, end in jail. The show is garnished with such slapstick as putting a patient to sleep by letting him smell an old shoe, such gags as "Your head sets on one end of your spine and you set on the other." Silas gets broad at times, but never really dirty. What keeps it moving are its dances and specialty acts, its gold-toothed but good-looking chorus...
...Book Four Flem returns from Texas with a string of insanely wild piebald ponies and sells them to his neighbors. They break loose in horrendous slapstick and pervade the countryside. Mink gets a life sentence; Cousin Flem doesn't lift a finger to help him. Two bourgeois and a desperate peasant invest all they have in a plot of land where Civil War treasure is known to be buried. They find Flem has hoodwinked them as he has everyone else. When last seen, Flem is on his way to larger operations in Jefferson...
...Roach has had a brainstorm. In a fit of temporary insanity he conceived a movie combining Disney fantasy, Runyon plot, West-Lamarr sex, and Laurel and Hardy slapstick. The chaotic and riotous result is "The Housekeeper's Daughter." Rarely on the screen has there been a set of characters doing more incongruous things. Rarely has the screen seen a funnier comedy...