Word: slapsticker
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...audience's middle. Nothing is too stale or too simpleminded: a sheriff (William Demarest) trying to be heroic with one leg in a low-comedy plaster cast; a brat tormenting the neighborhood with trombone practice. But most of it is quite funny, and besides his feeling for slapstick and travesty, Director William Russell knows how to shade in some sharp authenticity. The most redolent blend of realism and caricature is Beulah Bondi as the richest woman in town. Another pleasing sight is Veronica Lake as a charming and capable comedienne. Good line: Veronica brushing off an infatuated ten-year...
...monstrous tuba that was seven feet tall if it was an inch, grinding out such old favorites as "If You Knew Brunnhilde Like I Know Brunnhilde" ("wow--wow--wow what a frau") and Becthoven's 10th Symphony which smacked suspiciously of "Roll Out the Barrel." Fifteen minutes of slapstick were never more enjoyable as this bizarre ensemble umpahed its way through the finest of old Vienna schmaltz...
...Maid was originally written for the perishable market place of radio. It is a near-slapstick story of a small-town spinster who plays hostess to a hobo until he runs off with her maid and car. The libretto is a gag-writer's dream, filled with skillful swoons (by Marie Powers, star of The Medium), gay tunes, and amateur-theatrical hamming. The audience loved every minute of it, right down to the final clinch and the hero's preposterous curtain line-"Your mouth is an abyss...
Mack Sennett, pie-tossing old (64) master of slapstick now enjoying a revival (three studios are said to have considered making a film about his life), mourned that "comedy is becoming a lost art." He recommended a return to first principles: "We kicked hell out of mothers-in-law, but we never touched mothers...
...Keith spent $725,000 on a Boston palace for the glory that was to be vaudeville. In three years he was completely repaid, and the new artistic form had begun its golden days. When vaudeville finally died, its inheritors, the slapstick movie comedians, took over the palace, and now it is known as a Laffmovie. The new life does not quite fit the magnificent theater; and the gilded boxes, the high dome, and the murals of cherubs and angels in the hall seem somehow superfluous and foreign now that the balcony is usually roped off, and popcorn is sold...