Word: slapsticker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...suspect that Stephen Aaron was as much affronted by the script as I was, for his direction displayed no sympathy with Mr. Houghton's more serious moods. His direction was geared to the slapstick in the play, and he seemed, both in his acting and direction, embarassed by its seriousness. The stage was always full of actors in motion--slick, sometimes funny, and always pointless motion. It was a desperate attempt to breathe some life into the production, but all the energy seemed somehow irrelevant. Unfortunately, even the slapstick often lost effect because it lacked the one vital element...
Died. Mack Sennett (real name: Michael Sinnott), 76, impresario of frantic antics on the silent screen; of a heart attack; in Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, near Hollywood. Canadian-born Sennett started moviemaking under famed D. W. Griffith in 1910, quickly became Sultan of Slapstick, directing Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Bathing Beauties Gloria Swanson and Carole Lombard, Keystone Cops Ben Turpin and Fatty Arbuckle...
...fine store of memory, characterized by the special blend of feeling -love of life combined with a shrugging irony about its limitations-that marks the best of his films and plays. Some of Author Pagnol's anecdotes are a little too pat, recalling some of the slapstick in his lighter movies. And at the end, when he looks back on the deaths of some of those he loved, he allows himself a platitude, a kind of sentimental existentialism: "Such is the life of man. A few joys, quickly obliterated by unforgettable sorrows." But he notes immediately with the kindness...
Ocean's 11. This laughing gasser about an attempt by Frank Sinatra and his lout troupe (Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Peter Lawford et al.) to rob five Las Vegas casinos is slapdash slapstick, but that's the way the kookies rumble...
Satirist Ehrenburg also leads his pantaloon pilgrim to some slapstick swipes at Communist literature of the period. Although all he knew about the subject was that "Leo Tolstoy had a handsome beard just like Karl Marx," the little tailor becomes an "inexorable" Marxist literary critic. As pundit of proletarian literature -which is what Ehrenburg himself became after he ended his Paris stay in 1940 and went home-Lasik writes a preface for a socialist realist novel about romance in a soap factory ("Dunja yielded to the beat of new life, and whispered, blushing slightly: 'You see. we have surpassed...