Word: slapstickers
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...year's most hilarious movie. It will vastly amuse, if not stupefy, all who adore or detest television and the institution of advertising. Bearing virtually no kinship to George Axelrod's play of the same name, this Success, a happy direct descendant of custard-pie slapstick, is one of the silliest strings of sight-and-sound gags ever to jounce through the sober inhibitions of staid latter-day Hollywood. Producer-Director-Writer Frank Tashlin, a onetime Disney cartoonist and sketching fabulist (The Bear That Wasn't), plays the yarn strictly for laughs...
Died. Oliver Norvell ("Babe") Hardy, 65, chubby, splenetic half of the inseparable team of Laurel & Hardy, who churned out (1927-45) about 300 silent and talkie slapstick films (Babes in Toyland, Way Out West, The Devil's Brother, Blockheads) ; of the effects of a paralytic stroke he had in September, 1956; in North Hollywood. Georgia-born, bulbous Ollie sang on showboats while studying law, eventually wended his way via vaudeville villainry to Hollywood where he met (1919) skinny, sad-eyed Stan Laurel, onetime understudy to Charlie Chaplin. Two of America's few genuinely creative comedians, interested more...
...been minimized, and the scenes presented involve a minimum of physical action. The resulting emphasis on sheer ability to read poetry well suits the group's talents. But even in the final bit, the play-within-a-play from A Midsummer Night's Dream, entailing a certain amount of slapstick, the players do a fine...
...Minute's Wait, the longest and best of the lot, is a back-thwacking, shillyshally riot of slapstick. A train-a gruesome Irish hybrid of the Toonerville Trolley and a Long Island Railroad local -pulls into Dunfaill for a minute's stop. Its motley passengers immediately spill out into the station bar and some hilarious vignettes. To make room for a goat, a bewildered British couple are demoted from their first-class compartment into third, there to rub insensitive feelers with a slithering mess of outraged Irish lobsters. A sweater-girl (full-blown by Maureen Connell) snares...
...Happy Road (MGM) leads from a Swiss international school for children to gay Paree, and its steeplechase is a fairly pleasant mixture of the classic slapstick hide-and-go-seek elements of old-time Keystone comedies. The hiders, on the lam from teachers and texts, are two kids, ably though often too cutely played by Bobby Clark and Brigitte Fossey. (Pipes Bobby: "I don't think it's good for parents to be left alone too much!") The seekers are Bobby's widowed father (ProducerDirector Gene Kelly), a Paris-based U.S. businessman who sneers at the French...