Word: slapstickers
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...previously been a stagecoach driver, undertaker, deputy sheriff. Bedding manufacturers snapped at his scheme, and by 1910 were producing 250,000 Murphy beds a year. But the bed became far more than just a commercial success when the budding movie colony saw in it a hilarious prop for slapstick comedy. By the mid-1920s, Murphy and his disappearing bed had beaten off imitators right and left in bitter patent battles; he finally emerged with a fortune and his own distributing company in New York...
...wake of Shirley Booth, who played the part on Broadway, she never quite sinks in the comic scenes, and in the romantic ones she is light enough to ride the champagne splashes of emotion as if she were going over Niagara in a barrel. Spencer Tracy has one wonderful slapstick scene, and Gig Young does very well with a comic style for which he is much beholden to William Holden. But the real star of the show is Emmy. What redblooded moviegoing male will be able to resist the seductive lisp with which she murmurs pocketa. and ever so tenderly...
...this humor, no matter how accidental, is certainly needed, for the Yearbook otherwise manages only a dull accuracy. No one particularly wants the slapstick which often clutters high school annuals (and indeed appears in a few of 321's captions--e.g. "Radcliffe girl with lab assistant: Using curves of eyebrows to raise the curve"). No one wants clown shots or old-new gimmicks, and we should be grateful that 321 avoids them. But the undergraduate and even Mother, would like a little humor. And 321 provides none, even when it is there to be shaken ripe from the limb...
Hotel Paradiso, written 71 years ago by the once-famous and prolific Georges Feydeau with the collaboration of Maurice Desvallieres, is exceedingly standard and exceedingly French French farce. This means sex first, but not in the long run foremost. In such goings-on, slapstick and speed become a good deal more important than spice. The bed is only a prop; the actual objective is bedlam...
King's story left Hollywood profoundly unconvinced. Last week nearly everyone in the colony was gleefully playing a slapstick guessing game about King's goateed friend. Oddly enough, King has a nephew named Robert Rich who has occasionally worked around the studio. But this Rich, now an accountant, has truculently denied that he wrote the story...