Word: slapstickers
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...scanties. but Comedienne Garrett's wit is more often brash than beguiling. In general, the film is callow where it should be young, and supported by dogged energy rather than a bubbling gaiety. In mid-film, Jack Lemmon adds some bracing laughter to the show with a slapstick attempted seduction of Betty Garrett. In this scene, it is as if someone put a jolt of fine brandy into a pot of Pablum. But once Lemmon is gone, Eileen grinds on with its predictable succession of songs and dances...
...broader, slapstick way, Fernandel in Sheep takes on the tricky business of multiple roles, after the fashion of Alec (Kind Hearts and Coronets) Guinness. Separately, and in some technically flawless group scenes, he plays Papa Saint-Forget, a crippled, bitter old vintner, and five quintuplet sons, Alain, Bernard, Charles, Désiré, and Etienne. The episodic action begins in Trezignan, a French village where some 39 years before the film begins, Papa Saint-Forget, wanting a daughter, has become the unhappy parent of the five boys. In an effort to revive the prosperity that was Trezignan's when...
...Alain is the famous proprietor of Paris' most chichi beauty salon, a bewildering institution where the elegant clientele has its hair dried in battalion formation, and even the elevator boy speaks English. As Alain, in a ruffled shirt, Fernandel minces convincingly through a parade of slapstick situations, slathering cold cream on a dowager's jowls, roguishly examining a shapely leg, fawning over the telephone...
Comic Lewis is at his best when he is wildest: he gives a fine take-off of a choral conductor, dances insanely, impersonates Tough Guy Humphrey Bogart. Partner Dean Martin is better as a straight comic than as a singer. Otherwise, as the team goes through some tired slapstick movie routines, e.g., a chase on water skis, moviegoers may conclude that Martin & Lewis are headed for the fate that befell Abbott & Costello: all they do is make money...
...situation comedy until it is almost fed up (TIME, June 27), but viewers still love I Love Lucy. How long the love affair will continue depends on how much comic inventiveness Desi and Lucy can put into their formula of a young couple getting in and out of slapstick situations with a well-shaken mixture of low-class cunning and high-class ineptitude. Last week the re-run of an old Lucy was neither comic nor inventive. Lucy's idea of fun was to return repeatedly to a nightclub, got up in a series of outlandish disguises, and leave...