Word: slapstickers
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...programmatic or even 60s-melodramatic; they once scheduled a concert in one Chicago hall and then performed in another. Today the Art Ensemble eschews formal theatrics, but they continue to affect a stage deportment that communicates--their movements can be stylized or abandoned, approaching sacred ceremony one moment and slapstick hokum the next. Jarman is the most consciously animated. During a drum solo he may turn his back and raise his arms as if in supplication or approach a microphone as if to sing but content himself with making faces at the levice. It is appropriate that the most memorable...
...this absurdity is the well balanced slapstick and caricatured roles. The establishment is represented by truly Establishment figures clad in uptight strait-laced uniforms of preppie pink satin and navy pin stripe, a glossy Chivas Regal wealth versus patched jeans-adolescent revolt. It's fun to watch Treat Williams traipsing across an elaborately laid banquet table, trying to maximize shattered crystal in his path. It's not to be taken seriously, and thereby doesn't offend our sophisticated Seventies cynicism...
...film's cast is both talented and sexy, but Handkerchiefs is a director's movie. Blier consistently conquers the challenges of mood and texture set up by his script, weaving disparate elements into a ripe, dreamlike whole. The film opens in the slapstick manner of a cartoon, then evolves seamlessly into a bucolic Renoir romance. In the second half, Blier stages chase scenes, a benign car crash and a farcical kidnaping-the larky stuff of American screwball comedy. The film's stylized denouement, shot around a wintry mansion, is a surrealist's spooky intimation of tragedy...
...playlets are quite dreary. In the weakest, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby appear as vacationing Chicago doctors whose Los Angeles visit is ruined by slapstick mishaps involving torn clothing and wayward automobiles. It is a thin recap of an old Simon screenplay, The Out-of-Towners. Jane Fonda and Alan Alda fare only slightly better in their sketch. She plays a tart-tongued Newsweek editor who has flown West to fight with her ex-husband over the custody of their daughter...
...moved under the spotlight as the stage turned, but the power failed. When the board members were asked to walk around the stage and come under the spotlight one by one, the men, already standing in a circle, turned in different directions and bumped into one another. Slapstick comedy had returned. At a Law Day convention in Portsmouth, R.I., a dozen Boston policemen were discovered cavorting nude in the Ramada Inn pool; unfortunately, the discoverers were a group of visiting parochial school girls led by two nuns. And who can forget the sign that the Las Vegas Hilton hung...