Word: slapstickers
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...hasn't fallen for his line since he was four"), but she ends up melting in his arms with Shirley Temple sweetness. Donald O'Connor is so frenetic as Kelly's comic sidekick that he's exhausting to watch, particularly in "Make 'Em Laugh," a tribute to vaudeville slapstick during which he walks into walls, falls over couches, and generally mutilates himself in a (vain) attempt to make someone, anyone laugh. But Jean Hagen is the most annoying of all, doing a pale imitation of Judy Holliday as a shrill, dumb blonde, a silent star who refuses to admit...
...SCENES are such good vaudeville that they would have worked anywhere. Yet Nichols based too much of the film's appeal on this kind of repetitive slapstick--where people slam into walls and sharp objects without pain, mug elaborately, and heap abuse on each other without offense--that the Three Stooges did much better. It's good textbook vaudeville but not good comedy...
...Love and Death, Allen takes his fantasy setting to its logical extreme--a-lavish Tolstoy Russia. It works, but not as an unseemly setting for a slapstick stooge. There's no question that Allen's stock formula has hit home to a lot of losers and tickled a lot of losers-watchers, but when you get right down to it, it's a pretty thin joke. There are only so many laughs to the 98-pound weakling dilemma, whether it's set at muscle beach or Martinique. And it is where Allen scrapes the dregs of slapstick gags that...
...quaintly wacky. A series of mishaps culminates in an assasination attempt on Napoleon's life, a tiresome case of mistaken identities is thrown in, and Boris finally trails off behind the Angel of Death in a flap-happy parody of The Seventh Seal. Where Allen shines is not in slapstick situations but in soliloquies and banter duets. He and Sonia (Diane Keaton), an intellectual Russian nymph, often find themselves grappling with...
...vaguely art, does set lavish costumes and lost of energetic dance numbers. Director Josh Rubins has carried this historical faithfulness over in the acting style, too: the broad, farcical characterizations second forced at, first, but once you've gotten used to the production-after the first scene or so--slapstick and mugging seem like the only techniques that would make the play work...