Word: slapsticking
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...give Goethe's masterpiece the least shred of dignity or meaning. With a leering eye on the box office, it resurrected the Urfaust, that youthful first draft which Goethe himself threw into the wastebasket, and made it the basis for most of the play. To exploit its elephantine slapstick and bawdry, the Everyman sold its own soul to Hellzapoppin: threw in wisecracks about F. D. R., created the impression of medieval monks doing the shag, started a Yale cheer, thought up lines like "Calling all angels." The result was a muddled farce which might well have been titled Getting...
...nipped in the bud (see p. 21) and the Japanese, as usual, providing comic relief (see p. 25)-if it all had been planned ahead of time to create the utmost mystery, it could hardly have been improved upon. As melodrama, as a spectacle-as comedy as low as slapstick, and as tragedy as elevated as the warfare of the gods-as a week of history to stand beside the week that Cortes first invaded Mexico, as a horror story terrifying enough to blur the strongest mind-in all ways last week's news piled sensation on sensation until...
...better than any guide-book to the American dance is the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers pictorial view of fox trots, rhumbas, slides and glides in the "Story of Vernon and Irene Castle." Unfortunately, the picture offers little else. During Vernon's early slapstick days--his barber shop scene with Lew Fields, his gaudy, striped coats that are liable to start a national trend, his old-fashioned romance with Irene Foote--the picture proceeds at a light and entertaining pace. The mood of pre-war gaiety and Sunday excursions to the beach at New Rochelle is, made delightfully real. But once...
...European theatre is the plot of the sweated apprentices who sneak off for a holiday, of their miserly old master (Percy Waram) on the hunt for a wife, and of the obliging Mrs. Fixit (Jane Cowl) who fixes things to suit herself. The slapstick is the same that, 200 years ago. drew tears of laughter from simple London cits and beefy German burghers: mistaken identity, boys dressed up as girls, people hiding under tables, lurking in clothes presses, listening behind screens, popping out of trap doors...
...Gallup Polls and FORTUNE Surveys. The system works to everyone's advantage except Henry's until he is called upon to decide when and why the average U. S. citizen would go to war. At this point Thanks for Everything explodes into a climax which combines straight slapstick with vigorous satire on such U. S. preoccupations as the advertising business, manufactured war scares, quack psychiatry, 1939 World's Fairs...