Word: slapsticking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...expect to see So Fine offered in Eng 12b next semester, though; classical elements do not necessarily make a classic comedy, and So Fine is far from great humor. Too often the slapstick scenes flop for simple lack of originality. Clumsy gunmen run into nuns carrying food; when a tryst is interrupted by the return of the jealous husband, the young lover hides (you guessed it) under the bed; and the final chase scene takes place on-and off-stage during a performance of Verdi's Otello. To be fair, Bergman usually knows how cliched his situations...
...student of Shakespeare, has structured this comedy according to the truest Elizabethan standards of the form. All the elements are there, and in their proper places: a young protagonist, who starts out naive and ends up worldly; a humourously complicated love-at-first-sight affair, complete with bawdy slapstick; a "unifying theme" (quite a pleasant surprise for comedies of late); and, of course, the happy ending where everyone gets married...
...word you are apt to hear only from Bel Air real estate agents. Adventurous directors snapped the straight spine of traditional drama into a series of vertebral vignettes. The standard comedy structure, which had kept stage and screen humming from Labiche to Lubitsch, gave way to anthologies of slapstick punctuated by expletives. The story became so much dead air between explosions of pain and laughter. And so the question arises: Does anyone in movies still care about structure...
...action begins simply as the detectives confront the eerie outline of a body on the floor. This outline eventually becomes almost a character in itself--a totem, sinkhole and vortex of the show--but in its opening scenes the play draws the audience in with a witty sortie into slapstick and high comedy. The two detectives are something of the classically mismatched partners. Pablo is a prissy fussbudget, a wheezy bureaucrat. Clemenson flounces through the role in grand style, with his nervous gestures and his half-exhausted grandiosity (he tires before he can really come through). His gestures become more...
...pastiche of the Hollywood studio man, a change in tone that signals Edwards' trepidation at biting the hand that slugged him. Edwards' directing gets in the way of his own script. Every time the charcaters verge on any sort of emotion, they play it for laughs. Reductio ad slapstick...