Word: slapsticks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...passage that will turn the daughter into a self-winding adult. But Mrs. Babcock, whose suffering and despair are movingly portrayed, seems to have been smuggled in from a different novel. Kinflicks, for better and worse, belongs to Ginny and her amusing, if hardly profound, moral: Sisterhood is Slapstick...
...linked though they are to the archetypal comic myth, are not themselves intrinsically funny. To convert dogma into entertainment, it's up to the director to make them so. Embellishing the original script with a few Harvard touches, Manulis marches his cast through a series of mimes, impressions and slapstick sequences in a laudable effort to compensate for the thinness of the material...
...Slapstick Tragedy. The most obvious thing about the show is its broad exaggeration of soap-opera calamity. Mary is held hostage by a crazed gunman, then propositioned by the rescuing police officer. Her friend, Loretta, who dreams of a career as a country singing star, is battling paralysis after her car was struck by another car full of nuns...
...slapstick tragedy is not the only reason why people are watching Mary Hartman. The show's fascination lies in its oddly shifting tone. Almost all of the characters are confused. Mary herself is usually slack-jawed with bafflement-about her sister, who has fallen in with the local massage-parlor king; her grandfather, "the Fernwood Flasher"; and most of all by her stolid and truly enigmatic husband Tom. Though he is having an affair with Mae, a comely co-worker at the plant, he is impotent with Mary. The situation makes him terse and glum...
Still, Mary Hartman's most fitting habitat does seem to be opposite the late news. Chicago Sun-Times Columnist Bob Greene thinks that time slot lets viewers avoid "the merely hesitatingly slapstick news shows and instead enjoy genuine entertainment in the classic Chicago tradition: crude, snickering, dirty and easy to follow." Greene may be right. Mary is doing fine late at night. For a show with a soap-opera format, it is quite contrary. Quite contrary...