Word: spoof
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...Budget Production, offers four minutes' worth of opulent sets and a whole spring collection of Edith Head's most improbable costumes. But What a Way itself is so extravagantly overdrawn that the audience well may wonder where parody leaves off and plot begins. To furbish a frail spoof with all that Hollywood upholstery seems a bit like crossing a mountain stream aboard the Queen Mary-and why bother? Shirley MacLaine is a girl who can go for miles just paddling her own canoe...
...mistress. But things aren't working out according to plan. "I wish I hadn't bothered with the serum," she pouts. Then, "Oh well . . . next time." As a girl whose Mona Lisa face masks the soul of a Borgia, Actress Vlady almost turns Devil into an elegant spoof of French justice. Brasseur, too, seems drolly aware that Justice is a lady who can barely make it from bed to bench. The examining magistrate, dryly played by Bourvil, upholds the law's integrity as though he would like to drop it and run. Given more opportunities, these accomplished...
...long ago a little-known French comedy called Zazie Dans le Metro played the art-cinema circuit. It was a great spoof of all sorts of movies, from the Last Year at Marienbad variety to the Disney cartoon, and it was brilliantly funny without being selfconsciously clever. Writer-director Adolfas Mekas has tried without success to pull off the same sort of joke in Hallelujah. All that comes through however, is an hour and a half of very self-conscious and very unfunny cleverness...
...stands now, the story is a clumsy spoof of the television industry. Mrs. Biltmore St. Regis (Joseph C. Bright), owner of the St. Regis lipstick enterprises, is looking for a show that will sell her "lip-smacking good" products. An aide, Peter Papp (DeCourcy E. McIntosh), suggests updating Shakespeare, and a Harvard professor (Harry H. Lapham) is backmailed into changing the words of the Bard into television lard. The professor has secretly written a titillating account of Harvard life, The Student Body...
Mark Meyers' contribution, "Faint Hearts and Fair Ladies," is a short, personal spoof of Harvard emancipation, "the last gasp of the parietals issue." It is a nice bit of whimsy until you realize that Mr. Meyers is serious, the last gasp of provincialism. His facetious suggestion that the University herd streetwalkers into the senior common rooms might once have been funny, but is now only blainel...