Word: spoofed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hound's action takes place in a theater on opening night. It is a spoof of an Agatha Christie thriller, and Stoppard handles it with prankish zest, though it lacks the urbane comic polish and spine-prickling tremors that Anthony Shaffer put into his Christie takeoff, Sleuth. The subplot concerns two drama critics who observe and comment on the play and eventually get actively drawn into it at no small risk. Here Stoppard is sly and wry, and one may guess that he views critics with bemused affection and subdued contempt...
Properly handled, such a gimmick might have launched a spoof of James' involuted style or a parody of Freudian criticism (scholars have wrangled for decades about whether the ghosts of Quint and Jessel are merely figments of the new governess's sexually starved imagination). Director-Producer Michael Winner, however, tries for a pretentious shocker in fancy dress. He serves up a pastiche of sexual sadism, witchcraft (two dolls are burned in chamber pots) and a pair of Quintessential messages: love and hate are synonymous; the dead just hang around wherever they are killed...
...like telephone circuits while the operator. Jeanette Caurant, alternates between incoming calls and a conversation with her friend Roberta. The line of humming circuit impersonators switches back and forth with each call. This line quickly becomes a row of medical assistants passing instruments back and forth in a surgical spoof...
...ceremonies took place at noon as a handful of autograph hunters, a clubhouse full of Puddings, and two waylaid churchgoers attended a preview of the 124th running of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, a musical spoof of the American revolution entitled The Wrongway Inn, scheduled to hit the boards officially this Thursday night...
...small town Hellenic Society on its spring outing). The best numbers are the homages to Berkeley, with their overhead shots of chorines in kaleidoscope patterns. Aficionados of old movie musicals will love these scenes-but not as much as Russell, who can hardly bring himself to end them. A spoof of a spoof, this two-hour-plus film sometimes seems to reprise every reprise...