Word: spoofed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Bogart's hat and Neil Simon's jokes," crowed squint-eyed Actor Peter Falk, he of the unspeakable raincoat (Columbo). "I'm not saying it's heaven. But it's at least across the hall." In this case, near-Valhalla is the forthcoming Bogart spoof, Cheap Detective, set in 1940s San Francisco. Written by Simon, it stars Falk along with Louise Fletcher, Ann-Margret, Marsha Mason, Eileen Brennan, Stockard Channing and Madeline Kahn. A natty Falk makes time with all six ladies while stumbling up against the Gestapo on a hunt for precious gems that...
...devotees of the sci-fi movie genre may not take too kindly to the implicit parody of their chosen cult contained in Lucas' film, the dazzling special effects of Star Wars by themselves should prove sufficient to eclipse any lingering qualms they might experience about this decidedly good-natured spoof of motion pictures that journey into the great unknown of space...
...fair, this spoof on late Victorian aestheticism and its pretentiously empyrean devotees is not sterling Gilbert & Sullivan. Patiencedoes have its share of Gilbertian humor, mostly deriving from the parody of aesthetic attitudinizing, and its plot is powered by the usual sort of Gilbertian paradox--in this case, an identification of love with duty which brands the love of anything worth loving as undutiful. But it lacks the consistently memorable score that distinguishes Pirates of Penzance, for example, or the brilliant comic sequences which make Iolanthea favorite...
What enabled Novelist Spark to get away with her spoof for 116 pages-if indeed she did get quite away with it -was her severe, ironic prose. Echoing with the nuns' devotions and bits of English poetry, it contrasted with, and almost rebuked, the broadness of the subject. With Nasty Habits, on the other hand, the title is a fair barometer of the film makers' sensibilities. Spark's silvery resonance has, in the words of St. Paul, become as sounding brass. Christopher Porterfield
Although it begins with all the standard props of detective fiction, Thomas Berger's eighth novel is a spoof of whodunits only in the sense that Portnoy's Complaint was a redaction of Oedipus Rex. Berger's chief debt is not to the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but to the fiction of the '60s (including his own Little Big Man), written before black humor had been eclipsed by black studies. The convoluted and brazenly preposterous plot of Who Is Teddy Villanova? is simply Berger's excuse to practice verbal gunplay with...