Word: suburbanity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...suburb of Sarsaparilla, probably modeled after Sydney's leafy Castle Hill area. Barry Humphries, Australia's foremost humorist, savagely satirizes what he calls "the pseuds"-the self-consciously trendy Australians caught up in an age of television, jet charters and public relations. But his chief targets are suburban living and Australian respectability, which he lampoons in the form of two characters he plays: Mrs. Edna Everage, a dogmatic, middle-aged Melbourne lady who wears bizarre hats and white gloves, and is wild about the Queen, gladioli and ex-Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies; and Sandy Stone, a middle...
...center of the new Australian culture is the suburban club, which bears about as much resemblance to the typical U.S. country club as the Manhattan telephone book does to the Social Register. The $1,400,000 East Sydney Club, for instance, has 20,000 members who pay $5 a year in club fees. It has been described as a cross between Las Vegas and the Y.M.C.A. On a recent Sunday afternoon it bustled with several thousand boisterous Australians. On the first floor, at least 1,000 members were gathered around 200 slot machines, or sitting in the beer garden...
...that Walter Matthau "could play anything from Rhett Butler to Scarlett O'Hara." For more than a decade Matthau was as unpredictable as his facial expressions: an adamant sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, a psychopathic killer in Charade, an ambulance chaser in The Fortune Cookie, the libidinous suburban husband in A Guide for the Married Man. Of late, his roles have yielded an amusing but unvarying character: the rumpled crank whose shpeesh shoundsh ash if it wash making itsh way around a shigar. Plaza Suite happily puts him in reverse. In Arthur Hiller's rigid transcription...
...surface problem is a familiar one: Czech expatriate Forman is not familiar with the American milieu. His Greenwich Villagers look and sound like Jones Beach burliness, his suburban middle-class home is unrelievedly, unfunnily tacky; not sterile, but completely manufactured, though he films it gently, with soft lighting...
These compromises didn't offend me as much as the limited human viewpoint. The film's foundation is a slight story of two suburban parents struggling to find their daughter. (She had returned home one night to a mother frantically checking for needle marks and an angry father; justifiably, she then ran back to Greenwich Village.) They search throughout the city, are called to upstate New York only to find a neighbor's runaway, and join the S.P.F.C.-the Society for the Parents of Fugitive Children. Finally, the daughter returns with a wealthy rock musician, the father serenades the pair...