Word: vans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...vaudevillian, Billy Bright (Dick Van Dyke), clicks in silent two-reelers and becomes a national figure. Producer-Director-Writer Carl Reiner gives Van Dyke almost enough of this plot line to hang himself by strutting and capering in the manner of Mack Sennett's mute screwballs. Such flickering shenanigans are the most comical part of The Comic, but they are also the most derivative. The film gains its validity and poignance when Billy Bright reaches a crossroads and veers to the wrong. Sound movies are bunk, he decides, and abruptly the humor fades to black...
...damaged by Sunday Supplement color and cutting that might have been done with garden shears. Perhaps as a consequence, Columbia Pictures decided to hold it at arm's length, a flop to be forgotten. A flop, perhaps. Forgotten, hardly. For The Comic contains the most ambitious performance of Van Dyke's career, a resolutely unglamorous close-up of a string-necked, right-wing Angeleno, faded by sun and circumstance...
...turkey dinner and staged a traditional Navy "pollywog" ceremony for Astronaut Richard Gordon, who had never before crossed the equator at sea. Gordon was draped with a sign reading: "Beware! Luney Wog. Unclean. Unpredictable." Following a hula-skirted welcome in Pearl Harbor, the astronauts were trundled in their van aboard a flatbed truck and driven to nearby Hickam Air Force Base for the flight to Texas...
...Vincent Van Gogh by Marc Edo Tralbaut. 350 pages. Viking. $40. The tortured impressionist painter is so well known that to present him to the public again, one critic has observed, would be like presenting Christ to Christians. Nevertheless this is a splendid job. Calling upon more than 50 years of devoted research, the Belgian art scholar Marc Edo Tralbaut has put together the most satisfying study of Van Gogh's life and works...
...kingdom," this lighthearted book traces the names of animals back to abstruse origins. (The lowly burrowing gopher, for example, derives from gaufre, the French word for honeycomb.) The illustrations are shaggy dog in style, but accompanying quotations from naturalists, explorers and novelists can be stern indeed. Thus Admiral Jaacob van Neck on the dodo bird, circa 1598: "They have thick heads only partially covered with feathers and in place of wings only a few black feathers. We called them DISGUSTING BIRDS, because the longer their flesh is cooked the more unpalatable it becomes." Sic transit dodo...