Word: vaudevillians
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Died. Charles Correll, 82, tuba-throated half of radio's Amos 'n' Andy for more than three decades; of a heart attack; in Chicago. After several years on the Southern tent-show circuit, Correll and another white vaudevillian, Freeman Gosden, teamed up on radio in 1928 to create the roles of Amos (a kindly taxi driver played by Gosden) and Andy (a scheming misadventurer portrayed by Correll). With its fractured black-dialect humor, the show became radio's first major craze. At the height of the program's popularity in the '30s, hotels canceled...
...Downey's Messiah is a vaudevillian, his devil is a figure of preposterous melodrama-a glowering, gun-toting saloonkeeper named Greaser (Albert Henderson) who keeps his mother behind bars ("You'll always be my favorite," she reassures him) and who suffers from chronic constipation. His trips to the privy are state occasions, with his retinue of dim-witted subordinates nervously circling outside, awaiting glad tidings of relief that are never forthcoming...
There are flaws in the film, as there are in every Peckinpah production, but they are mostly due to Jeb Rosebrook's dialogue. Ace's language is sometimes that of a 19th century vaudevillian, and if God only knows what rodeo groupies talk like, it must be something different than what is said here. But there is enough full achieved in this film--with the aid of photographer Lucien Ballard, composer Jerry Fielding, and the setting and people of Prescott (where the first pro rodeo was held in 1888)-to reaffirm my faith in Sam Peckinpah as the first American...
City Lights was made during the turn into the 1930's, the cusp between the silents and sound films. Barely touching on the newer possibilities, it reaches into silent comedy's vaudevillian traditions for many effects and gags. Then after his chair has been moved, or accidentally substituting soap for his neighbor's cheese) is just one mark of his genius. We know that he'll flip his rescuer into the water as he struggles to get out, and we laugh uproariously anyway. Chaplin brings off new twists in a drunk scene and plays those familiar cliches with such finesse...
...vivid enough evocation of "police brutality," but it is also a Keystone copout. Why do the vaudevillian police suddenly attack the other dancers? Why does the Spanish lady's flamenco collapse into a laugh-creating parody of itself? The answer, of course, is that those actions titillate theatrically-for an instant. Ballet, an art of linear grace and movement, is even less a medium of pure intellect than painting or opera. But it is not made relevant by playing games with half-digested references to yesterday's headlines...