Word: vaudevillians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Jules Munshin, 54, basset-eyed comic actor, veteran of Hollywood and Broadway; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. A seasoned vaudevillian, Munshin's hilarious antics in his first major Broadway role (a mustered-out soldier in 1946's Call Me Mister) established him as a star, and three years later he scored his greatest hit gagging it up with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly as trouble-prone sailors in the film On the Town. Always drawn back to the stage, he went on to appear in such Broadway productions as The Gay Life, Barefoot in the Park...
...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...
This chronicle is often retrieved from corniness by touching moments and memories that allow young Lahr to mold humanity around the trite-tragic skeleton that his father's life seems to have been. For instance, there is Lahr as a budding vaudevillian putting makeup on his collar even when unemployed so everyone will know he is in show biz. One is touched by the physical fact that his left wrist was permanently larger than the right from breaking repeated pratfalls. And a fine moment comes when a wino outside the theater holds out a dollar saying "Here, Bert...
Frost himself, both physically and professionally, is what you get when you cross a William F. Buckley Jr. with a Tommy Steele. He is a resourceful interrogator with a vaudevillian stage sense. More important, he has brought the talk show back toward its original purpose. As host, Frost asks questions that make sense, and actually listens to the answers. His guests are people worth hearing out-not just routine talk-show circuit riders plugging their latest movies and books...
Lehane also chronicles the vita activa of the flea as vaudevillian; the flea as athlete (one "can jump about 150 times its own length along, and about 80 times its length up"); the flea as spreader of plague and, in the case of the male, even as sexual tyrant. In mating, says Lehane, a man obviously sympathetic to the underflea, "he grasps her abdomen with his antennae, and sensuously brushes her parts with a wispy membrane. Then violence comes. Copulation lasts about three hours, sometimes as long as nine. ... So sharp and indelicate are the hooks and spines...