Word: ventriloquistic
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...patting mud pies. The plot has Lana, down to her last lira, befriended by a true-blue simpleton (Bonar Colleano), who promptly falls in love with her. Moving into his apartment, Lana falls in love, instead, with his roommate. Singer Carlos Thompson, who looks remarkably like TV's Ventriloquist Paul Winchell and acts with all the intensity of one of Winchell's puppets. Pier Angeli. Thompson's fiancee, is on hand to look bereft and beautiful, while such outlanders as Charles Goldner, Peter Illing and Eric Pohlman do their best to behave like Neapolitans...
...hero this time is a ventriloquist whose twin dummies have gone berserk. Whenever one of the little monsters sees the girl his master is about to marry, he insults her. Desperate, Danny consults a psychoanalyst and promptly pratfalls in love with the psychoanalyst's colleague (Mai Zetterling). Meanwhile, he has stumbled into more serious trouble. An international spy ring has stashed the stolen plans of a secret weapon in the heads of the dummies, and when two spies are killed in Danny's hotel room, the alarm goes out for the "redheaded ripper...
...Knock on Wood," Kaye plays an American ventriloquist who, while touring Europe, becomes the unwitting carrier of a set of horrendously important atomic blueprints. Since not only the original owners of these plans (Our Side), but also two competing sets of Middle European badmen are after the documents, Kaye soon assumes the position of the rabbit in a greyhound race. The epic chases and subtrefuges which result, however, have their edges dulled by limp globs of plot which necessarily precede and follow each comedy sequence...
Even more embarrassing and stultifying, however, is the attempt to give the ventriloquist dimensions as a character by giving him a psychosis which prevents him from marrying the women he falls in love with this boresome idea is not abandoned as soon as the action is underway, but instead is followed through down to the last guilt complex. The audience is shown a sodium amytal treatment, a flashback to the patient's youth ("You see, his father and mother quarrelled..."), the patient falling in love with his beautiful young psycho-analyst, and, as a grand climax, the paient curing...
Frozen Singers. After the big moment on the air. most of the amateur performers fall back into obscurity. But some have gone on to fame & fortune, including Opera Singers Mimi Benzell and Robert Merrill, Ventriloquist Paul Winchell, Dancers Vera-Ellen and Ray Malone, Comedians Jack Carter and Bert Parks, and such singers as Teresa Brewer, the Mariners, Monica Lewis and Frank Sinatra (who appeared on the show in 1935 as one of a quartet called the Hoboken Four...