Word: wildered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Wilder knew his limits as few members of the Lost Generation knew theirs. A onetime archaeology student, he took the long view. From Julius Caesar's Rome in his novel The Ides of March to Grover's Corners, N.H., in Our Town, it was "the ocean-like monotony of the generations of men" that fascinated him. He had a Roman mind and an American heart. He saw "the absurdity of any single person's claim to the importance of his saying, 'I love!' 'I suffer!' " But his democratic passion was writing about...
...Town, despite daredevil risks with the sentimental and the obvious, was his masterpiece. Wilder's death is enough of a loss to produce at least one small question. Who will play the Stage Manager at Grover's Corners, improvising muted trumpet solos over the graves of literature's Unknown Americans...
Directed and Written by GENE WILDER...
...expects something in the Mel Brooks mold-raucous, anarchical, anachronistic-from Gene Wilder's debut as a director. He has, after all, recruited members of the Brooks mob: Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, Dom DeLuise. Like Brooks' most recent works, Adventure is a broad parody of a hoary popular form, in this case the period detective drama...
...Wilder soon forces an adjustment of those expectations-neither up nor down, but definitely sideways. His sensibility is gentler and even more childlike than that of his master. Playing a young Sigi Holmes,* a detective suffering a near-terminal case of sibling rivalry because Big Brother Sherlock is always getting the good cases, he becomes a pawn in one of the latter's non-stop games of mastermind with Professor Moriarty. This one has something to do with a stolen state document on which the fate of empire trembles...