Word: wildernesses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...taste. The show follows all the hallowed tac tics for promoting mediocrity into success. One does not gamble with $500,-000; one invests in the imitation of past successes. That means: Don't create -crib. Thus the plot line of Promises, Promises is derived from the Billy Wilder-I.A.L. Diamond film The Apartment, which was far sharper in lancing U.S. sexual hypocrisy, and the structure of the show has been borrowed from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The evening is not so much viewed as deja...
...concurrent Broadway hits. But as in all schemes where addition is allowed to pass for logic, there was the danger of the parts not resting snugly with each other, and it is exactly that danger which hits Promises, Promises hard. The plot, taken step for step from the Billy Wilder-I.A.L. Diamond screenplay, must be counted an asset; Simon has certainly contributed a better than respectable quantity of laughs; and the Bacharach-David score is exceptional by any reckoning, absolutely top-drawer by current musical-comedy standards. The problem is that the property works at cross-purposes...
...HEART of this incongruity, I think, lies the gap between Wilder and Diamond on the one hand, and Simon on the other. There would be no cause to criticize the show in such terms if it hadn't retained so much from the movie and at the same time acquired so much that is new and not quite in phase. Besides holding fast to the screenplay's construction, Simon has used several short sections of dialogue intact, which have in common that they come from the story's more serious episodes. In the funnier scenes, he has cut loose with...
...most left-over of the left-overs is Mel Brooks' The Producers, a professionally written, professionally staged, but miserably filmed comedy starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. In spirit, the picture is happily reminiscent of the Marx Bros., and it has ten minutes of genius-within-genius under the title Springtime for Hitler, a musical about the Third Reich. Here, working on stage, Brooks is at his best as a director, and achieves the very tricks of timing which elude him on film. His lyrics for the show's title song ("Springtime for Hitler and Germany/Winter for Poland and France/We...
Less funny if more consistent is Gene Saks' filmed version of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. A dull bunch of character actors takes the edge off the comedy, and Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon don't work nearly so well together as in Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie. By chance this assertion can be tested since The Fortune Cookie is on re-release at the Orpheum. It, rather than The Odd Couple or The Producers, is the legitimate '60's heir to the best tradition of Hollywood comedies...