Word: wildernesses
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...WORLD'S GREATEST LOVER Directed by Gene Wilder...
...Apartment. Billy Wilder ("Some Like It Hot," "The Fortune Cookie," "One, Two, Three") likes to make comedies on grim subjects. ("Some Like It Hot" was about the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.) In this 1960 film an affable loser(Jack Lemmon)plays pim pin order to get a key to the executive washroom. Lemmon is perfect as the "schnook" who gets cornered into lending his apartment to philandering higher-ups in the Big New York Conglomerate in which he works. (Just a few years later, Lemmon, having played this role once too often, turned into a grotesque caricature of himself...
...Brooks and his little band of comic brothers do when they run out of old movie genres to parody? In the course of a distinguished career in anarchy, Brooks himself has taken on the backstage musical, the western, the gothic creature feature and silent comedy. His sometime star Gene Wilder made steak-and-kidney pie of the Victorian detective romance in Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother year before last. Now we must somehow come to grips with another Brooks star turning director-writer in'order to send up a formerly beloved movie form in a show called The Last...
...would have been easy for Cole to fall into the role of dilettante, composing patter songs to amuse his intimates. Instead, as Alec Wilder observes in his classic treatise, American Popular Song, "the body of [Porter's] work shows clearly that he constantly sought to maintain a high level, not of social frippery, but of professional craftsmanship." Cole worked as hard as he played. Each morning he would sit down at the piano for three hours. When he went on a cruise he took-along with his tailored dinner jackets and crates of his favorite champagne-a piano organ...
...film, The World's Greatest Lover, he plays a doltish Midwestern baker who goes to Hollywood and changes his name to Rudy Valentine. When his wife (played by Carol Kane) lets the bathtub overflow in the couple's posh hotel suite, Wilder passes it off as an added luxury of the place and swims laps, to the astonishment of his aunt and uncle. The slapstick is pure Wilder. He not only stars in the film but is also the writer, director and producer-a quadruple task he says "makes me want to go home and cry sometimes." Despite...