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Archive for the ‘Spy Comedy’ Category

My Favorite Blond/Star Spangled Rhythm

23 Jan

My Favorite Blond/Star Spangled Rhythm —  director Sidney Lanfield/George Marshall – Mystery Farce in which a coward gets involved with a WWII spy ring. And A Hollywood WWII effort Variety Show.  Black and white 1942.

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The Ghostbusters is a better Hope film of this era, but this one has its moments, as a mock spy caper, with Madeleine Carroll as The Hitchcock blonde she was. Star Spangled Rhythm is a Paramount varsity show and far more fun, with Hope as a cameo, spouting in-jokes about Crosby who is also in it. In a huge cast of Paramount superstars, the main attraction is Betty Hutton. You might say, if fact you would have to say, she “propels” the plot, for she had pop-eyes in every cell of her body. Here she throws herself into each scene as though onto a trampoline. This was her way, and if you can stand it, you can stand anything. But boy do you have to give her credit for total engagement, and she is superb in one scene with two men attached by the hands, trying to get over a wall. It’s a very funny scene, brilliantly played by her and by the other two, who were avid contortionists. Ray Milland, Franchot Tone, and Fred MacMurray are amusing as three men playing bridge like three women, a sketch written by George S. Kaufman. And there is Rochester doing a superb zoot-suit number with Katherine Dunham, young and great. Boy, do they rock! George Balanchine’s choreography of a jazz ballet with Vera Zorina is fascinating, not least because of Zorina’s amazing figure — yikes! Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer wrote the music for the film, and the score includes That Old Black Magic and Dick Powell and Mary Martin singing Hit The Road to Dreamland, the latter of which is taken over by a quartet of black male singers who are just wonderful! So there is really a lot of jam on the thin piece of toast this picture is, which was a War-effort effort. The toast may be stale by now, but the jam — especially as regards the black singers and dancers — is still fresher than fresh!

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Posted in Alan Ladd, Betty Hutton, Bob Hope, Cecil Kellaway, Dick Powell, Dorothy Lamour, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Fred MacMurray, Katherine Dunham, Madeleine Carroll, Mary Martin, Paulette Godard, Ray Milland, Spy Comedy, Susan Hayward, Variety Show, Veronica Lake, World War II

 

Start The Revolution WIthout Me

14 Jan

Start The Revolution Without Me – directed by Bud Yorkin – a farce in which two sets of identical twins plot to cut off The Terror at the pass. 1 hour 31 minutes color 1970

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Farce requires the stage. It requires a static set, back and forth through whose doors characters race. Physical dexterity is its sine qua non. Motion pictures move. In film, the set is never static because the camera isn’t. Therefore the necessary contrast is lost. But given this limitation, farce on film can work, not through physical comedy, but through verbal comedy, through situation, and through what passes across the characters’ faces. Thus we have Hugh Griffith, whose loony visage always promises the embarrassing human folly of dirty underwear even when he is dressed with monumentally glittering daft royalty as King Louis XVI. The film is vaguely a parody of The Corsican Brothers or some Ronald Colman swashbuckler or other, it doesn’t matter which, because the film is a parody of films like that, and as such it works like gang-busters. Everything is fabulous here. The whole piece was made in France, in real French Chateaus, in their real interiors, with real French extras, and a real English cast to lend authenticity to France and to two real North American actors who play the four French leads. The settings are breath-taking, and the costumes, by Alan Barrett, are the finest funny period costumes you will ever see, all run up for a nickel, the Special Features tell us. Gene Wilder plays one set of separated twins, and, as he admits in the Special Features, while he thought he would be wonderful as the peasant, he is far better as the crazy, vicious, sadistic, me-first noble. Donald Sutherland has the cunning to make both the peasant and the noble similar, which they would have been in real life, one slightly out-to-lunch and the other above-it-all. He is delightful to watch. His hauteur is preposterous because he is already so tall. In film, all farce is farce of the face, and the only movement is that of the audience’s eyes to the next visage treat. When people start running about, film farce tends to slow down. You can’t make motion out of what is already motion, only what is not. As Orson Welles remarks in it, this is a film in which he does not appear, so we know from the start that we are in the sacred land of irreverence, impudence, and idiocy, and can take out our Monty Python Toby-mug, fill it up with ale, sit back in our armchairs, and chuckle.

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Posted in BROAD COMEDY, Donald Sutherland, Farce, Filmed in France, Gene Wilder, Hugh Griffith: ACTING GOD, Parody, Spy Comedy

 

The Silencers

06 Dec

The Silencers – directed by Phil Carlson – a parody of Bond. — 102 minutes color 1968

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Do you find garage doors fascinating? Like them this film is a gadget, not without its grumbling use and occasional comical breakdown. And it itself is full of gadgets, huger doors, fatter death-rays, wilder amo. If you fire this revolver it will shoot you in the chest, if you press that button you will find a naked tomato in your bathtub. Of course, the hugest garage doors are the false eyelashes of the babes. They come crashing down, dislodging civilizations. Step back from them. Dean Martin certainly does. He is wise and unperturbed by the sexual affront they present and the cavernous décolletage they awn. Ah, for the peace of refusal which seems to be his, as he plays in this, the first of the Matt Helm mock-Bond series. Nowadays we don’t have leading ladies such as Stella Stevens whose hair is dyed Irish Setter and held in place with Gorilla Glue. She’s Helm’s fumbling side-kick, called that, I suppose, because she keeps kicking him in the side. Martin is some kind of easy dish, like spaghetti, pleasant and not without nourishment, easy to take. He never asks to be liked and so is likeable for it. He strolls through bullet-hails with benificent nonchalance. Daliah Lavi presents hair piled on the back of her head as though concealing a rocket launcher. Dozens of ladies, equally coiffed and lashed throw themselves at Martin’s head, but he retains his incredulity as to the animal fervor they advertise, as any normal intact male would. Their ferocious armamentarium promises pornography, that is to say, unearned nudity. And, since the film begins with a series of strip-teases, we are able to sustain no virginal delusions about what is to follow. Even when the miraculous Cyd Charisse performs. Two numbers are given her, miserably choreographed, vilely costumed, but her dignity, her alacritous genius, and the natural placement of her hip-bones conquer the drooling mess.

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Posted in ACTION, Cyd Charisse: screen goddess, Dean Martin, Farce, Low Comedy, Parody, Spy Comedy

 
 
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