Word: clowning
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Then there was Mr. Axeler, the "Mad Cossack" of the Half Moon Country Club -one of the summer camps for manhunting secretaries and girl-hunting clerks in which young Moss served six miserable years as "social director" and resident clown. The sleepless grind of "making fun" for the guests-an occupation also survived by Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Herman Wouk and dozens of others-consisted of reciting Shakespeare by the campfire, impersonating Fanny Brice, staging a full-length musical each week, supervising endless Spanish Fiestas and Greenwich Village Frolics. Mr. Axeler's establishment in Vermont was really more...
Working a long engagement as "vice president in charge of fun" at Santa Monica's Pacific Ocean Park, sad-eyed Clown Emmett Kelly took a sad-eyed view of his profession. When they were still the greatest shows on earth, he moaned, big-time U.S. circuses had billets for something like 1,000 clowns, but the survivor, Ringling Bros., now uses only about 35. "The kids don't see any future in clowning," said Kelly, but he had a fourth ring up his tattered sleeve. "There is a new field that offers possibilities. That's the shopping...
...role of the petty-tyrannical high school teacher (played in the original by Emil Jannings), Jurgens subtly conveys the unavowed jealousy that flares up within him whenever he catches his students ogling Lola Lola. And at the film's climax, when he is persuaded to play the clown in Lola Lola's revue before an audience of old school cronies. Jurgens penetrates rare emotional depths. Crowing like a crazed cock as one raw egg after another is broken over his bald pate, he personifies the soul-destroying humiliation that is the inexorable companion of unbridled desire...
Planned Togetherness. In an effort to give good value for rates that run up to $189 a week (for a room with two baths), the hotels-stretch their policy of planned entertainment into every waking hour. Gone are the toomlers, the noisy resident clown's who sang welcome and farewell songs for guests and yakked it up all over the lobby. Instead, there are art schools, beauty parlors as jammed as airraid shelters under attack, discussion groups, dancing classes. And everywhere, from swimming pool to dining room, there is the lavish style show that the guests put on themselves...
...Allen to shoot the rapids of the old DeMille stream. Under 120,000 sq. yds. of studio canvas (v. about 80,000 sq. ft. for a Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey big top), he presents a parade of stars-from a plumper Peter Lorre as a white-face clown to Mrs. Bing Crosby on a flying trapeze-and backs them up with everything from lion tamers and wire walkers to the Ronnie Lewis Trio, the Flying Alexanders, and Hugo Zacchini. the Human Cannon Ball. But as Ringmaster Vincent Price calls off act after act, The Big Circus often looks like...