Word: knockabout
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...Leaf: she has spiked a sentimental story with misanthropic jokes about money, marriage and adultery that are not in the old film. Grodin and Cannon, who have May's sharpest lines, give impeccable, dry comic performances. Some of the humor?involving batty butlers and rough football players?is knockabout, but the gags never go on too long...
...comic style, no matter how diligently he tries. Though his films have not yet descended to the puerile level of Marty Feldman's recent Brooks knockoff, The Last Remake of Beau Geste, they contain no big laughs. In place of honest humor, Wilder provides the illusion of knockabout comedy-frantically busy scenes and lots of noise. Only Saturday-morning TV addicts could possibly endure the antics of The World's Greatest Lover, in which characters are forever shouting their lines, bulging their eyes and stumbling through pratfalls...
...this, in the right hands, could make a diverting screwball comedy. These are not the right hands. The film is a noisy, pell-mell piece of work. Deneuve has so little flair for physical comedy that the frequent closeups of her stunning face are more enlivening than her knockabout scenes. Montand is a cannier performer; his offhand Gallic charm offers a study in how an actor can operate at a safe distance from his material. Even his smile is pained, as well...
...even the featherweight conventions of family entertainment allow for more than the cartoon characterizations and obvious knockabout farce of Mr. Billion. Hill, the Italian-born European star who is making his U.S. film debut, is sometimes wistfully appealing as he tries to live a western-movie vision of America. His best moment occurs when he acts out a favorite fantasy by clobbering Slim Pickens in a Texas barroom brawl. But when he turns up in the old fight-to-the-death on the edge of a cliff (this time in the Grand Canyon), with Perrine lashed prettily to a nearby...
...carefully programmed knockabout farce, The Ritz has been adapted with only slight modification from Terrence McNally's Broadway hit. The insanity centers around a small-time Italian businessman named Gaetano Proclo (Jack Weston). On the run from a mobster brother-in-law, Gaetano lies low in what he considers a suitably obscure hideout. The place even has a reassuringly classy name-the Ritz. Gaetano is from Cleveland, so he can be forgiven his naiveté about the Manhattan demimonde. He suspects all is not well, however, when the Ritz turns out to be an elaborate bathhouse patronized exclusively...