Word: wilderness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...WORLD'S GREATEST LOVER Directed by Gene Wilder...
Screenplay by Gene Wilder...
...Gene Wilder should be perfectly content to be Gene Wilder, but he persists in trying to be Mel Brooks. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, Wilder's first film as a director-writer-star, was a pale Brooks pastiche, and The World's Greatest Lover is more of the same. This is sad, for Wilder does have a fresh sensibility of his own to offer: here and there in his films one can find a sweet romantic streak and the beginnings of a surreal visual style. But Wilder refuses to trust his own instincts. Every time...
...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...