Word: comical
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...comic is a candidate
...beloved onomatopoetics of yesteryear, redolent of childhood's long, rainy Sunday afternoons, cannot help recalling that the comics were the popular art that most radically stylized experience. Sometimes artfully, more often not, they reduced it to its basic components of violence, disgust, fear, heroics and sometimes laughter. From their beginnings, the comics and the movies have lived together symbolically; there is scarcely a major comic-page figure who has not been reincarnated on the screen, or a comic strip that has not been influenced by the way movie directors frame and compose scenes. Yet the transitions from one medium...
Still, the movies keep trying-especially after the success of the Star Wars saga, which has comic-adventure roots. Two big-budget Christmas releases illustrate the perils and pleasures of going to popular culture's sub-basement in search of material. Flash Gordon, which expensive but unpretentious, works; Popeye, which reflects the critical and sociological chat about comics in recent years, does not. Indeed, it is one of the most grievously miscalculated movies in recent memory, claustrophobic in manner, mean in spirit, downright grotesque to look...
This is not to imply that Flash is an art film. Its adapters had an easier task than Popeye's did, since the comic's creator, Alex Raymond, was the most movieish of illustrators. His space fantasies are replicable on a sound stage, because they consisted largely of art deco architecture, primitive emotions and sexy states of undress. One gets a sense that Production Designer Danilo Donati had fun recreating Raymond's visions, that Writer Semple's script was lettered into balloons, and Director Hodges kept a pile of old comic books on hand to suggest...
Scottie Templeton is one such com pulsive performer. To him, silence is gelding and only two sounds are pleasing: his own voice and his listener's laughter. As the central character, comic relief, raisonneur and raison d'être of Bernard Slade's play Tribute, Scottie kept the jokes flowing as his world collapsed like a burlesque banana's baggy pants. On Broadway, as incarnated by Jack Lemmon, Scottie was a sympathetic soul. With the footlights acting as a DMZ between character and playgoer, Scottie could be abstracted and romanticized: he was the fatally ill trouper...