Word: comically
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...might expect O'Connor (as a milder Archie Bunker) or Fields (in a part that cries out for an actor with the implosive intensity of a Sean Penn) to commandeer the spotlight. But Home Front is Sternhagen's show, allowing her to nail down, with an increasingly desperate comic urgency, the suburban matriarch. This mom will not be accused of screaming at her children: "I was using my loud voice." Instead she will display a compulsion for propriety at all costs. "Let's not talk about it any more," she exclaims. "It's a holiday!" And on holiday, Sternhagen...
...agreeable level and is often below it. But perhaps because the writers outnumber Director Amy Heckerling 4 to 1, Johnny Dangerously offers more verbal felicity than it does visual flair. Heckerling has no feeling, affectionate or malevolent, for the genre she is trying to parody and no sense of comic rhythm either. The result is a thin and clumsy thing, in which talented Michael Keaton leads a cast of good actors in search of the missing beat. Only the redoubtable Maureen Stapleton, listening to some wild pulse of her own, finds something she can dance...
Reinking, who has one of the best bodies but--orst voices in film, executes her rate efficiently. She has an enormous amount of resilient charm but no comic timing, or comic presence of any sort. In all of her scenes with Moore she exudes a dry earnestness that seems quite lawyerly, but that dulls Moore's comic sheen. Thankfully the peculiarly pulchritudinous Irving can effectively play the foil to Moore's neurotic mannerisms. She possesses a wry vulnerability that suggests she's a lot of fun but a danger to play with. As for Moore, he looks shorter, funnier...
...Edward's comic characters are sleeped in obsession: the only idea in the head of Inspector Clousean, the prototypical Edwards character, was his devotion to his duty. The problem with this theme in Edwards's work is that his characters can get mighty boring mighty fast. Even the protean Peter Sellers could not save the Panther films from a sense of mechanical flatness that was a reflection of the monotony of the protagonist's character. Clouseau was an original idiot, nothing more. When Sellers played a truly vacuous character in Hal Ashby's Being There, he could give the film...
...woman show? Catch Whoopi Goldberg, six monologues written and performed by a rag-doll actress with a bonkers stage name. Some of the skits are predictably poignant, and two just peter out. But the evening serves as an embossed calling card for stardom, presented by a scarifyingly gifted comic artist whose radiant smile even a cobra would be compelled to return...