Word: comically
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...popular arts, these are the glory days of trash. The entertainment industry is staying alive by marketing the guilty secrets of its past. Summer movies have taken for their inspiration cult comic books, old TV shows, old horror and boxing movies, even old Walt Disney cartoons. Nonfiction bestsellers discreetly exploit the misery of movie stars, while Stephen King's novels borrow from E.G. comics and AIP movies. Even Broadway, long thought immune to adolescent fancies, has jumped on the trash bandwagon-at least in its musicals. Composers, librettists and directors ransack old Hollywood movies (42nd Street) and newer foreign...
What's the latest equivalent of the comic who wants to play Hamlet? A comic film maker who takes it in mind to rewrite Shakespeare. In the past month, the two most distinguished confectors of '70s movie comedy have genuflected before the Bard in order to elevate the adolescent tone of current screen fare. First, Woody Allen frolicked midst woodland nymphs in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. Now Paul Mazursky (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Harry and Tonto) has gone to "an uninhabited island" for his gloss on Shakespeare's last great play...
...best films-Blume in Love and An Unmarried Woman-had a lock on the '70s sensibility. This, one could feel, was the way the American upper middle class attempted to face the new demands of sexual and racial equality. And this was the way a sympathetic comic artist, reporting from the inside of the analysand wonderland, could transform these demands and dreams into engaging movie narratives. But when Mazursky tries to Say It All about modern life, his voice can turn strident. His valued collaborators, the actors, can lose their charm and become stick figures, animated ideograms...
...into Choubert's subconscious past. Wife becomes mother, man becomes boy. The conclusive finding: Choubert hated his father and adored his mother. Some critics regard Victims of Duty as a parody of both the Oedipal myth and the Oedipus complex. This off-Broadway revival blunts all the wickedly comic points. The people involved may be thanked for doing Ionesco, but not for doing him in. -T.E.K...
DIED. Harold (Hal) Foster, 89, creator in 1937 of the richly colored, exquisitely drawn Prince Valiant comic strip (now syndicated in 350 newspapers), which was celebrated for its scholarly research on the medieval period and the King Arthur legend; of a heart attack; in Spring Hill, Fla. "God in his wisdom endowed me with certain imperfections," said Foster, "but I have made Prince Valiant as I wish God had made...