Word: dumbness
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...course, Andy Warhol himself, who in the 20 years since his days as a shoe illustrator for I. Miller has managed to parlay his cool into one of the social myths of our time. During the '60s, Warhol's silence about himself and his knowingly dumb utterances about the culture he helped form-"Pop art is liking things"-underwrote his durability as a star. Indeed, his banality endowed him with an air of mystery, since few people could bring themselves to believe that any artist could possibly be so banal. They may soon be convinced of it, however...
...Make 'Em Laugh," a tribute to vaudeville slapstick during which he walks into walls, falls over couches, and generally mutilates himself in a (vain) attempt to make someone, anyone laugh. But Jean Hagen is the most annoying of all, doing a pale imitation of Judy Holliday as a shrill, dumb blonde, a silent star who refuses to admit she wasn't cut out for the sound...
None of these characters has any more than two dimensions--Hagen's dumb blonde should have at least a spark of pathos, but instead you cringe every time she appears on the screen. They're like card-board cutouts, decked in lavish twenties satins and furs, pasted against larger-than-life sets, mouthing jokes that aren't funny, singing and dancing on the all-too-obvious cues...
...from all of their successors: Hope and Cresby, Abbott and Costello, Carney and Gleason, and Nichols's own broad way pair, the Odd Couple. All of these teams run on the same fuel--the big, ponderous straight-man who masterminds the operation always blowing up at the little dumb one, who muffs everything but stumbles on brilliant ideas through his wit. One's neat, one's messy. One's methodical, one's haphazard. It's all there in Oscar and Nicky, who could have synthesized everything that's funny in his paradigm if their relationship had been at all developed...
...nice - mostly New Mexico and Nevada - but Brooks' notion of staging a scene is to plant the actors in the middle of the frame and have them talk. The dialogue is not worth such attention. Coburn is called on to describe Hackman as "the cham pion of dumb animals, women in dis tress and lost causes." Candice Bergen points out to the hotheaded Jan-Michael Vincent (the kid looking to make a reputation) that "killin' someone don't make you a man." Brooks occasionally offers some comic relief (Whore...