Word: facially
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...film does have some funny scenes. Zero Mostel's characterization of a fastidious gentleman, slowly changing into a rhinoceros before our eyes, is wonderful. His extraordinary facial expressions and contortions transform him into a wild, snorting beast. He begins charging around his bedroom smashing furniture and eating plants. Unfortunately, though this transformation scene is funny, and Mostel is at his absurd best, the scene is just too long and gimmicky. O'Horgan's determination to make the play a conventional comedy ruins the scene. It's always fun to exploit Mostel's talent. But long comic scenes which rely...
...creates his Broadway role of John, Stanley's friend and upstairs neighbor. Writing about the 1961 production, Critic Robert Brustein observed that "Mostel has a great dancer's control of movement, a great actor's control of voice, a great mime's control of facial expression." The film preserves Mostel's virtuoso performance, including a long, bumpy transformation from man into rhino. But the control that Brustein admired is not so apparent under O'Horgan's direction. Mostel, unchecked and unchallenged, easily skids into self-parody. Still, his billowing, bellowing metamorphosis into another...
...this is abundantly plain in the R.S.C.'s staged reading from her works. The trouble is that there is nothing to dramatize. The lines are autotelic. Adding facial expressions, making gestures, moving about the stage, even if done by three women instead of one, provide no additional dramatic dimension. Nor do they evoke any emotion or achieve any resonance that does not already exist on the printed page...
...times. For the flamboyant Ali, there has been the frustration of waiting for a rematch with Smokin' Joe, and more recently, the shattering of his reputation (and jaw) at the hands of Ken Norton. And since the last go-around, Frazier has undergone the drawn-out recuperation from the facial pummeling Ali gave him and, most recently, the humiliating de-regalization by George Foreman as heavyweight king...
...Butch Cassidy may not have been very good, but it made a bundle, so what difference does it make? Newman and Redford pass a few facial expressions between them and try to cool each other out. If there ever was much of a script, it can be said to have gone to waste...