Word: knockabouts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Follow a Star (Rank; Zenith) is a rickety vaudeville vehicle designed to display the low-comedy high jinks of British Buffoon Norman Wisdom, an artificial hybrid who seems to have resulted from the cross-pollination of Tom Ewell Jerry Lewis and an otter. Wisdom plays a knockabout Cockney trying to sing his way from pants presser to Palladium. Enroute, he falls off a psychiatrist's couch is clobbered over the head by a fat-lady voice coach ("We must always remember to keep our vowels open!"), gets stuck astraddle a spiked, swinging gate. When that gets rusty, he drops...
...first-class barroom talker, which Robert Ruark is, needs a knockabout past, a creative memory, sufficient humor to see the vanity of his inventions, and a delivery good enough to shield from his listeners the gravy stains on material, memory and wit. With this equipment, a talker who happens to be, say, a journalist, can Jang out a newspaper column for years in an average daily elapsed time of eleven minutes (so Newspaperman Ruark has coasted; one suspects the creative memory is an aid in recounting the feat). Or he can put together two volumes of yarns about his boyhood...
...Rhinoceros is far too long in making its point. Actually the play is much better farce than satire. The pandemonium of the first rhinoceros scares, the hurly-burly of the mounting rhinoceros fever, the sight of Actor Zero Mostel virtually turning into a rhinoceros right onstage, are all good knockabout fun. And the dialogue throws darts into a variety of human rationalizations and cliches...
...Sundowners. When not upstaged by dingoes, wombats, endless flocks of sheep and Peter Ustinov, Stars Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr are appropriately knockabout as a shiftless couple beating the Australian bush...
...that of a literary acrobat cockily performing newly-learned tricks and listening slyly for applause. In one neon-streaked passage, Durrell preens so obviously that his arrogant virtuosity is amusing: "I question myself eagerly. Is this amusia, aphasia, agraphia, alexia. abulia? It is life.''* The narrator, a knockabout literary sort named Lawrence Lucifer, gloats over sex, happily flexes his ability to shock ("I am afraid to shake hands with him, for fear that the skin will slip the bony structure of the hand and come away. It would take so little to produce the skeleton from this debile...