Word: slapstick
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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CULDESAC, an inventive exercise in macabre slapstick by Polish Director Roman Polanski, looks like Part 2 of a projected trilogy of terror that began with Repulsion. This time around, Polanski plays his ghoulish games on a desolate North Sea island whose sole inhabitants are a half-mad old fool (Donald Pleasence), his hot-blooded young wife (Francoise Dorleac) and two unexpected nighttime visitors...
...precocious thriller called Knife in the Water. Knife in hand, this switchbloc Hitchcock then went West and persuaded British producers to finance a small masterpiece of menace called Repulsion. His third film, also made in England, is a jittery-tittery comedy of terrors in which Polanski hones his slapstick to a razor-edge...
...whimsies, this most projectively physiological of comedians subsides like an elephant conquered by cobwebs. Not once is Hero Zero permitted to charge the camera, as he charged his Broadway audiences, with the massive animal aggression that is the essence of his comedy and the soul of slapstick...
Those who go too far are generally female, though Eric House's foppish Tattle who always deals with women "who shall remain nameless" and Terrence Currier's shoutingly gruff sailor Ben "who wants a little polishing" have their share of slapstick hysterics. A few players like Dixie Dewitt's drunken Nurse are too raucous-voiced all along, but the general problem is not knowing when to stop. Miss Clayburgh and Mr. House's seduction scene has some deftly staged running around but the audience tires around the half-mile mark...
Morgan has visions of fleeing animals, the movie gallops toward terror and despair--and still the slapstick, only mildly successful in the begining, drags on. The last scenes are unabashed surrealism, as the whole second half of the show should have been. There are teasing ideas, of beauty and the beast and rebirth, among other things, that are the most delicate and satisfying form of symbolism. But there is too much of an attempt at humor, at slapstick tragedy...