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The silent-screen clown who can't "save it for the cameras," his life from the funeral backwards, a fond and astringent portrait. Carl Reiner's model is Welles, why not, the comic's wake is lifted from Ikiru and the pallbearer gets a pie in the eye as "his final joke on earth." Five decades earlier, the young vaudevillian (Dick Van Dyke) had come to Hollywood equipped with Keaton's agility and Langdon's trilby, ready to conquer the screen. Sennett is the presiding style, Chaplin is his hobgoblin, "I could be twice as big as him if I were half his height." (His own pathos-laden City Lights is called Forget Me Not.) Success, marriage to one of the Bathing Beauties (Michele Lee), alcoholism, philandering, family neglect. And then, poof, he's a wax figure with blanched teeth dutifully doing pratfalls on TV for Steve Allen. Custard plus arsenic in a bright meditation on slapstick, with affection for vintage comedy darkened by scorn for showbiz. A string of two-reeler recreations (everything from Cockadoodle Dumbbells to Love, Honor and Oh Boy!) prefigures the pastiche virtuoso of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, and there's genuine burlesque flavor in Mickey Rooney's soulful rendition of a Ben Turpin trouper and in the seasoned gravel in Pert Kelton's voice. On the sour side there's the industry's amnesia toward its pioneers, a vision of modern times represented by gum-chewing gold-diggers and the comic's swishy progeny. "I don't think you know what's funny anymore!" Reiner's act of cinematic remembrance is also one of melancholy embalming—the artificially aged jester sinks in his armchair watching one of his antiques, Beckett's words ("No, no, allow me to expire") rattling in his brain. With Cornel Wilde, Nina Wayne, Jeannine Riley, and Paulene Myers.
--- Fernando F. Croce |