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‘Silent Movie’ is hum-drumSilentMovie: (PG), with Mel Brooks, Marty Feldman, Dorn DeLuise and,Bernadette Peters, directed by Brooks, at the U.\ Chrls-Town and El Camino Theaters.By MIKE PETRYNl“Silent Movie is to Mel Brooks what “At Long Last Love was to Peter Bogdanovich. Brooks may have thought making the first silent movie in 40years would be a cute idea but at! he has for the tffort is a record dud.The trouble with “Silentv\ »■Movie is easy to diagnose. it’s not funny.The story has Brooks, who directed and helped with the screenplay, as Mel Funn (that name shows where his ego is perched), a has-been movie producer who gets the half-baked idea of making a comeback by making a silent movie with some of Hollywood's biggest stars. He takes t w o henchmen (Marty Feldman and Dom De-Luiset along for the vide. Together they try to save Sid Caesar's failing studio by attracting the likes ofBurt Reynolds, Liza Minnelli, Anne Bancroft and Paul Newman, who all appear in cameos, to his production.Essentially, the movie’s story is the same as what Brooks had to do to make the movie. Thai's the kind1 of cuteness that indicates Brook's imagination got up on the wrong side of the bed' the morning he thought all this up.The movie, except for one word, is completely silent, It uses dialogue cards like the old silenls, but more often than not it's a treat for audiences who like the strain of reading lips. And the lack of laughter among the audience indicated thoroughly that this is a strain most can do without..Yet Brooks might have pulled it all off if his visual gags had some humor and charm. Of course they don't. Besides the fact that most of the slapstick is humdrum and the eampiness (which supposedly needles the old silents) is downright boring, Brooks has timed the whole thing like a slow fuse which fails to detonate.On top of that, he still has his distasteful fixations, He is after all the man who made such infantile epics as “Blazing Saddles and “Young Frankenstein.” At one point in “Silent Movie he has Bernadette Peters on a carousel and the horse she’s riding defecates. That only shows at which psychological stage Brooks’ maturation has been arrested.Culp’s problemsBy MARILYN BECKHOLLYWOOD - Now it's “I Spy actor Robert Culp who’s writing an autobiography. And from the way he talks, the part covering the last decade of his life could well be titled. “One Man's Family: How An Actor’s Children Can Overcome the Most Unstable Environment. Home life for Culp’s four youngsters ended in 1966, when the eldest was B, the youngest barely 2 and Bob left their mother in what he now unsparingly refers to as, “a classic dump. Nancy had every reason to be bitter toward me.He left her for actress France Nuyen and in 1969 his*eldest son followed. Josh came to live with me at the tag end of my marriage to France. When she and I split about a month later, Josh and 1 moved into a little house overlooking Benedict Canyon — and it became the two of us against the world.” But, devoted as they were to eachother, it wasn't the best of worlds.THE BREAKUP of his second marriage had left him “whipped, with my tail between my legs.’’ The end of his “I Spy TV series had made it necessary for him to start chasing far - flung film assignments. And, finding it impossible to be a full - time parent to a son “who was very bright, but who was becoming arrogant and .aggressive,” Bob enrolled Josh in a nearby boarding school — from which he could commute home on: weekends when Bob was in town,A ’VflQV f’liln I urtm nan ruirvonf.Ut
Newspaper Details
Phoenix Arizona Republic
Phoenix, Arizona, US
Wed, Jul 07, 1976
Page 58
Full Page
Clipped by
Rotten T.
USA 24 Sep 2020
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