The Dally Tar Heel
Leaven reviews
Wlke
m3 Poppa
tos&Moiiis -to sense of limier
msiv
Wednesday, February 10. 1971
toe
Carl Reiner is a funny man. With Sid
Caesar, Dick Van Dyke, and his own
("Enter Laughing''), he's given us his
particular brand of solid, journeyman's
humor. Nothing deep; surely nothing
memorable: except, was it ever funny. It
was the kind of humor your mind could
relax to. Mr. Reiner! May he live and
prosper forever!
This by way of a half-apologetic
preface to my remarks on "Where's
Poppa?" which Reiner directs, and which
is neither funny nor intelligent.
"Where's Poppa?" is Reiner's first
attempt at directing someone else's
screenplay, and I can almost understand
how so flimsy a property attracted him.
"Where's Poppa?" is a melange of styles
and comic targets-perhaps it would be
more accurate to say a comic stew
cooked up only of spices: but spices that
were the sole possession of avant-garde
theater eight or nine years ago.
Specifically, Reiner tries to make black
humor, momism, and absurdist comedy
palatable to domestic audiences, and does
Campnii!
so-as Robert K Lane's brainless script
implicitly suggests he do-by treating
them like a typically "wacky" episode of
theDick Van Dyke Show. Only, "Where's
Poppa?" is meant to be wackiness with an
exponent on it.
What held the Dick Van Dyke Show
together was the consistent assumption of
normality underlying the comic
situations. Absurdist humor, on the other
hand, requires, if not anartistic coherence
of its own, then at least an intelligible
relationship to the external
world-satirical , psychological, or
whatever. To combine these modes
randomly is to create a world of
irrelation. To construct a novel or film
which is sometimes recognizably
"normal," and sometimes wildly
a-rational, depending on the artist's whim
or the ebb and flow of his comic
inspiration, is finally to approach total
opacity. This is the case with "Where's
Poppa?" which is an artistic chaos: it
becomes incapable of making any
statement about either itself or the
caneeoair
Interested in Christianity? The Bible?
Ever wonder why it doesn't seem to make
any sense why churches leave you
confused? You have the questions and
you may be surprised to find out that
there are answers. Don't believe it? Come
to the Presbyterian Student Center at 9
this Friday night where students from the
Way Biblical Research Center will show
them to you. It's worth a try!
There will be a meeting of the Campus
CPG Wed. night at 8:00 at our UNC
Office to discuss leadership difficulties. It
will be a joint meeting with the Duke
branch CPG.
Women's Liberation new discussion
groups beginning Thursday, Feb. 11, 8
p.m. in room 205 in the Student Union.
All women welcome.
The library at Hillel House, 2 1 0 W.
Cameron, has a large collection dealing
with Judaism and Jewish history. The
library is open to all UNC students and
faculty.
Travel information on Israel is
available at Hillel House, 210 W. Cameron
Avenue.
Modern Hebrew Classes will be held
this, and each, Thursday at the Hillel
House, 210 W. Cameron Ave., at 7:30
p.m. for beginners, and at 8:30 p.m. for
intermediates. All interested students are
invited.
Faculty, students and town fold are
invited to come to the Buffet at the
Battle House at Battle Lane and
Boundary every Wednesday from 12
noon to 2 p.m. Within easy walking
distance from the campus, the buffet
features lunch and conversation in a
relaxed atmosphere. The meal is one
dollar ($1) and reservations are not
required.
world-incapable even of asserting that
the world is absurd.
The maintenance of this kind of
perspective, it seems to me, should be the
first concern of a comic artist. Without it,
an audience can literally not know when
to laugh.
In "Where's Poppa?" there's a
courtroom scene in which George Segal
represents a Memphis football coach
who's accusing his team of breach of
contract in firing him. Segal hasn't slept
the night before, and he stumbles and
mumbles through the scene, shuffling and
dropping his-thousands, it seems,
of papers, forgetting who his client is
and what questions he wanted to ask him.
The coach, we learn, has been in the
rather dubious habit of kidnapping the
biggest and fastest nine and ten year-old
boys he can find, so that he can teach
them football the right way, from basics.
Their parents make some ruckus, but
quiet down when they get the bonus
money. There's the situation. The entire
scene, it should be added, is merely a
digression which might have been lifted
bodily from the film, with no loss.
What we have here is humor that
works at contradictory levels. On the
first, we're apparently supposed to
chuckle at Segal's ineptitude, as the coach
grimaces and the judge demands that he
get on with his questions. This is
"normal" comedy, and our laughter arises
from our recognition of the difference
between doing something right and doing
it extravagantly wrong. But on the second
level, there are the coach's plans for
building a football dynasty. This is the
humor of absurdity, no sequitur joking,
and its effect in the scene is to make
Segal's mugging and the various reactions
to it look pedestrian and out of place.
Conversely, however, the particularly
unimaginative comedy of errors deprives
this second level of humor of the air it
needs to breathe, and leaves us with the
impression, as the scene closes, that the
coach is out of step with the rest of his
world, rather than that the world itself is
insane.
A more serious instance of "Poppa's"
failure to assert a point of view, occurs
toward the end of the film, when the
audience apparently is supposed to
ili
With Deepest
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delight in a representation of an old
peoples' home, and its inmates. Here, the
humor doesn't merely fail; it turns putrid
in your mouth.
I don't mean to imply that "Where's
Poppa?" is utterly without laughs. It has
its moments, but they get farther and
farther apart as the film procedes. And
they are always easy laughs, as when a
Colonel attempts to dispel our Chilian
misconception that soldiers like to kill
Vietnamese. Not at all, he says, and then
explains with obvious relish how he deals
(always fatally) with the "little bastards"
and "gooks." Funny? Yes . . . but.
Reiner's direction, as I've already
implied, is extremely uninspired. His
metier seems to be realistic comedy.
Here, in a film which might have been
brought some measure of organization by
a director with an imaginative visual
conception of what he wanted to say,
Reiner can add nothing. Hence, "Where's
Poppa?" is almost entirely lacking in the
kind of visual humor it needs so
desperately to achieve any unified effect.
Reiner's cinematic vocabulary is limited
to a close-up, a slow zoom, and a distance
shot which invariably leaves you with a
sense of being just slightly too far away
from things. This kind of clumsiness can
be cured, as I hope it will be, by
experience. But beyond that, the
direction of the entire film is a solecism,
and I hope Reiner's next film will be a
return to the kind of thing he does best.
George Segal, who starred in one of
the meet beautiful films in many years,
"Bye-Bye Braverman," is wasted here.
Ruth Gordon, who plays his senile
Mother, is effective-and yet, '"Where's
Poppa?" is the kind of film which makes
even a good performance seem
unsatisfactory. Ron Liebman, as Segal's
brother, is also good.
F
nllm socneuy teataires classics
The UNC Film Society has scheduled a
series of cinematic classics to be shown
on Thursdays during the semester.
The series begins tomorrow at eight
o'clock with the Marx Brothers' first film,
"Cocoanuts," which was made in 1929,
th; year the Depression began. It was
based on a Marx Brothers' Broadway
offering that enjoyed enormous success.
On February 18, "The Big Sleep" will be
screened. William Faulkner wrote the
screenplay and Howard Hawks directed
the Humphrey Bogart film. The Big
r Sleep" is a murder mystery in which the
outcome is always suspensefully and
artfully in doubt.
Equally artful is Erich von Stroheim's
direction of "Greed," adapted from
Frank Norris's novel, "McTeague."
French filmmaker Jean Renoir hailed it as
. 'The masterpiece of the cinema." Erich
von Stroheim was a pioneer in cinematic
techniques. "Greed" will be shown on
March4.
"The Shop Around the Corner" is
slated for March 11. Directed by Ernst
Lubitsch, the movie features James
Stewart. The movie was adapted from a
Ferenc Molnar play. The senior clerk and
a female clerk in a Budapest store
discover their love through a "lonely
hearts" correspondence club.
'" On March 18, two all-time film
heavies, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter
Lorre, appear in "The Mask of
Dimitrios." The action in this one is
virtually nonstop. The film is based on
Eric Ambler's novel of the same name.
Next in the film fare is 'Two or Three
Things I Know About Her," a movie from
Godard's bourgeois period. Pauline Kael
has called Godard "the most dazzlingly
inventive and audacious artist in movies
today." The movie is scheduled for March
25.
On April 8, Gene Kelly will once again
dance his way into America's hearts in
"Singing in the Rain." Many critics
consider it the best musical of all time.
Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen direct the
film, based on an Adolf Green-Betty
Com den play. Two weeks later, the first
. URBAN PLANNERS
URBAN PLANNERS BEING SOUGHT WITH VARIED BACKGROUNDS
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French sound film, "Under the Roofs of
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and directed it.
On April 29, 'The End of St.
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Revolution directed by V.I. Pudovkin,
will be presented. Pudovkin, along with
notable Russian film makers, helped to
revolutionize motion pictures.
The series concludes May 6 with
another Ernst Lubitsch film, "Desire."
Marlene Dietrick made her comedic debut
in this 1936 movie.
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