{"id":12268,"date":"2010-09-01T06:00:45","date_gmt":"2010-09-01T10:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.moviefanfare.com\/?p=12268"},"modified":"2014-11-07T17:10:10","modified_gmt":"2014-11-07T22:10:10","slug":"the-man-who-came-to-dinner-1942","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.moviefanfare.com\/?p=12268","title":{"rendered":"The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Guest blogger Joe Malone writes:<\/p>\n

I like to go to plays. Not Broadway extravaganzas, but community and university theater productions. Unfortunately, my spouse doesn\u2019t share this interest — which cuts back on my dramatical attendance, except when our daughter comes home for a visit. Fortunately, stage plays find their way onto the silver screen, even moreso in the ’30s and ’40s than today. Modern examples of the play-on-film would be <\/span>Bug<\/a> (2007) and <\/span>Doubt<\/a> (2008), which I have reviewed. Unfortunately, we are not living in the age of Eugene O\u2019Neill, Thornton Wilder, and Tennessee Williams, except insofar as revivals and remakes allow us to do so. With all due respect, John Patrick Shanley, Tony or no Tony, is no Kaufman or Hart, the two who wrote the play from which\u00a0 <\/span>The Man Who Came to Dinner<\/a> (1942) derives, via the Epstein twins\u2019 screenplay. (The Epsteins of <\/span>Casablanca <\/a>fame).<\/span><\/p>\n

The Man Who Came to Dinner is a comedy of great verbal energy, many fun cogs and wheels and conversational gizmos, jokes, gags, all done on the level of a New Yorker parlor drama. They don\u2019t make them like this anymore \u2013 so dense, so many moving parts. As I watched Married Life (2007) the other night, I detected faint echoes from those lost days. Do I subscribe to the theory that civilization is headed downhill because of this and other portents? Nope, and besides, weighing and judging civilization and its components is far beyond my capacity to grok, at least in 1,000 words or less. (Do I believe the planet and the human race are headed downhill? Ulp!) But just because I don\u2019t expect another The Man Who Came to Dinner to roll off the assembly line in 2010 doesn\u2019t mean that I\u2019ll have no chance to laugh at a movie. I watched Reno 911: Miami (2007)\u00a0 again the other night with my spouse, and because she liked it, perhaps I\u2019ll get to watch all 5 seasons again. Yay! In my defense, I think that the Marx Brothers would like it, too. And She\u2019s Out of Your League (2010)? Not in The Man Who Came to Dinner’s league, but still, life is still good on the couch.<\/p>\n

Most of\u00a0the topical content in\u00a0the film\u00a0has aged and evaporated, leaving behind in the dialogue a foundation of basic comic ideas. Gone for most of us are an appreciation of Lucius Beebe\u2019s penguins and octopus, Lana Turner’s<\/a> sweater, Zasu Pitts<\/a>, Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, and the larger-than-life Alexander Woolcott, (who spent a weekend with Moss Hart, prompting Hart to wonder out loud,” My God, what if he never left?,” and thus the play\u2019s premise was born).<\/p>\n

In the fim, Jimmy Durante<\/a> is funnier than I remember. Younger, too. Who fills the Durante niche in comedy today?\u00a0 There\u2019s bound to be someone. Early Jim Carrey? It\u2019s got to be someone who mugs outrageously and with unflagging energy. Vintage Robin Williams? Durante, suddenly seeming more\u00a0modern to me, makes me doubt the trope that some classic aspect of\u00a0 screwball stage comedy is gone and isn\u2019t coming back; perhaps it\u2019s all just cycles and cycles and only a matter of time before we\u2019ve gone in retrospect from That Touch of Mink to M*A*S*H \u00a0to Airplane! to Knocked Up and back to The Cocoanuts again. An extra four billion folks have arrived on the planet since\u00a0The Man Who Came to Dinner\u00a0was written. Even if they simply act like monkeys with typewriters, lost or missing dialogic brilliance ought to crop up now and again, out of the chaotic randomosity of crowds. Or will w\"\"<\/a>e just keep getting more video games instead?<\/p>\n

Glinda the good witch works in\u00a0The Man Who Came to Dinner\u00a0without her wand. Ann Sheridan plays the whole movie overdressed, but shows up ’30s style for one scene in a thin silk blouse, confronting the camera face-to-face, so to speak, and proving without a doubt that she\u2019s a mammal.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve noticed more than once that watching two movies at the same time, interleaved as it were, or one after the other, offers perspectives that might otherwise go unnoticed. For example, I saw\u00a0Amarcord (1973) one Friday night in San Diego, followed by The Godfather (1972) on Saturday. Fellini\u2019s artistry made The Godfather, seen so soon after, seem rather amateurish to me. Now that The Godfather has entered the pantheon of great films, any crudeness in its fabrication goes largely unnoticed. Every so often, when I stop to think about this, I feel privy to a cinematical secret, just because of that Friday and Saturday a long time ago. In the present instance, the two overlapping movies are\u00a0The Man Who Came to Dinner\u00a0and Repo Men (2010). Sure, there are chuckles in both, but in this example we learn that just talking at each other real fast can pack a punch greater than that one\u00a0felt by\u00a0cutting the other guy open, reaching inside him, and hauling out his mechanical stomach while wise-cracking about it. Just sayin.<\/p>\n

For more on Joe Malone, visit <\/em>Does Writing Excuse Watching?<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest blogger Joe Malone writes: I like to go to plays. Not Broadway extravaganzas, but community and university theater productions. Unfortunately, my spouse doesn\u2019t share this interest — which cuts back on my dramatical attendance, except when our daughter comes…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":12270,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[1442,5588],"coauthors":[1710],"class_list":["post-12268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-articles","tag-1940s-movies","tag-movie-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Man Who Came To Dinner (1942)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A look at the 1942 comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner, starring Monty Woolley and Bette Davis.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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