-The Clock: A sweet, crazy fable about a Bavarian clock that sputters and speeds up, acted out with unfaltering precision by Caesar and company as a quartet of mechanical village figures waddle out from the clock at the top of the hour.
-This Is Your Story: An unforgettable spoof of the hit TV and radio series "This Is Your Life," which featured unsuspecting studio audience members (famous and non-famous) being spontaneously honored and reunited with old friends and relatives. Carl Reiner plays the ever-smiling host and Caesar an ordinary man who would prefer to remain ordinary -- slapping Reiner away upon hearing he's been chosen, smacking him with his coat and fleeing up the aisle, where a gaggle of ushers drag him to the stage.
-Argument to Beethoven's Fifth: Live on national television -- a mime sketch in which Caesar and Nanette Fabray are a couple who bicker in perfect rhythm and counter-rhythm to the famous classical composition, their hands, mouths, entire bodies jutting and slashing like the strings themselves.
-Mozart is Dead: Caesar as a befuddled professor who grieves upon hearing that Beethoven is dead, and really breaks down when he's told the same about Mozart. "Moose is gone? I'm sick from that. I was so close with him. What was it an accident? They were both in the same bus or something? Beethoven and Mozart, verklumt."
-Professor Houdini Von Hoffmeyer: Caesar as a supposed master of illusion who appears at an amateur magicians' convention. He is stumped when his host (Carl Reiner) performs the most elementary trick: Sweeping a handkerchief over his hand and making a finger disappear. "Where's the finger?" Von Hoffmeyer asks, helplessly, like a frightened child. "Would you make the finger come back?"
AP
No comments:
Post a Comment