Local Boy Makes Good

The plot, the budget, the playtime - even the slapstick - are modest in scope. As a result, the lead four actors and a camera with wonderful eye had what seems to me a "hands-free" opportunity to actually act and create a work with poetic charm. Joey and co-players are young, attractive, and exuberant, and share their humor with us across a gulf of seventy years. But that humor's consistently the stuff of which good comedy is made: incongruous play with high-tone ideas (Freudian dream analysis, botany), and characters battling their way through seas of foibles, inhibitions, mistaken word choices, vanities, and longings for things totally inappropriate.

From works like this evolved - to my mind - all the better comedies to follow, from My Friend Godfrey, to the Pierre Richard films, the best of Albaladejo and his superb team, Shall we Dansu, Woody Allen's best works, Mad, Mad, Mad, World, or films like The Loved One, or Christmas Vacation. This may be a low budget film, but its ideas are not cheap - they target a common, human soul riddled with weaknesses and self-doubts we all share. And wow! Did I like Joe E. Brown and his fabulous colleagues in Midsummer Night's Dream - what a treasure.

What a shame Hollywood all but dropped the baton - trading delicacy off in exchange for a bullying big-industry get-rich marketing clique to exploit ad tedium a totally different lowest common denominator.