The Polyesteryears

By the time the 1970's commenced, Hollywood comedy appeared to have been ruptured in a sense, it was a time when virtually all the top-line comedians and most of the leading directors that were associated with the genre, and had been for many decades, suddenly vanished from thin screen. There was however one that survived the decline, and that was Billy Wilder. But even a director of his powerful proportions would deliver sporadically, and after his abysmal Italian set-romantic comedy that starred an otherwise on form Jack Lemmon in Avanti!(1972) he would have no other choice but to run for cover, and with a raucously effervescent but seemingly conservative remake of the old Broadway warhorse, 1974's The Front Page.

The intermittently brilliant once cartoonist Frank Tashlin had directed until his death in 1972, and he would helm Danny Kaye's very last vehicle The Man From the Diner's Club (1963), Tashlin concluded his career with The Private Navy of Sergeant O'Farrell (1968), one of the saving grace highlights in an otherwise disappointing later work of yet another seasoned comic, who was in certain circles regarded as the 'funniest man in America,' Bob Hope who made his most recent appearance with the forgettable Cancel My Reservation (1972).

The ever faithful French were the only to receive Lewis in kind circa the seventies.

Jerry Lewis would be consistently active as both performer and director throughout the Sixties, but there would be many a sign, that the standard and quality of his work was slipping, as the decade

trooped on. After an underwhelming war comedy Ja Ja Mein General! But Which Way To The Front? (1970), he retreated into silence from what appeared to be beset by personal difficulties, and not to re-emerge until 1980's ironically titled Hardly Working, which entailed an out of work circus clown who feigns a variety of characters; the film would garner a cult critical success in Europe, but was virtually dismissed elsewhere.

Peter was still a good Sellers point in the decade.

There was one comic performer that remained a surefire box-office dazzler during the Seventies and that masked man was Mr Peter Sellers. From his guise of the bumbling inspector Clouseau, centerpiece of a thread of spin-offs from The Pink Panther (1963). These films would include 1975's The Return of The Pink Panther, The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and were elegantly directed by Blake Edwards, who also notched up a success of a different variety with the sex romp '10' (1979), which also featured lady Edwards, aka Julie Andrews, who would soon shock her audiences proper when she bared her bosom in the Hollywood satire S.O.B. (1981).

Fly Like A Segal...

Sex comedy, if of a generally rather cautious and compromised kind, proved one of the staples of Hollywood humor in the Seventies. Typical were The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), where George Segal exercises his rumpled charm as a meek bookshop clerk who gets caught up with Barbara Streisand's flamboyant call-girl, and in 1973, A Touch of Class, where Segal stars again, this time with a lot more chutzpah as a savvy insurance man, partnered by Glenda Jackson as the shrewd businesswoman that he indulges in an extra-marital affair with. That was not the end for Segal, nosiree, he would show his mush again the very same year in 1973's Blume in Love, an engrossing movie in which director Paul Mazursky consolidated the instinct he had conveyed in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) for compassionate and inventively funny examinations of modern sexual customs, a talent he was subsequently to develop in An Unmarried Woman (1978).

Hoffman was actually 30 and Miss Bancroft an ancient 36 in The Graduate

It was the wildfire popularity of 1967's The Graduate, the story of a college kid's first encounters with sex, lust and love, tat really added impetus to the ' permissive ' comedy, while the level of success also turned director Mike Nichols into a prestigious hot property. Another block-buster moment would ensue for the director with the anti-war satire Catch-22 (1970), that was adapted straight off the pages of Joseph Heller's popular novel of the Sixties. He would follow suit in 1971 with a veritable examination of 1960's sexual mores in Carnal Knowledge, the film was scripted by cartoonist Jules Feiffer and it traced the amorous rakes' progress of two erstwhile university lads. It was considered to be Nichols best achieved film, but consequently was his least ambitious. The Fortune (1975), a true knockabout farce set in the roaring Twenties, that starred Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson as a pair of amateur would-be killers.

May I introduce you to Elaine?

Nichols initially made a gilded reputation partnering Elaine May, first in the nightclub circuit, and then on to the Great White Way. In a series of trendy satirical sketches, Elaine May herself would venture into the wonderful world of cinema, starting as an actress and ultimately director, most notable for 1971's A New Leaf, which was an acidly amusing little fable about an unprepossessing heiress (May) whom a penniless upper-crust loafer (Walter Matthau) seeks to marry her for her moolah. In Mikey and Nicky (1976) Miss May would apply some quite unconventional techniques of filming, unattended cameras were set to capture moments unintended and an overall realist's disposition and in fact it would star someone that would quite approve of the medium as it would star the one and only and only and one John Cassavetes.

Better with him than ol' Ted, eh? 

In the theater Nichols would direct two plays by the writer who, since the early Sixties, had dominated mainstream comedy on Broadway, and increasingly in Hollywood, too - Neil Simon (though perhaps in an odd twist of events, had never directed Simon's work for the cinema). Simon's name rapidly became a byword for that which is profitable, and the bulk of his plays would be converted into acclaimed comedy movies. Simon himself would pen the adaptations of Barefoot in the Park (1967), The Odd Couple (1968), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1974) The Sunshine Boys (1975) and 1978's California Suite, among others. He also would branch out into the realm of the original screenplay, for conventional situation comedies, such as the comedy of terrors that starred Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis as a couple that came down with a serious case of Murphy's law in The Out-of-Towners (1970), and for the ingenious spoofs of detective fiction, Murder by Death (1976) which starred diminutive tv detective, Peter Falk among a parade of pouts and The Cheap Detective (1978) that starred Monsieur Falk yet again as Lou Peckinpaugh (no relation to the Wild Bunch). Simon's work can at times translate as being hollow and predictable (as witnessed in Plaza Suite, 1971) but what the man always achieves is an uncanny instinct, a prescience, giving the public precisely what it craves.

Three stars were born.

Simon's pre-Broadway apprenticeship was served as television scripter and gagman, namely for the Sid Caeser program Your Show of Shows (1950-1954), on which his fellow employees would consist of no fewer than a trio of men and these three were the wise men who would go on to become leading lights and key figures in the cinema - Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen.



*Cover shot ; Ruth Gordon and George Segal from Carl Reiner's Where's Poppa (1970).