You know when you sleep, I think that you look like you're dead?
Tonight ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I had to hit pause on our movie and laugh so hard that the Roku remote—whose microphone we had duct-taped over to keep it from hearing us—thought we were trying to give it instructions because we were watching Carry On Screaming! (1966) and the electrically regenerated mad scientist played by Kenneth Williams had just enunciated the name of the mummified pharaoh in his luridly purple-lit drawing room, "the founder of the Fourth Dynasty, you know—King Rubatiti." We missed half the scene that followed. It wasn't even the caliber of the double-entendre. It's not a bad one, even by the similarly outrageous standards of Mel Brooks or Monty Python, but I'm pretty sure that a sixth-grader hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost surely produce at least half of a Carry On script. It was the irreproducible effect of Williams' diction, archly drawing out every cut-glass syllable so that for approximately one zeptosecond it sounded like a perfectly reasonable thing for an Edwardian scientist to brag about to his guests before the audience's brain caught up to the bold-faced lowbrow of the joke and exploded. The spirited contributions of the actor's nostrils are also not to be underestimated. I can find no evidence that Williams was ever involved in a production of The Mikado and it saddens me: he was born for Pooh-Bah's line about being born sneering. I am also sorry that he and Fenella Fielding never seem to have been paired in another Carry On. Their brother-sister act, him such a high-strung live wire he's in danger of literally running down, her vampirically smoldering to the point of actual combustion, is the best I've seen in the old dark house genre since Riff Raff and Magenta.
spatch and I had to hit pause on our movie and laugh so hard that the Roku remote—whose microphone we had duct-taped over to keep it from hearing us—thought we were trying to give it instructions because we were watching Carry On Screaming! (1966) and the electrically regenerated mad scientist played by Kenneth Williams had just enunciated the name of the mummified pharaoh in his luridly purple-lit drawing room, "the founder of the Fourth Dynasty, you know—King Rubatiti." We missed half the scene that followed. It wasn't even the caliber of the double-entendre. It's not a bad one, even by the similarly outrageous standards of Mel Brooks or Monty Python, but I'm pretty sure that a sixth-grader hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost surely produce at least half of a Carry On script. It was the irreproducible effect of Williams' diction, archly drawing out every cut-glass syllable so that for approximately one zeptosecond it sounded like a perfectly reasonable thing for an Edwardian scientist to brag about to his guests before the audience's brain caught up to the bold-faced lowbrow of the joke and exploded. The spirited contributions of the actor's nostrils are also not to be underestimated. I can find no evidence that Williams was ever involved in a production of The Mikado and it saddens me: he was born for Pooh-Bah's line about being born sneering. I am also sorry that he and Fenella Fielding never seem to have been paired in another Carry On. Their brother-sister act, him such a high-strung live wire he's in danger of literally running down, her vampirically smoldering to the point of actual combustion, is the best I've seen in the old dark house genre since Riff Raff and Magenta.
no subject
(Also re. Dan Dann the Lavatory Man being a red herring - Charles Hawtrey was supposed to playing a larger role - I think he and Peter Butterworth should have been reversed? - but he asked for a raise and so got shoved into a cameo. And, of course, being Charles Hawtrey ran away with the film regardless.)
no subject
Yeah, that's Buster Keaton-quality. And that bone structure didn't go anywhere.
but he asked for a raise and so got shoved into a cameo. And, of course, being Charles Hawtrey ran away with the film regardless.
Good for him!