USA,
1967, 98 min
Shown in 1967
CREDITS
- dir
-
John Korty
- prod
-
Hugh McGraw, Stephen Schmidt
- scr
-
Peter Bonerz, John Korty
- cam
-
John Korty
- cast
-
Peter Bonerz, Sandra Archer, Carol Androsky, Larry Hankin, Bud Steinhilber, Ethel Sokolow, Gerald Hiken, Arthur Okamura
- source
-
Korty Films, Inc.
-
COMMENTS
John Korty in person.
OTHER
In John Korty's second feature, Funnyman, we watch the tribulations of a San Francisco comedian who attempts to use the entire potential of the world's artistry in his night club act. Perry D'Angelo wants to mean something and tries to build his comic flair into a new expression of humor. His struggle is temporarily marred by the disillusionment of love loss, and by several hilariously numbing encounters with the world of television commercials. Korty's The Crazy Quilt revealed his abilities for far-out laughter, and here he surpasses himself with two splendid sequences describing the creation of animated characters for an insecticide commercial. He obviously knows his milieu, and the characteristics of both films (especially his famous lyric interludes, where environment becomes a character and San Francisco wanderings are transformed into colorful dream journeys) testify to Korty's sensitive, poetic feeling for camera imagery. Fortunately, the film is only local in background and universal in its message; it is as modern as a protest march and as hypnotic as a sitar twang. There is sadness, too, behind much of the laughter, but the performers are all mock harlequins, never lapsing into self-pity to make a point. Peter Bonerz, as the hero, is quite a genius and a pantomimist beyond description when he enacts a dandy, gradually discarding all of his physical charms. And so, John Korty has succeeded thoroughly in his cinematic journey from delineating the language of faces to translating the language of the heart.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #219
Daniel Talbot, editor of Film: An Anthology , was the first recipient of the Mel Novikoff Award in 1988. Later he cofounded New Yorker Films, a distribution company that introduced many foreign language films to North American audiences. The Mel Novikoff Award, named after the pioneering San Francisco exhibitor, is given to an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema.
