Norman Z. McLeod
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Breezing into screwball-romance terrain charted by such otherworldly standards as "Blithe Spirit," "Topper" and "Ghost," writer-director David Koepp seems liberated by the chance to put repartee front and center.
The British comic plays Bertram Pincus, a misanthropic dentist in New York City who develops an ability to see dead people; to be specific, the dead are noodgy, solid-looking ghosts of the type that populated the Cary Grant movie Topper.
The premise of a ghost—or multiple ghosts—that only one person can see dates back to at least Topper (1937), to which Ghost Town owes a significant debt.
While growing up in days of yore, I loved the Topper movies.
At its essence, Ghost Town is Topper multiplied, with Gervais' misanthropic dentist Bertram Pincus seeing dead people all over Manhattan following a botched medical procedure (some of the film's funniest scenes involve the brilliant Kristin Wiig as a purposefully inarticulate surgeon and Michael-Leon Wooley as her in-house legal counsel).
Again, Koepp has delivered something of a throwback, but his inspirations are marvelous: "Ghost Town" offers an update of the supernatural farce found in "Topper," "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" and other comedies from Hollywood's so-called golden age, when the term "adult" meant "sophisticated."
A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)
Directed by Seth MacFarlane
influenced by The Paleface (1948)
Music Characters Plot Themes
*** With a title inspired by the lurid pulp grandiosity of Spaghetti Westerns (“Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead” and “Django’s Cut-Price Corpses” are just two examples), a big-sky score by Joel McNeely that channels the Aaron Copland-esque themes of the Hollywood mainstream and a premise more or less lifted from Bob Hope’s “The Paleface,” writer-director-vilified-Oscar-host Seth MacFarlane’s follow-up to his huge hit “Ted” was judged a box-office disappointment when it was released theatrically in May, earning “just” $42 million compared to the $218 million snatched by the movie about the vulgar talking Teddy bear.
Albert may be spineless, but that is nothing new; it is more than sixty years since Bob Hope put a coward among the cowboys, in “The Paleface.”
The problem seems to be that he and co-writers Wellesley Wild and Alec Sulkin could not decide whether to do an over-the-top parody such as “Blazing Saddles” or a fish-out-of-water spoof such as Bob Hope’s “The Paleface.”
Now in a sense, all comic Westerns do this, whether we're talking about Bob Hope in "The Paleface" (1948) or Mel Brooks ' "Blazing Saddles."
The truth is he’s made the new Shakiest Gun in the West — Don Knotts’ 1968 rehash of Bob Hope’s The Paleface (1948) — except MacFarlane’s picture isn’t even up to the none-too-exacting standards of the Don Knotts movie.
But Hope had a knack for comic timing in movies like “The Paleface” — sometimes that’s all he had — and Brooks pushed cultural as well as scatological boundaries in 1974’s “Blazing Saddles.”
Casanova (2005)
Directed by Lasse Hallström
influenced by Casanova's Big Night (1954)
Characters Plot
For it's also the name given to Joan Fontaine as Bob Hope's love interest in the 1950s spoof, Casanova's Big Night.
In the 1954 comedy "Casanova's Big Night," she is courted by Pippi Poplino ( Bob Hope ), a Casanova impersonator who puts on a mask and tries to seduce her.
The plot echoes Bob Hope’s The Paleface and its remake with Don Knotts, The Shakiest Gun in the West, about a fast-talking coward becoming, in a case of mistaken identity, a western hero.
Now, before you can say "Topper," these ghosts are not fun-loving or mischievous by nature.
Like Cary Grant and Constance Bennett in Topper, their life together on earth is cut short by an accident.
"Parents" is essentially a comedy of frustration, akin to the scripts that John Hughes devised for the original "Vacation" and then "Planes Trains and Automobiles"--or, on a far more exalted level, that of W.C. Fields for the incomparable 1934 "It's a Gift".
Fans of the genre will relish all the various homages to films running the gamut from the Sergio Leone classics to the Bob Hope comedy "The Paleface" through countless verbal and visual quotes, cameo appearances from a wide array of B-movie favorites (including, as the opening credits put it, "The Friendly Participation of Franco Nero") and incredibly arcane in-jokes (there are a couple of scenes that closely resemble moments from Tarantino's previous films in much the same way that Howard Hawks used to repeat favorite bits from film to film).
Tulio (voiced by Kevin Kline) and Miguel (Kenneth Branagh), the bantering cronies in the animated adventure-comedy The Road to El Dorado, are sort of like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in ''Road to Rio.''
Whether it’s W.C. Fields in It’s a Gift (1934), the murderous chainsaw-wielding clan in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), the Firefly bunch in House of 1000 Corpses (2003) or every family in every Wes Anderson picture, it’s a staple of the movies.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
Directed by Ben Stiller
influenced by The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)
At least, that’s what the Goldwyn family must be feeling now that their long-delayed “ The Secret Life of Walter Mitty ” update finally exists, smarter and less screwball than previous attempts at the material have been.