MORE SID CAESAR

I'm afraid I'm way too sleepy to put up a decent post, but I have a few more Sid Caesar grabs. They don't make the same acting points as last time, but they're interesting for what they reveal about Caesar's preferences in story. I'll put them up and see what happens.

In the situation above Sid and his girlfriend, who used to be poor and half starving, are a now a wildly popular dance act in Vaudeville. For the first time Sid has money to eat whatever he wants and it goes to his head. He can't stop eating...he eats even while dancing... and he's getting too fat to perform. Here his wife begs him to stop, but he pays no attention.

She clutches him passionately. He just stands there, rigid and impassive.

Finally he pushes her away in disgust.

She's crushed an egg salad sandwich that he'd hidden in his jacket pocket.

Fortunately he still has a banana in his other pocket.

I like this for a couple of reasons. I always like scenes where one character has a passion to communicate, and the other couldn't care less. I also like the jump cut that occurs in the final two pictures (above). They tell you to avoid jump cuts in film school but the truth is they work just fine when used correctly. Using them is a signal that something interesting is about to happen. In comedy they prime the audience to laugh.

Poor Sid doesn't realize how fat he's gotten til one day during a performance....

...the audience breaks out in cat calls like "Fat, fat, the water rat! 50 bullets in your hat"

He stops in mid dance, and addresses the audience...tells them they should be ashamed of themselves...but the truth is undeniable now. His career on the stage is over, or at least it seems that way.

Well, the story goes on. It's a parody of vintage movies like "A Star is Born." Caesar was best at doing "shtick," which is what the cocktail party sketch in the previous post was, but he also liked to do parodies. The two together fit what Caesar was good at. A lot of fans don't know that before he hit it big on TV he was a dramatic actor as well as a comedian.

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Yikes! I thought I'd seen this actress (above) before. She's the very same woman who starred in my favorite horror film, "Burn Witch, Burn!"