http://www.turnerclassicmovies.com/MovieNews/Index/0,,82709,00.html
My review of the recent Don Knotts DVD set. There's no case to be made that he was any kind of lost comic genius but The Ghost & Mr. Chicken still holds up and The Love God? is an intriguing failure. Something I eventually cut from the piece because it didn't quite fit is that there's a brief moment in the latter film that made me wonder what Knotts would have been like in a straight dramatic role. It's not long--maybe 15-20 seconds--and there's no way to judge whether he could have carried this off but it's still a glimpse of something different. Maybe only a certain type of comedian tries to make this shift; they're usually considered "ambitious" but I think it's more generally a lack of imagination. Woody Allen did this with some success but people like Jim Carrey are hampered by poor taste (and often not being very comically imaginative to begin with).