Word: agamemnon
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...while performing, following the tradition of Soprano Giulia Grisi, who, whenever she had to fall onstage, always landed near a trap door so that a stagehand could sneak her a glass of beer. In the Metropolitan Opera's current production of Electra, Birgit Nilsson's search for Agamemnon's ax is really a quest for a ginger ale stashed under a rock...
Given all the attendant premises, the film is a really remarkable achievement. The three plays--Agamemnon, Choephorai, and Eumenides--have a total running time of about eight hours, cut to five and a half for the live production. This was obviously too long for a movie, and the time had to be further shortened by wholesale cutting to an hour and three quarters. Still, the film manages to capture the grand sweep of the classic tale of revenge murder and retribution, though many qualities of the original are necessarily lost...
...spasmodic English narration was not always satisfactory. In the Agamemnon portion particularly, the narrative was simply superimposed on the dialogue, with the result that one could not understand either the Greek or the English. At other times the Greek was momentarily faded out. I think a better solution (if a narrative was necessary at all) would have been to present an English summary at the start of each play and then let the drama go right through in uninterrupted Greek...
...wine-producing village in southern Italy, a town so poor in everything, including fertilizer, that its inhabitants stalk oxen with a broom and a pan. The Hector of the tale is the village mayor, a paisano whose native cunning has been reinforced by the study of Machiavelli. The Agamemnon of the story is a German captain assigned to rob the village of its only precious possession: 1,320,000 bottles of vermouth...
...centuries ever winged the Birds as Lahr did. When Prometheus reveals some of Zeus's confidences to him, Lahr calls him "a fink." When Zeus offers Lahr his wife, Bert busses her and then bellows his trademarked "annng-anng-anng." When Lahr stumbles over the pronunciation of "Agamemnon," he quips, "That's Greek to me." At one point, he even digresses into a rendition of his famous Frito-Lay TV commercial. Offering a pickle to the god Heracles, Lahr smirks: "I'll bet you can't eat just...