Word: bankheads
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Royal Scandal" succeeds in poking fun at the welter of intrigues for which the court of the czarina was justly notorious, but it does not measure up to "Forgotten Paradise," the silent film to which Ernst Lubitsch now adds dialogue and Tallulah Bankhead. Wielding its satire with too broad a hand, "A Royal Scandal" has lost the flavor of the original, and director Otto Preminger finds himself left with something too slapstick to be convincing...
...Tallulah Bankhead, an actress who revels in free speech ,but suffers "depression and melancholia" when she is misquoted, came around to admitting that she sometimes prefers misquotations. Unnerved after an unexpected mass interview with a dozen reporters in Manhattan's Stork Club, she confided to Columnist Leonard Lyons: "I suffer less when it's only the Times and the Herald Tribune, because then I know that if I should say 'godammit,' they would report that I had said 'good gracious...
...story: Catherine the Great (Miss Bankhead), with the help of a cooney chancellor (Charles Coburn), is governing Russia after a fashion, but not firmly enough to prevent conspiracies against her life. A wild-eyed young soldier (William Eythe) rides three days & nights to warn her of one. Catherine, more impressed by his bright pink condition at the end of the ride than by his loyalty, rigs him out in an ice-cream uniform, promotes him through the military ceiling, moistens him thoroughly with champagne, subjects him to a dazzling blitzkrieg of carnivorous kisses, and turns him into a hopelessly bemused...
...Budapest school of perky lubricity. Some 20 years ago Director Ernst Lubitsch turned it into Forbidden Paradise, one of the shrewdest high-comedies in screen history. Producer Lubitsch's new version, which is directed by Otto (Laura) Preminger, has its points too, most of which are named Tallulah Bankhead. But all told, they just about manage to get the show...
...make neither good sense nor good nonsense; the ending of the play is lame; the dialogue is sometimes bright but often flashy, and riddled with literary puns ("I have been faithful to thee, Cynara. after my Old Fashioneds"). For its best moments Foolish Notion can thank deep-throated Actress Bankhead-a tiger in her wrath and also (with a funny line) a tiger in her timing...