Word: brutuses
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Julius Caesar. Joseph Mankiewicz's production remains the best filmed version, with excellent performances by Marlon Brando as Antony, James Mason as Brutus, John Gielgud as Cassius -- but the battle scenes are overdone...
Also making his Festival debut is Marc B. Weiss, who has lit the show with unerring taste and skill. Especially effective is the night lighting. In a departure from custom, Brutus and Antony deliver their eulogies of Caesar in the evening, with flickering light coming from flaming torches held by four of the assembled commoners...
...with a handshaking ritual, and the text requires them to go through a bloodbath ritual after the murder. Cassius even predicts that this "lofty scene" will be re-enacted countless times by posterity. This killing is viewed as almost a religious act, and Kahn has taken his cue from Brutus's words: "Let's be sacrificers, but not butchers...Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods. Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds...
...major issues of the play are centered in the complex character of Brutus, a man "with himself at war," an idealist who, as it turns out, can no more foretell the dire outcome of his well-meant acts than can Gregers Werle, the great idealist in Ibsen's The Wild Duck. James Ray gives us a Brutus that is reasonably well spoken, and rather restrained as befits an adherent of the Stoic school of philosophy. But he does not reach the deep intellectuality attained by James Mason in the film, and does not sufficiently earn the posthumous tribute paid...
...distaff side, Sharon Laughlin as Brutus's wife Portia is not wholly at case in her lines. Ruby Holbrook, as Caesar's wife Calpurnia, speaks better but hasn't the remotest idea of how to react when her husband decides to go to the Senate after all on the Ides of March...