Word: burtonizing
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...ROBE (ABC, 7-9:30 p.m.). Richard Burton, Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Richard Boone and Michael Rennie star in this (1953) version of the Lloyd...
...TAMING OF THE SHREW. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor frolic through Shakespeare's salty salvo in the war between the sexes, expertly directed by Italy's Franco Zeffirelli, who mixes bawd and brio on a Renaissance palette...
...virtues, this particular taming is sometimes more shrewd than Shrew. The writers have edited Shakespeare's speeches, transposed lines, and improvised bits of business for the Burtons that never took place in the Globe's wooden O. Despite such wild tampering, most of the words and-more important -all of the spirit of the play have been maintained. To make sure that the viewer's eye never rests long enough to get restive, Zeffirelli builds the production against a background of burnt sienna, vermilion and viridian-the splashiest colors of the Renaissance palette. He also keeps Taylor...
...Kiss Me Kate). Zeffirelli has refurbished the oft-told tale by styling it with the brio of the 16th century commedia dell'arte. Moreover, his casting seems to be a case of art's imitating life: Elizabeth Taylor as the sharp-tongued tigress, Kate, and Richard Burton as her hard-nosed trainer, Petruchio...
...better performances, Taylor makes Kate seem the ideal bawd of Avon-a creature of beauty with a voice shrieking howls and imprecations. Whenever Liz strains at the Elizabethan, the camera shifts to Burton, who catches the cadences of iambic pentameter with inborn ease. As the lickerish and liquorish Petruchio, Burton pursues his Kate with a weary, beery smile that promises temptation and trouble. An inspired chase across rooftops and into piles of fleece establishes him as a kind of King Leer, the supreme embodiment of a raffish comic hero...