Word: casanova
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cockney Casanova, Alfie leaves behind him a trail of broken hearts and gravid wombs. If worse comes to worst, Alfie is game to arrange an abortion, though not quite up to paying for it. In the lost lingo of yesteryear, Alfie is a bit of a cad, and it might follow from this that he is repellent. Quite the contrary. Terence Stamp plays him with enormously ingratiating charm, zest and skill. More important, Playwright Naughton has netted a real character, and reality exonerates itself in the theater, turning moralizing attitudes into carping ghosts at a feast...
...last, decadent century of its independence, the old republic was all pageantry and intrigue. From Piazza San Marco to the Rialto, it was a gaudy blur of masquers and courtesans, actors, singers and sightseers. As the sunny antithesis of London, and most colorful way-point of the Grand Tour, Casanova's Venice even then drew 30,000 Englishmen a year. So many top-chop Londoners returned with Canaletto's etchings and oil paintings that an Englishwoman visiting the city for the first time in 1785 wrote that the artist's "views of this town are most scrupulously...
...extraordinary people, it was the adventurer Casanova and the swindler Cagliostro who raised deception to a way of life and a high art; Machiavelli who made it a cardinal principle of statecraft; while Mussolini was by no means the first Italian leader to perish finally believing the deceptions he had himself created. At the start, Barzini thinks, Mussolini "watched him self playing the great role he was invent ing as gusto," he but went over the along, years he hamming at it began to with believe the stirring show and the lies and flattery, came to read his own news...
...Somerset Maugham's 1937 novel Theatre was to risk anachronism, and to make it in French ought to have guaranteed disaster. What could be done to enhance the hackneyed backstage tale of a London actress who gambles her good name and marriage in an affair with a Casanova not much older than her teen...
...chaser, that's what I am," Platonov admits. By alter-chaser, that's what I am," Platonov admits. By alternating pledges to take up and break off extra-marital escapades, he invites insults, homicide, suicide, and laughter. While the plot thrives on surprise entrances and simultaneous incidents this boobish Casanova slides toward his comic doom...