Word: cleopatra
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Suppose that, after the death of Caesar, some industrious private investigator assembled all the relevant documents on the murder-intercepted letters from Caesar's better-known enemies, the report (to Cleopatra) of a secret operative of the Egyptian government, a discussion with Caesar's physician, confidential messages from his wife's maid, and, above all, Caesar's private papers. Suppose, further, that these documents were arranged like the evidence in a murder trial to show who was guilty and why. How would the result compare with the accounts given by Shakespeare and Suetonius...
Rank's producing companies-all controlled by G.C.F.-were leaner than even his U.S. rivals had hoped. Hollywood had guessed that he had lost money on such prestige pictures as Caesar and Cleopatra. But they had not suspected, as the books showed, that the loss in 1944 through 1946 had been a thumping ?2.2 million. The company's other interests had pulled it into the black in 1944 and 1945, but last year the net loss...
...there is little sprawl and no congestion, and things turn dull only where Shakespeare himself has let history nose out drama. Moreover, under Guthrie McClintic's perceptive direction, this Antony and Cleopatra properly brims over with worldliness, cynical wit, self-seeking and double-dealing...
Katharine Cornell is competent and lively as Cleopatra, but hardly right: she seems conscientiously rather than constitutionally wily and sluttish. Marc Antony is played by English Actor Godfrey Tearle (whose close resemblance to F.D.R. won him the role of the U.S. wartime President in MGM's atom-bomb movie, The Beginning or the End). As the ablest Roman of them all brought low by middle-aged lust, Tearle is brilliantly effective...
...Last Antony and Cleopatra, in 1937, ran for five performances, was greeted by Critic John Mason Brown: "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra-and sank...