Word: cleopatras
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...ever since Five Fingers of Death set U.S. and European box office records in 1973, Shaw Brothers has kept a keen eye out for Western fans. Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (a Shaw Brothers-Warner Brothers coproduction) was a hit in the U.S. This year Shaw Brothers bought the rights to Taipan from MGM and budgeted $12 million to film James Clavell's bestseller...
Antony and Cleopatra is a devilishly difficult play to put on convincingly. To begin with, the imagery applied to the two lovers has an Olympian grandeur that somewhat dwarfs merely mortal actors. Antony is "the triple pillar of the world" and an erstwhile demigod in battle. When he dies, Cleopatra says "the odds is gone"-meaning that the world has lost its prime measure of greatness...
...Cleopatra, "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite variety ... other women cloy the appetites they feed; but she makes hungry/ Where most she satisfies." Even the vows that she and Antony swear in lovers' defiance of the world are thunderously imperial. Says Antony: "Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch of the ranged empire fall!" and Cleopatra echoes, "Melt Egypt into Nile...
Granted the almost insuperable problems of portraying such exalted beings, Maggie Smith's Cleopatra and Keith Baxter's Antony are blazingly well executed. Smith is not precisely a sultry, sun-kissed figure of voluptuousness, but she is regal, cunning, mercurial, and desperately in love with her "man of men." One feels about Keith Baxter's Antony that he has outgrown the self-sacrifices characteristic of the Roman code. The grizzled veteran now prefers to make love...
...most compelling achievements of the Smith-Baxter performances is to show how separation from each other is the divorce that Antony and Cleopatra cannot bear. Their love has grafted each in the other's heart and mind so that when they are forced apart, it is a semi-suicide. She wonders, in rapt preoccupation, whether he is sitting, or standing, or riding his horse. When he orders his fleet to turn and follow her deserting ships in the sea battle that destroys his fortunes against Octavius Caesar, it is not that he has totally lost valor, but that being...