Word: cleopatras
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...oldest whore on the beat," said Joseph L. Mankiewicz last week, contemplating his 41 years in Hollywood. Mankiewicz, who won Academy Awards for both screenplay and directing in two pictures-Letter to Three Wives (1949), and All About Eve (1950)-ruefully admitted that big-budget movies, à la his Cleopatra, which cost $40 million, are now out. "What they would like my next four films to be," he said, "are Easy Cowboy, Midnight Rider, Cowboy Rider and Easy Midnight." Mankiewicz has apparently got the message. His latest film is a low-cost western called There Was A Crooked...
Shaw followed up his "melodrama" with "a history," Caesar and Cleopatra, and "an adventure," Captain Brassbound's Conversion -and put them all together under the heading "Three Plays for Puritans." The second work is far and away the finest, and the American Shakespeare Festival chose it as its first departure from Shakespeare...
Mike was Burton's kind of boy. As the Liz-Dick scandale deepened during the filming of Cleopatra, Burton recalls, "Ninety percent of our friends avoided our eyes. Mike flew to Rome from New York to be with us." Nichols stayed by Elizabeth's side when Burton went off to make another film. Favors like that one remembers. In 1966, the Welshman and his lady were signed for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Elizabeth insisted on Nichols as director. Virginia Woolf could have been a mini-Cleopatra, but its be-low-the-belt punches intrigued critics and audiences...
...THEME remains. Cleopatra conducts us to it when she says of Caesar. "He words me girls, words me, that I should not/ Be noble to myself." The theme, which pulses in Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Hamlet and western poetry, is that there is a conflict between words and poetry in which moral dignity and reason itself are consumed by degraded language. The nobility of man and woman must resist the corruption of mad discourse. The argument of values in Troilus and Cressida, a singularly distasteful but revelatory play, becomes a murderous melodrama of confused abstraction and disfigured moral orthodoxy...
...analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth." Words are the quarry from which the cathedral is fashioned which the Mass of the symbol vivifies. Hofmannsthal said that to the pious only the symbol is real. Purity of language is the achievement of Antony and Cleopatra. The high road of Shakespeare is surely the road home...