Word: cleopatras
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Carnovsky's Shylock was perfect; his Lear is not. Yet his Lear is the greater achievement, and raises him, at sixty-five, to the pinnacle of a distinguished career. For let's face it: Shakespeare's Lear is the supremely difficult task for an actor (as his Cleopatra is for an actress), and its full realization is not humanly possible. The marvel is that Carnovsky has immersed himself so deeply into a character for which real-life experience offers no preparation, and has been able to project so much of it so meaningfully...
...Cleopatra, still afloat after taking the salvos of Manhattan critics, barged westward. "This lady," said Hollywood's Rosalind Russell at the film's Los Angeles premiere, "is one of the most remarkable fund raisers in the history of the world." It sounded like good news for 20th Century-Fox, but Roz, alas, wasn't talking about Cleo-she was talking about Mrs. Norman ("Buff") Chandler, 61, wife of the president of the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Co. To raise money for her pet project, a new L.A. Music Center, Buff peddled premiere tickets at $250 apiece, raised...
Antony and Cleopatra, as Mankiewicz conceives them, are all too human. He is an aging politician, she is his ambitious mistress. The script says they are in love but they obviously aren't. Nothing suggests that the most famous lovers of all time felt anything better than lust. What the hero calls love is a Freudian fixation, what the heroine calls love is a power complex. The motives of the central characters are confused and ultimately mean, and as a result their tragedy is befuddled and ultimately petty...
...world history. To look at, she is every inch "a morsel for a monarch." Indeed, her 50 gorgeous costumes are designed to suggest that she is a couple of morsels for a monarch. But the "infinite variety" of the superb Egyptian is beyond her, and when she plays Cleopatra as a political animal she screeches like a ward heeler's wife at a block party...
Still and all, as spectacles go, Cleopatra goes reasonably well, and may safely be seen by those who can afford it. But customers will be well advised to do what the wife of Senator Jacob Javits did on opening night. She brought a little pillow to use in a pinch...