Word: empresse
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...group of schemers (led by Yul Brynner) who want her to be recognized as Anastasia only in order to get their hands on her unclaimed inheritance. They plough all the proper aristocratic graces and memories into the haunted girl, and finally present her to the dowager empress (Helen Hayes). The pupil now and then surprises her tutors with fragments of memories that could come only from the real Anastasia, so that the film clearly believes in Santa Claus. Unfortunately Santa Claus runs away with Yul Brynner. She renounces imminent royal recognition for love in a moderately tear-jerking, immoderately unconvincing...
...borrowed jewelry. Some costumed lady guests were marvels to behold, but none greater than the international set's large-hearted partygiver, Elsa Maxwell, 73, bedecked with such garnish as one of the world's biggest rocks (a 337-k. sapphire) in her guise of Russia's Empress Catherine the Great. Also gone regal was Metropolitan Opera Soprano Maria Meneghini Callas, playing her greatest nonsinging role as Hatshepsut, an 18th Dynasty Queen of Egypt. Prattled Columnist Maxwell just before the ball: "Maria and I, gentle as ewe lambs, will be side by side in the Parade of Empresses...
Emperor Hirohito, in cutaway and striped trousers, and Empress Nagako, in a pastel kimono and silver fox furs, greeted some 170,000 well-wishers in Tokyo from the balcony of a pavilion on their palace preserve. Customarily presenting a poem to his subjects on New Year's Day, Hirohito this year delighted everyone by producing two. Both, as always, suffered from translation into English. The first, inspired by Japan's annual tree-planting rites last spring, was titled Reforestation...
...great age of religious fervor which marked not only the high point of Buddhist art, but also of court painters and poets still ranked among China's greatest. Among the period's leading figures : the Empress Wu, who rivals Britain's first Elizabeth for energy and cunning; the "Illustrious Sovereign" Hsuan-Tsung, scholar and educator, whose tragic love for the beauteous Yang Kuei Fei ended when the army, incensed at her extravagance, forced her to be hanged from a pear tree with a silken scarf...
...actors, in general, make good use of their melodramatic opportunities. Yul Brynner is gloweringly glamorous as the villain. Helen Hayes is effective as the Empress, but her work, like much about this picture, has been scanted by the inept direction of Anatole Litvak. Director Litvak made his worst mistake in connection with Ingrid Bergman. Her acting is competent, but only now and then toward the end of the picture, almost as if by accident, can the moviegoer see what he probably will want most of all to see on the screen: the fact that, seven years after her abdication...