Word: gielgud
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...movie fails in its (fortunately rare) attempts at seriousness. When Moore sobers up, the movie loses its sparkle and falls flat. Gordon's writing talents end with the jokes--he lacks the necessary subtlety to convey real emotion. Minnelli. Moor and John Gielgud (brilliant as Arthur's paternal butler) utter lines to each other now and then that are supposed to mean things but actually don't, and the audience squirms in its collective seats and waits for Moore to go back on the sauce. When Gielgud has difficulties near the end, you want to feel...
...would put Ian up with Olivier and Gielgud in his intelligence and skill," says the National Theater's Peter Hall, who directed Amadeus. "He's an original," says Trevor Nunn of the Royal Shakespeare Company. "He has a strong and complex intelligence, and he can't really be compared with anybody." Although he has the stature and the command of theatrical grandeur associated with the Olivier generation, McKellen also has something more contemporary, more recognizably his own. It is a sort of granite center, a moral core that harks back to his Cambridge teacher, the great critic...
...real obscenity is the amount of money spent on the gallons of fake blood and the tons of naked flesh used in the film; the amount of money needed to waste the talents of such fine performers as Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole, Helen Mirren, and Sir John Gielgud; the amount of money squandered on lavish sets that often look less like ancient Rome than the interior of the Hong Kong...
...there are ten versions of Caesar, the first being a French effort of 1907. In the half century since 1929, about 50 sound films have been made, including three of Caesar, all American. The straightforward 1953 version, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz--with James Mason's Brutus, John Gielgud's Cassius. Marlon Brando's Antony, and the late Louis Calhern's Caesar--remains the only excellent Shakespearean film ever done in our country (and few people know that its off-camera crowd roars in the stadium were specially recorded by a huge throng at a baseball game...
...strangely wooden when, instead of reading them on the printed page, we are forced to watch actors trying to speak these abstractions with realistic spontaneity. As for Joyce's famous epiphanies, they seem disastrously flat on the screen, at least in this adap tation. It falls to John Gielgud to deliver the most famous of them, a priest's vivid description of the torments of hell. He speaks the words well enough, his precise diction giving them something like the burning power of dry ice. But in the truncated form the screen demands, they lose much of their...