Word: houseman
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...calculated risk of being a box-office flop. Julius Caesar is the first effort by M-G-M to film Shakespeare since Romeo and Juliet lost more than a quarter of a million dollars in 1936. Shakespeare is supposed to be box-office poison, but Mankiewicz and Producer John Houseman think they have a sure-fire script. Says Mankiewicz: "It's a good, rip-snorting piece of blood & thunder coupled with eternally new and true-for-today character studies...
...most of whom worked for less than their regular salaries to be identified with such a big "prestige" picture: Marlon Brando (Mark Antony), Louis Calhern (Caesar), James Mason (Brutus), John Gielgud (Cassius), Deborah Kerr (Portia), Greer Garson (Calpurnia). The screenplay, reportedly all Shakespeare, contains no "additional dialogue." Says Producer Houseman: "We kept it in black-and-white because there are certain parallels between this play and modern times. People associate dictators with black-and-white newsreel shots of them haranguing the crowds . . . Mussolini on the balcony, that sort of thing. With color, you lose that reality and the show becomes...
...huge grab bag in which pointlessness and preposterous melodrama pop up as frequently as good storytelling and plausible conduct. Cathy's story, gamy, lurid, and told at tedious length, is all but meaningless. Almost as tiresome is the figure of Lee, the Trasks' trusted Chinese houseman, whose warmed-over Oriental wisdom and too gentle heart give the whole California story an overdose of stickiness...
...divorce from her radio actor husband, Actress Agnes Moorehead, 44, had a witness define her charges of cruelty. Her husband, said her former houseman, called his wife dirty names, revved up the radio and slammed doors every time she tried to study her scripts, forced her to sleep in his room, pointed his antique firearms at her, left empty whiskey bottles around the lawn and in the grandfather clock. "It was just too much to bear," said Agnes...
There was more confusion when the disappointed brigade of newsreel cameramen and reporters arrived at Dodona Manor, the Marshalls' Leesburg, Va. home. The Marshall houseman told them that Madame Chiang had requested two days of privacy. Madame Chiang, however, soon sent word that she would willingly be photographed, came outside to chat and pose...