Word: mankiewicz
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...orchestra breezed through six not-very-challenging movements of Shostakovitch's Suite from Incidental [and very trivial] Music to Hamlet, half of which sounds like a collection of ditties out of a Gilbert and Sullivan treatment of the play. The other half suggests the score of a Joseph L. Mankiewicz Hamlet starring Mr. and Mrs. Burton...
Cleopatra (20th Century-Fox) has plenty of trumpets and tambourines, plus occasional sobs from strings and winds, but the real pleasure is reading the depth-psychology notes that Director Joe Mankiewicz has written while listening to Alex North's bullying score. Good for testing out stereo sets...
Such was clearly the intention of Director Joseph Mankiewicz. Story, he insisted, must dominate spectacle, and with that in mind he constructed not one drama but two-both broadly true to Plutarch, each about two hours long...
...however, the deep-revolving, witty Mankiewicz fails most where most he hoped to succeed. As drama and as cinema, Cleopatra is raddled with flaws. It lacks style both in image and in action. Never for an instant does it whirl along on wings of epic elan; generally it just bumps from scene to ponderous scene on the square wheels of exposition. Part of what is wrong went wrong in the cutting room, and for that Darryl Zanuck, boss of 20th Century-Fox, is possibly to blame. But much of what is wrong was wrong in the script, and for that...
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...