Word: mankiewicz
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...another part of the forest, Writer-Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve) announced that his version of Cleopatra, which stars Elizabeth Taylor (naturally; who is Pharaohess of them all?), would be considerably different from Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. (Work had begun on the movie when Liz took sick last fall.) "Shaw's life," Mankiewicz explained, "is full of letters to naive young girls, instructing them in the ways of the world. He wrote Caesar and Cleopatra as if he'd come upon Cleopatra himself in that pile of rocks. The play is a Shavian dream...
...honor the 50th anniversary in the theater of Actress Peggy Wood (Bittersweet, Blithe Spirit), ANTA last week collected round her most of the remaining members of the much-chronicled Algonquin Round Table. The late great wits were missing, of course-Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Herman Mankiewicz-and, significantly, the reunion was held not at the old rear-center table in the Rose Room of the Algonquin but in the grand ballroom of Manhattan's Hotel Edison, five blocks and 90 light-years away. The most notable living absentees were George S. Kaufmann...
...ease with which the Englishman wins it, and by the oafishness with which the American loses. It is a cheap debating trick, and it cheapens the picture as it did the book. But the picture, in the last reel, suffers at the hands of Scriptwriter-Director Joseph Mankiewicz an even more drastic devaluation of its intellectual currency...
Despite the letdown at the end, the picture is well worth seeing for the buildup that precedes it. Mankiewicz is an intelligent director, and he keeps his actors on the jump and his story on the move. Moreover, for Americans, the picture carries a moral they will long have need to ponder: if it is more blessed to give than to receive, it is also a damned sight more difficult...
...There will be no need to prepare anything," he told Mankiewicz. "Just come with your cameras and film our annual procession." Last week, trailed by a motorcade bearing some 50 technicians and actors, all well-armed with pith helmets, salt tablets and quinine pills, Mankiewicz journeyed to Tayninh. Meanwhile, prompted to some extent by the wishful thinking of the exile himself, word had spread among the Cao Dai faithful that Hollywood magic had somehow arranged for the return to Tayninh of Pope...