Word: marta
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Miss Sheridan kills her ex-lover. Then his vengeful widow (played with notable intensity by Marta Mitrovich) and a crooked art dealer (well played by Steven Geray) try to blackmail her. Her efforts to keep the truth from her husband bring on other complications and the whole business becomes a court-and-headline scandal. Battling their way through the excess plot like machete-swinging explorers of the Mato Grosso, Mr. Scott and Miss Sheridan express the emotions that might be expected of them; acidulous Eve Arden and earnest Divorce Lawyer Lew Ayres finally persuade them to give their marriage another...
...this, along with a highly vocalized romance between Kosciuszko and a Polish girl (Marta Eggerth), is drenched in thicker-than-usual musicomedy mulligatawny. Crowds of peasants, more Ruritanian than Polish, whirl about with almost frightening energy; court balls are halted by the alarums of war; battlefields, bathed in lurid crimson light, are agitated by frantic flag-waving ballets...
...Quantities of stuff," says bluff Iowa-born Novelist Phil Stong, have been written about the "vain German nymphomaniac" who was Russia's Catherine II, "Catherine the Great." But Marta, "who was truly great" both as Peter's wife and as Empress Catherine I in her own right, has rated only one biography, written in the 18th Century. Author Stong, with the same racy narrative power that made his State Fair one of the most likable novels of more than a decade ago and has since earned for his two dozen-odd novels and children's tales...
...Dominator. Marta Skavronsky entered the "tavern brawl" of Peter's Moscow "as she would have gone into a new kitchen.... History felt her broom." She was illiterate, clean and piously Lutheran. Purchased for a ruble (approximately 50?) from the Russian corporal who first claimed her as a prisoner, the sturdy Lithuanian entered the household of Marshal Sheremetiev without fuss or fume. She obediently went to bed with him and next day set about tidying his house...
Transferred to the household of the Privy Councilor Menshikov, Marta soon became "a part of the gay, foul pageant of the Muscovite demimonde." She endured with patience Menshikov's orgiastic embraces and downed her vodka with his roistering friends, glass for glass, without losing a shred of dignity. She could sit placidly through wild banquets where the big joke of the evening might be a string of boiled mice slyly hidden in the cabbage soup, a trick that made some of the revelers vomit on the floor-"which capped the joke though it made things slightly unsanitary...