Word: mgm
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Have just read your impressive write-up on MGM's great epic Ben-Hur [Nov. 30], but could not help wondering why no mention was made of Miss Haya Harareet, Israel's talented up-and-coming star, who has made her first appearance in a U.S.-made film as Esther in that movie...
...MGM's statistics, is adorned with more than 400 speaking parts, about 10,000 extras, 100,000 costumes, at least 300 sets. One of them, the circus built for the chariot race in Rome's Cinecitta, was the largest ever made for any movie. It covered 18 acres, held 10,000 people and 40,000 tons of sand, took a year to complete, and cost $1,000,000. The race itself, which runs only nine minutes on the screen, ran three months before the cameras and cost another million. Three months before the shooting stopped, Production Manager Henry...
...excellence by which coming generations of screen spectacles can expect to be measured. His virtues have been agreeably rewarded. Friends report that his percentage-of-profits deal with M-G-M will put him on easy street for the rest of his life. But it is probable that MGM, which was in a shaky financial spot when the project was launched, will not have any trouble keeping up the payments. Ben-Hur has run up the biggest advance sale ($500,000) in film history, and the studio expects it to run at least two years at high-priced...
...First Time (Corona; MGM) presents outsize Tenor Mario ("My voice is the greatest in the world") Lanza as an "unpredictable, erratic, self-centered" American singer who is chased by an overdressed, "publicity-loving" international party girl (Zsa Zsa Gabor). The casting is pluperfect, but most of the picture is a pretentious bore. The pre recorded songs seem unable to locate Lanza's lips, and some of the arias might even have been scraped off old Lanza sound tracks. The only new number, a "Jamaican rock 'n' roll" item called Pineapple Pickers, summons little of the old Mario...
WILLIAM FAULKNER (MGM) reads selections from his novels-The Sound and the Fury, Light in August-in a voice as dry and fragile as a wisteria pod. The interest here is not in the pitch of line or phrase but in the incantatory plod of the Faulknerian periods, straddling page after page in the exhortation of meanings more felt than heard...