Word: passionateness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Renato Castellani, an Italian moviemaker (Two Cents Worth of Hope), had an idea: since Shakespeare had laid the story of his "star-crossed lovers" in Verona, why not actually photograph it there and, where necessary, in other Italian cities whose stones are better preserved? Why not set a Renaissance passion in a Renaissance scene? And why not let all this young love be made, for a change, by young lovers...
Finally, motion pictures have taken the final stride toward valuable utilization of the extra screen area at their command. The big selling point of The Black Widow was that it represented the first time a "Crime of Passion has appeared on Wide screen." Mood setting is obviously the proper function for the embarrassing space on either side of CinemaScope action. Unfortunately, this particular picture just drudges along with extra chairs, rugs, lamps, desks, and the other paraphernalia of interior films. What might have been done confounds the imagination...
...dreadful type of introduction, promising a shocking glimpse of marital infidelity, the movie is still much closer to Victor Hugo's original Ruy Blas than to a Mickey Spillane epic. For one thing, the characters are far more interested in the seventeenth century ideal of glory than in the "passion" currently popular in drugstore circles. Alto, most of them are too busy intriguing against each other to get worked up over a love affair--even if it does involve the Queen of Spain...
...Profundis, the confession he wrote toward the end of his two-year prison sentence for homosexuality, Wilde explained exactly-and sentimentally-why his brilliant career ended so ignominiously. "What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion ... I ceased to be lord over myself ... I allowed pleasure to dominate...
...himself considered the weakest part of his character. Few of his poems pass muster today; they are the lush, overripe productions of a man who got "a curious joy" (a "kick" is the modern word; out of being "spendthrift of my own genius" and let himself "drift with every passion till my soul / Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play...