Word: passione
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Bible's most flaming story of transgression ... A tremendous cast of thousands recreate a world of passion and fire!" This kind of overheated advertising blurb (for David and Bathsheba), and the kind of movie it is designed to sell, goaded Britain's leftish-highbrow weekly New Statesman and Nation into inviting its readers to invent puffs for other cinematic possibilities in the Old Testament. Last week Hollywood tittered a little self-consciously at the results...
...Esther.* "The World's Greatest Cinderella Story, Ripe with the Wisdom of Ages, Yet Trembling with Topicality; Throbbing with Tempestuous Passion, Yet deeply Religious and Reverent . . . Sensational drama direct from the bestselling book of all time . . . Real wine was drunk in the screening of the royal feast...
Literary compliments aside, The Betrothed is a far more ambitious work than any Scott ever attempted. It is an adventure that pried into hearts as well as history; a long irony on men and politics that stung liberal Italians of a hundred years ago into a passion against the petty governments that divided their country. It has gone through more than 500 editions, and Italians rank it second only to Dante's Divine Comedy...
...angelic strength," Antony with its 42 scenes is also full of history's tumultuous, haphazard movement. Not angelic wings, but seven-league boots are needed for this panoramic drama of conquests and civil wars that is even more a chronicle of power than it is of passion. The characters are uniformly worldlings, plotters, palter-ers, betrayers; even Antony is destroyed by lust, not love; and Cleopatra is as devious as she is passionate. Antony and Cleopatra is really less the sequel of Caesar and Cleopatra than of Shakespeare's own Julius Caesar. And in this checkered struggle...
...Oxford." While he laid about him, buffeting the dons, intoning ballads and drinking songs, dominating political and religious debate, Britons soothed themselves by reflecting that he was, after all, a bit of a foreigner. For every true Briton believes at heart that whenever his peace is disturbed by uncompromising passion and brilliance, foreign blood is bound to be at the bottom of it. In Belloc's case, the tag goes: "Of course, his father was a Frenchman...