Word: portia
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...Boys from Syracuse (Portia Nelson, Jack Cassidy, Bibi Osterwald, conducted by Lehman Engel; Columbia LP). The 1938 Rodgers & Hart musical (based on A Comedy of Errors) in a dazzling record reduction. Such hits as Falling in Love with Love and This Can't Be Love are treated overtenderly, but the album is worth having, if only for the late Lorenz Hart's remarkable rhymes...
...minor roles, Edmond O'Brien is particularly convincing as Casca, infusing his lines with a natural fluency, while Deborah Kerr (Portia) and Greer Garson (Calpurnia) make the most of what are essentially bit parts...
...usual cops & robbers roles, as Casca, the conspiracy's hatchet man. In the vital role of Brutus, James Mason gives an intense, brooding performance that effectively combines the poetic and the prosaic. Greer Garson and Deborah Kerr, as Caesar's wife Calpurnia and Brutus's wife Portia, are decoratively patrician, but have little to do in roles that are virtually bits...
...topnotch cast, most of whom worked for less than their regular salaries to be identified with such a big "prestige" picture: Marlon Brando (Mark Antony), Louis Calhern (Caesar), James Mason (Brutus), John Gielgud (Cassius), Deborah Kerr (Portia), Greer Garson (Calpurnia). The screenplay, reportedly all Shakespeare, contains no "additional dialogue." Says Producer Houseman: "We kept it in black-and-white because there are certain parallels between this play and modern times. People associate dictators with black-and-white newsreel shots of them haranguing the crowds . . . Mussolini on the balcony, that sort of thing. With color, you lose that reality...
...Randy McHugh ("Please . . . you're making it hard for both of us"), was sweetly patient with his incurably ill wife Elise, and, to the accompaniment of vibrant organ "strains," calmed a gun-toting hysteric. Supervisor Max Wylie, who has had an expert hand in such sudsy classics as Portia Faces Life, asked listeners to be patient, promised that soon "we're going to do adult soap opera for the first time and get away with...