Word: shakespeareanisms
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...there the Old Vic proved disappointing. For a great repertory company, it had more than its quota of indifferent actors; there was no great distinction in their rendering of speech or verse. (The musicomedy-sized Century Theater made for hearing trouble.) But they had the main thing-a real Shakespearean robustiousness. In Part I they contrived a fine balance between the historical scenes and the humorous ones, a telling contrast between that arch-romantic and exemplar of heraldic honor, Hotspur, and that arch-realist and epitome of worldly wisdom, Falstaff. And they had for this two brilliant actors...
...begins with shots of 17th-Century London and Shakespeare's Globe Theater, where Henry V is being played. The florid acting of Olivier and his prelates (see cut) and the Elizabethan audience's vociferous reactions are worth volumes of Shakespearean footnotes. For the invasion, the camera, beautifully assisted by the Chorus (Leslie Banks), dissolves in space through a marine backdrop to discover a massive set such as Shakespeare never dreamed of - and dissolves backward in time to the year 1415. Delicately as a photo graphic print in a chemical bath, there emerges the basic style of Shakespearean cinema...
...scenes comparable to those in Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook the World. Inside, however, the audience was sharply divided. Parisian sophisticates, perhaps not yet grown up to Eisenstein's post-sophisticated refurbishing of primordial cinema devices, booed and stomped and hissed at the all but Shakespearean intensity of the great static closeups, the poetic registrations of emotion, the grandiose, dancelike gestures of the players, broad as bad opera-or Michelangelo. When Ivan's enemies mugged fear, Frenchmen cheerfully shouted: "Cowards!" When the sound track jammed as Ivan received a chess set from Queen Elizabeth, someone...
...woman of the year." Also huzzah'd: Dean Virginia Gildersleeve, 68, of Manhattan's Barnard College; All-But-Abstract Painter Georgia O'Keeffe, 58; Choreographer Agnes de Mille, 36; Novelist I. A. R. Wylie (The Young In Heart), 60; Johns Hopkins Psychiatrist Esther Loring Richards, 60; Shakespearean Actress-Director Margaret Webster, 40; Radio Program Director Margaret Cuthbert, 52; New York Times Editorialist AnneO'Hare McCormick, sixtyish; International Business Machines Vice President Ruth Leach, 29; and New Jersey's Congresswoman Mary T. Norton...
...Mistress Mine is the comedy the Lunts played in London last season under the no less Shakespearean title of Love in Idleness (TIME, Jan. 1, 1945). It tells of an attractive, broke widow who has been living in gay, sumptuous sin with a wartime British Cabinet Minister. Then her priggish, pinko 17-year-old son (well played by Dick Van Patten) comes home after five years at school in Canada. He forces his mother to choose between him and her lover and (possibly because a show must keep going until 11 o'clock) she chooses...