Word: shakespeareanisms
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...half century since 1929, about 50 sound films have been made, including three of Caesar, all American. The straightforward 1953 version, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz--with James Mason's Brutus, John Gielgud's Cassius. Marlon Brando's Antony, and the late Louis Calhern's Caesar--remains the only excellent Shakespearean film ever done in our country (and few people know that its off-camera crowd roars in the stadium were specially recorded by a huge throng at a baseball game...
...grace, therefore, was all the more dramatic. In surprisingly sympathetic words, the prosecuting counsel, Peter Taylor, noted: "The tragedy of this case ... is that Mr. Thorpe has been surrounded and in the end his career blighted by the Scott affair. His story is a tragedy of truly Greek or Shakespearean proportions-the slow but inevitable destruction of a man by the stamp of one defect...
...Shakespearean terms, this interpretation is an unconscionable outrage, yet it leaves a vivid comic impression. What makes Pacino dreadfully wrong for the role enhances what is prickingly funny about the way he plays it. In social mobility, this young (39) actor has come a long way upward from The Bronx, but no one has been able to mouthwash The Bronx from his speech patterns. From moment to moment, his urban streetside inflection breaks up the house, deliberately. Pacino has insufficient breath control to carry a Shakespearean line, so he spits out the poetry and mars the imagery. He strikes just...
...hands: Who could forget his parody of a Midwestern accent in the former or his rapturous cigarette smoking in the latter? Olivier is such a sly devil that he could make his Oscar acceptance speech, a riotous stream of sheer poppycock, sound as though it were a Shakespearean soliloquy. As TV audiences saw, it was enough to addle Fellow Oscar Winner Jon Voight's brain for the rest of the night...
With the audacity of the venturesome, Joseph Papp has assembled a black-Hispanic acting troupe, and its debut production is Julius Caesar. In the U.S. the problem of proper delivery of the Shakespearean line transcends ethnic background or race. Few, if any, American actors are qualified to speak in iambic pentameter. Lacking sufficient breath control, they pant when they should roar, and jangle the music and authority of poetic rhetoric...