Word: sommer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dean Martin and Elke Sommer have locked up star billing in House of Seven Joys, Columbia's new Matt Helm thriller. Yet one supporting role is sure to set the audience buzzing. That's when an aide informs the President that thieves have made off with $1 billion in gold bullion. And there's old L.B.J. listening to the bad news. Old who? Well, it's not quite the boss himself, folks. It's his cousin. To play the President, Central Casting tapped J. B. Peck, 66, retired sheriff of Garland, Texas, and L.B.J...
After Lavinia, the most important character is the Roman Captain. Wheeled in at his imposing first entrance, and decked out in armor with a raspberry cape, Josef Sommer makes him a formidable figure indeed. He is handsome, superior, intelligent, obviously used to command, and able to fall in love with another as forcefully as he is in love with himself...
...Sommer brings to the part the kind of imperious and clean elocution that we tend to think of as typically Shavian. It will be a wholly admirable performance when someone tells him that the word 'applicable' is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable and not the second...
Armado (Josef Sommer), the handsome and bombastic Spaniard, is funny when he swings his sword about with disregard for anything in its way, and just as funny when--saying, "Rust, rapier"--he kisses and resheathes it. Costard (William Hickey), his rival for the affections of Jaquenetta, wears red sneakers, striped pants, and an orange jacket with slogan buttons on the front and "Make Love Not War" embroidered on the back. When Dull drags him off, he yells, "Police brutality!"; and, soon after, he calls Armado a "Fascist Hindu!" Jaquenetta herself (Zoe Kamitses) turns out to be a yellow-stockinged blonde...
Although Gaunt dies rather early in the play, Josef Sommer makes him unforgettable. Gaunt's great panegyrie on England ("this scept'red isle") usually emerges as a one-key aria. But Sommer takes his time with it, carefully shapes its rhythms and dynamics, and lovingly introduces modulations--so that the whole thing comes across as a miniature scena with dramatic form. I have never heard it done better...