Word: venetian
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...early, conventional portrait done by Titian around 1525, from Omaha, hangs near his 1565, darkly haunting Ecce Homo, from St. Louis. The contrast between the pair illustrates the degree to which the Venetian evolved his own austere, luminous, intensely personal style that became finer and more influential among succeeding generations...
...doubt for long. Before the performance even begins we see a huge golden lion-rampant hanging in front of a blue cyclorama -- the lion being a traditional symbol of gold, and gold having long been termed "the lion of metals." Underneath we note part of two arched Venetian foot-bridges, both of gold. A short masque takes place on stage, but we are put somewhat ill-at-ease by the dissonant musical score provided by Richard Peaslee (a far cry from the pleasant harmonies Virgil Thomson composed for the Festival's Merchant of exactly ten years...
...Harold Macmillan and the Roman consul Paulus, all upholding the axiom-one that is not writ large in Lyndon Johnson's copybook-that a leader who wastes too much time on his critics has little time left for leadership. Across Wisconsin Avenue, the lights were out and the Venetian blinds lowered to a uniform level in the National Institutes of Health buildings; last year the wasting candlepower and higgledy-piggledy blinds had troubled Johnson when he looked out of his window at night...
...script is a riddle. Why eliminate practically all of the exciting events described by the 13th century Venetian in the chronicle of his travels in Cathay, and introduce instead 100 minutes of substandard horse operatics that resemble polo more than Polo? What's more, the cutting looks as though it had been done by a Mongolian headsman; the dubbing is so wildly out of sync that occasionally a word spoken by one actor seems to come out of another actor's mouth; and the color print looks like a fresco restored with the assistance of Clorox...
...actors are plainly demoralized. Quinn, who plays a head-shaven Kublai Khan, just sort of sits there on his throne looking like Yul Brynner with a nasty case of jaundice. Welles, who plays a Venetian savant, is all dressed up to look like Leonardo da Vinci, but then he queers the pitch by muttering something about a navigational device he calls an "astrolobe." Horst Bucholz, who plays the acrobattling hero, obviously doesn't have the thighs for this sort of work, but he makes up for that with some of the niftiest karate ever seen in medieval Persia...