Word: visconti
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Directed by LUCHINO VISCONTI Screenplay by LUCHINO VISCONTI, UGO SANTALUCIA and SUSO CECCHI D'AMICO
...historical Ludwig failed to brush three times a day and see his dentist twice a year was that he was preoccupied with the construction of those huge, zany castles on which his fame-and much of modern Bavaria's tourist industry-rests, it seems perverse of Director Visconti to give us so many splendid views of the royal mouth, and only one or two postcard snaps of the royal passion...
Still, as demonstrated by Visconti's previous excursions through the darker realms of the German soul (The Damned, Death in Venice), decay in some form or other is the only thing that really interests him. It is thus natural for him to see Ludwig's molars as the mirror of his soul, while ignoring the fact that quite another side of the royal character was expressed in such glorious excesses as the romantic Schloss Neuschwanstein, the rococo Linderhof, and the unfinished imitation of Versailles, Schloss Herrenchiemsee. Ludwig's edifice complex may nearly have bankrupted his kingdom...
...touch pasteboard decks at Passover. Silk and cotton or plaited straw were inlaid into the cards to reproduce gay theatrical costumes in their original fabric, like the 17th century Pulcinello opposite. The superb min-chiate (or tarot) cards done in the 15th century by Bonifacio Bembo for Filippo Visconti, Duke of Milan, are so elaborate in their detailed painting, embossment and gilding that they could seldom, if ever, have been used...
Cukor fabricates stock character types and conventional plot complications with playful expertise. Henry, the stodgy middle-class bourgeois, Augusta, the eccentric aunt, Visconti, her wildly romantic macho first love, and her present lover, Wordsworth, a fortune-telling black African, wind up on a mock spy adventure on the Orient Express as Augusta delivers an illegal $100,000 ransom to Visconti held captive in Africa. Fortified by the belief that love conquers all. Aunt Augusta cajoles, lies, steals, blackmails, and is deported in the course of her mission. Having sacrificed practically all she own when she finally does deliver the ransom...