Word: magic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Black Magic (Edward Small; United Artists) is a viscous, heady brew concocted by a Russian-born Hollywood moviemaker (Gregory Ratoff) out of a turbulent French romance (Alexandre Dumas pere's Memoirs of a Physician) about a swaggering 18th Century charlatan (the so-called Count Cagliostro). The film was made entirely in Italy at a cost of $2,000,000 (more than a billion lire). Hollywood...
...Black Magic was clearly intended to be a superheated spellbinder. But though it boils, toils and goes to no end of trouble, it produces far more spectacles than spells. Spectacle No. i is a fair example. In the midst of a gloomy, Golgotha-like landscape, cluttered with ruffians and sinister twisted trees, a poor gypsy lad is about to be blinded with hot irons. Suddenly a portentous cruciform light appears around the torture stake, and aided by a swarm of brother gypsies, the boy escapes. Later, he grows up to be the fabulous Count Cagliostro (Orson Welles), intimate of princes...
...actually wanted to be an actor, but failed; from play-acting he turned to playwriting. He read widely and weirdly; like Friedrich Schiller's heroes, he considered himself a rebel; like Kierkegaard, a pessimystic; like Darwin, a scientist; like Goethe's Faust, he turned to black magic (which he practiced in his attic). When he was crossed, he would roam the woods lashing at branches and hacking down young trees; sometimes he would climb a tree and yell defiance at the universe...
...tasks of The Magic Flute and Fidelio were really accomplished by the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. The Flute was given first, before a sellout audience in the 300-year-old riding arena, carved out of the Monchsberg by the archbishops of Salzburg. "It is Mozart's turn," explained old Baron Heinrich Puthon, the festival's president. "Next year we will open with Fidelio so Beethoven will not be mad at us." For the Flute, the State Opera had no single great voice to offer, but its ensemble singing...
...model for his CBS staff, Meighan cites Arthur Godfrey as typifying "the magic approach that has the brightness that comes with freshness and sincerity. People trust him, know he wouldn't pull anything on them." It is inaccurate to accuse Godfrey of kidding his sponsors: "He is, in fact, enthusiastic about them...