Word: assisi
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After spending three months searching the world for an Assisi-like setting for earlier scenes of the film, Director Michael Curtiz settled on Assisi, and it proved a happy choice. When Curtiz complained that the authentically medieval town hall did not look old enough, the village submitted to a 20th Century-Fox makeup job. When he called for extras, there were hundreds of volunteers, including both Communists, who profess special regard for St. Francis, and members of the local Franciscans. The monks also gave Producer Plato Skouras, son of Spyros, free use of their archives and buildings-including the exquisitely...
...their adaptation of The Greatest Story Ever Told. The Biblical epic continues to be the greatest story ever sold. But the moviemakers are running out of Testaments, and in Italy last week, a later period of Christian history was being memorialized in the newest spiritual spectacular, Francis of Assisi...
Curtiz was also briefly hampered by a gentle jurisdictional dispute between the two Franciscan orders in Assisi-the brown-cloaked Friars Minor and the black-clothed Conventuals-over the color of the saint's robe. But Skouras' Vatican-connected authority happily ruled that Bradford (A Certain Smile) Dillman, as Francis, should wear grey...
Ironically, Francis of Assisi was roughest of all on the animals. While Curtiz eliminated the sermon to the birds as "too corny," Dillman was still required to bless a menagerie ranging from dogs to ducks. And in the closing minutes of the film-shot in Rome on golden sand previously hallowed by Ben-Hur's chariot tracks -the director decided to foreshadow Francis' death by depicting a raven on a desolate limb. Explained a Curtiz assistant: "We had three ravens in Assisi; one died of cold, and another flew the coop. Some body shut a car door...
...fervor; of a heart attack; in La Scala Opera House, Milan. Athens-born of ecclesiastical lineage, Greek Orthodox Mitropoulos gave himself to music with the dedication of a monk (which he once intended to be), lived frugally, gave away his money to students as his hero St. Francis of Assisi did, became an apostle of modern composers. On the podium he danced, shook his fringed pate, conducting without a score from an awesome memory. Off the podium he read philosophy, the Greek dramatists, but for diversion Mitropoulos climbed mountains...