Word: borgias
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Unfortunately, the actors keep getting into the foreground, brandishing passports from Hollywood and posturing through a sprawling script based on the bestselling drugstore novel of Borgia intrigue by Samuel (Captain from Castile) Shella-barger (see BOOKS). The very authenticity of the surroundings helps to betray the story and characters as strictly from Graustark. And even Graustark is betrayed: moviegoers willing to take swashbuckling romance on its own easygoing terms are likely to chafe at the film's portentous pace and the political airs it puts...
...Prince of Foxes is Andrea Orsini (Tyrone Power), who is not only a talented diplomat, but also a swordsman, painter, great lover, ordnance expert, politician and military strategist. Into the bargain, he is a peasant-born rogue posing as a noble cutthroat in the service of ruthless Cesare Borgia (Orson Welles). While carving out a promising career in treachery, Orsini comes heroically to his senses on a tough mission: to conquer an almost impregnable little duchy by seducing the duchess (Wanda Hendrix) and assassinating the duke (Felix Aylmer...
...dashing example of Renaissance Man. But Wanda Hendrix, ludicrously miscast as an Italian noblewoman, looks like a bobby-soxer lost in an art museum. As her guardian-husband, Aylmer is still playing Polonius with all the sententiousness and none of the wit. Welles, in his own freehand style, out-borgias Borgia. Even as capable an actor as Everett Sloane plays a scoundrel to excess...
...professor of political science at the University of Heidelberg. Like the Soviet historians, Eckardt goes over Ivan's matted reign with a fine-tooth comb; unlike them, he refrains from minimizing the diabolical cruelties of a despot who made even such a hard-faced operator as Cesare Borgia look like a cherubic innocent. Nonetheless, Eckardt does his best to follow the rule he paraphrases from Philosopher Benedetto Croce: "Not to insist upon a description of horrors in history [but] to find in sorrow and terror the starting-point of a new development...
...order to achieve this plan, Author Balchin believes, that Cesare schemed and wheedled troops from the French and raised his private horde of Swiss and Italian bandits. While his satiated father sat back weakly on his throne (some historians think, on the contrary, that Borgia senior was quite handy at murder), son Cesare stormed and conquered numerous fortresses in Italy. Men who got in his way were ruthlessly disposed of by his Spanish henchman, Don Michelotto, or quietly turned over to his bland and terrifying secretary, Agapito, who, in Author Balchin's version, sounds comically like P. G. Wodehouse...