Word: cathay
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Every country is not only a country but also an idea. The idea of China has haunted-and usually eluded-the Western mind ever since travelers set out to find the dream of golden-roofed Cathay. In the Renaissance, Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who reported on China under the Ming dynasty, praised the country's "orderly management of the entire realm." In the Age of Reason, Leibniz suggested that what Europe needed was Chinese missionaries to teach "goodness." In the Victorian era, the U.S. Protestant missionary Arthur H. Smith was shocked by China's "indifference to suffering...
...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...
...Malaysia and $36 million in Hong Kong. Though most of the ad business is controlled by local, Japanese or Australian agencies, U.S. agencies are moving in fast. J. Walter Thompson has a staff of 100 in Manila alone, and Ted Bates & Co. has an interest in Hong Kong-based Cathay Advertising, which bills $4,000,000 throughout Southeast Asia. McCann-Erickson has opened offices in Manila and Hong Kong, and is starting up in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Bangkok...
...Eugene O'Neill, seemed a ponderous, pontifical play when it was first produced in 1928, and it has not improved with age. O'Neill's idea was to cast Marco Polo as the go-getting, money-grubbing Babbitt from Polo Bros., Venice, whose travels to Cathay and the kingdom of Kublai Khan result in a grand confrontation of Eastern and Western values. More symbol than satire, the play is a contrived collision of abstractions rather than a felt conflict of human beings...
Marco Millions is O'Neill's most Shavian play, Though imbued with much poetic philosophizing, it is nonetheless peppered with brilliant epigrams and witty repartee. For all its use of the historical Marco Polo and exotic sites in medieval Venice, Persia, India, Mongolia and Cathay, there is no mistaking that the target of this epic satire was the materialistic and acquisitive American businessman-a creature that O'Neill also examined in Desire Under the Elms, The Great God Brown, and Long Day's Journey Into Night, and one that still confronts us on every side, in a more notoriously tired...