Word: du
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...Du Pont Show of the Month: Weaving through a French chateau, London's Old Bailey, a revolutionary Paris square with guillotine, and some 30 other sets, cutting from love duets to orgies of hate, CBS gave Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities a revival that all but burst out of the TV screen. The play roiled with revolutionary turmoil, rang with Dickensian speeches by such able players as Denholm Elliott in the role of Charles Darnay, Rosemary Harris as his wife, Eric Portman as Dr. Manette and Agnes Moorehead, who played Madame Defarge as if the revolution...
...Aladdin, a sort of Horatio Alger story smothered in Oriental opulence, had everything except taste. There were fire-eaters, elephants and Chinese superbazaars, and special effects that must have taken all of Sponsor Du Font's chemical resources. The score - his first for TV-seemed not so much by Cole Porter as against him. Cyril Ritchard's sporadic drollery clashed with the eager droolings of the teen-ager's rage, Sal Mineo, whose Aladdin only maddened. As for Perelman, even his "native sportiveness" was lacking. He would probably have done better with one of the earthier versions...
...Du Pont Show of the Month: When Humorist S. J. Perelman talked with interviewers about his libretto for CBS's musical Aladdin, he mused: "It is an extremely simple story known to every unintelligent schoolboy. Very little exists beyond the bare bones of the legend. It will take 90 minutes. That means a whole lot of me ringue." Producer Richard (Cinderella} Lewine spooned up $350,000 worth of meringue, enough to satisfy all the princes of Persia - and give viewers indigestion...
...repeat everything they had seen and heard. One of them, arriving in broad daylight. claimed that he was led by a servant carrying a lantern through a succession of cavernous, shuttered rooms until a door opened into a brilliant drawing room lit by 20 candles. Here sat Emilie, Marquise du Chatelet, surrounded by scientific instruments and glittering "with diamonds like an operatic Venus." Above, "weaving spells" at the head of a secret staircase, sat "the Magician" who was Emilie's lover, the notorious M. de Voltaire. When a bell announced suppertime, the company gathered in a dining room devoid...
...Emilie du Chatelet was soft-eyed, handsome, highly sexed-and the mother of three children. She had a fluent knowledge of Latin, Italian and English -not Spanish, because someone had told her that "the only book in that language was frivolous," i.e., Don Quixote. Her scientific and mathematical knowledge surpassed Voltaire's. Together, they were destined to change intellectual history, Voltaire by championing Newton in France, Emilie by helping to open the border to the philosophy of Germany's Leibnitz. Voltaire was high-strung, always ailing, always in hot water with the authorities; Emilie was "strong...