Word: mckellen
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PRIEST OF LOVE is undoubtedly the longest two-hour movie ever made. Billed as razzle-'em, dazzle-'em intimate portrait of D.H.Lawrence (lan McKellen) and his German wife. Freida (Janet Suzman), the movie is simply a series of bangs that end with a whimper. Director Christopher Miles has apparently confused action with sex, character with caricature. With Priest of Love, he achieves the impossible. He reduces the pathos of Lawrence last years, spent in exile and pain, to a cheap thrill. Lawrence and Freida leave England soon after the British censor. Herbert G. Muskett (John Gielgud) publicly burns available copies...
...Lawrences travel from New Mexico to Mexico. Where Lawrence is diagnosed tubercular, and return to wander through Europe in search of a cure. Miles uses Lawrence's ambiguous sexual orientation as a vehicle for suspense. It is intensely depressing to watch lan McKellen and Janey Suzman frolic in bed with all the emotion and ingenuousness of a whoreand her john. It is even more discouraging to see McKellen swimmaked on his back in an English lake. Gratuitous nudity translates this unmanageable passion Miles seems so intent on portraying into a vulgar act with all the subtlety of a road-side...
...McKellen, late of Amadeus and the Royal Shakespeare company, struggles in vain to play the part of the genius, falling several deciles short of the score. His Lawrence is less the Martyr of British Censorship than he is martyred by Alan Plater's offensive and vapid screenplay. At the mercy of lines such as."We writers, we're supposed to be brave," or "Better peoplethan me have been crucified," he tempts us to ask why tuberculosis could not have claimed him sooner and so spare us the pain...
...Bonaparte, with Ian Holm as the Little Corporal and Billie Whitelaw as his Josephine; a drama series called A Play for Love, which debuted last week with a new one-acter by John Osborne, starring Alec Guinness; and the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Macbeth, with Ian McKellen as the Scottish insomniac...
...theatrical enterprises, from the circus to a rock concert, travels easily. As Salieri, he addresses the Broadway audience directly, sometimes like a ringmaster, sometimes like a stand-up comic and sometimes, too, like a penitent. "It's not enough just to say I'm this character," McKellen insists. "The reality approach limits you." When an actor like Ian McKellen brings it back from a spin around the block, reality stands revealed for what it should be, a humble beginning...