Friday, September 5, 2008

The Sponsor Chooses the Best Possible Placement for its Advertisment

King Lear. Dir. Peter Brook. Perf. Orson Welles, Natasha Parry, Margaret Phillips, Beatrice Straight, and Alan Badel. 1953. DVD. Passport, 2006.

Really, I just have three things to note about the Welles' King Lear before moving on to other matters.

One comment is flippant.  

One comment is scholarly.

And one comment is coincidental.  I leave it up to you to determine which is which.
  • Even though the subplot is cut in this production, the network logo seems significant.  CBS's eye-within-the-eye reminds us (perhaps too subtly) of Gloucester's absence from the production.
  • At the end, Alistair Cooke brought Peter Brook up to say a few words.  He said something like, "Thanks to your director here, Andrew McCullough," leading me to believe that McCullough was the director of the Omnibus program while Brook directed this specific production of King Lear.
  • What is the ideal sponsor for a Shakespearean tragedy?  What do you need right at the close of the play?  Well, take a look at this fabulous product placement:

Links: The Film at IMDB.
Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

    

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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