Candide: Make Our Garden Grow: Bernstein at 70

An evening pause: The finale of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Just before the song begins, Candide says this:

We will not think noble, because we are not noble. We will not live in perfect harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We can only promise to do our best, and to live out our lives. Dear God, that is all we can promise in truth. Marry me, Cunegonde.

The Black Stallion

An evening pause: The central sequence from the 1979 movie, The Black Stallion, when the shipwrecked boy Alec succeeds in taming the shipwrecked Arabian horse. The combination of Carmine Coppola’s music and Caleb Deschanel’s photography in this sequence is unmatched.

Mary Black – Thorn Upon The Rose

An evening pause: On St. Patrick’s Day, how about one of Ireland’s best singers.

No lose, it’s just the same
Tears of joy, tears of pain.
They’re hand in hand, they come as one.
Never see the Moon without promise of the Sun.
For all the roses, for all the blows.
I’d rather feel the thorn then to never see the rose.

So when you give the handsome flower
Don’t forget the thorn upon the rose
Its cut is deep and its scar lasts forever
It follows love wherever love goes.

Cleopatra enters Rome

An evening pause: As today is the Ides of March, I am always reminded of Julius Caesar. With that thought in mind, here is a clip from the 1953 movie, Cleopatra, staring Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton. The movie overall isn’t very good, though the first half with Rex Harrison playing Julius Caesar is worth watching, partly because of Harrison and partly because it is very clearly inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra.

That first half also includes the scene below, when Cleopatra enters Rome, bringing with her her son by Caesar. A more classic example of late Hollywood spectacle would be hard to find. It is silly, absurd, impossible, and yet totally engrossing. And it was done with no computer effects. When Hollywood PR used to say a movie had a “cast of thousands,” they really meant it.

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