The Epic That Never Was

The ruins of Denham. “May I be permitted to point out” Ninety-Take Wyler and God knows Three-Hundred-Take Chaplin and the Indomitable Mankiewicz?

Various parties heard from, even the script girl. Bits and pieces edited by Sternberg “at a prodigious rate.” Robert Graves on Alexander Korda’s Hungarians and “my army is revolting!” John Armstrong (who had just costumed Korda’s Rembrandt) on “the Roman religion.” Sternberg on Laughton, “gave me trouble.”

Probably the apparatus of stutters and halts gave him fits, but he labored like a Trojan and found a mainspring to set the whole contraption going like mad, anyway.

Sternberg’s word for I, Claudius is “truncated”, and that is undoubtedly right. The work brought to light with Zarathustra’s Sunrise.

Roger Greenspun of the New York Times, “not without fascination.”