I'm sorry, I know it's an "epic" (by epic I guess that means looooong drawn out walking scenes that take half an hour), but how has no one talked about the brown-facing of actors!? It's goofy as ****! I can't even take the film seriously because I see Obi Wan in brown and I lose all interest in the movie. Like a bad school play or something.
8.4/10!?
So an actor's wearing make-up makes you "lose interest" in a great film? Your petty standards say more about you than they do anything else.
shareYou saying a great movie with someone in blackface actually trying to pass as a black man wouldnt downgrade the quality of an overall picture? You're why racism still exists.
shareROTFL!!! I'M the reason racism exists! You must be the reason hyperbole exists.
There's a huge difference btw make-up and blackface. Blackface is a caricature. Guinness was playing an Arab, so of course his skin was darkened. There was nothing caricaturish about it. Would you condemn Olivier's Othello as blackface?
You might also try reading your own prior post. You didn't say Guinness's make-up impacted the quality of LOA. You said it made you lose interest in the whole film. As I said, your standards are rather petty.
It's called acting. Kindly name the Arab actors who.were as good as Guinness or Quinn
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These days "authenticity" is taken too far. English actors were used to portray Arabs because....box office. Besides, Alec Guinness needed the cash.
shareI'd consider it more of an issue if Guinness or Quinn weren't portrayed as dignified, respectable characters rather than racist stereotypes. One only need compare them to Laurence Olivier's Mahdi in Khartoum. Considering that the film was made in 1962 by British filmmakers, a mostly-Arab cast was too much to hope for.
I'm afraid that you underestimate the number of subjects in which I take an interest!
but how has no one talked about the brown-facing of actors!?
If Omar Sharif can play a Russian...
shareExcellent point!
But for 1962, it was very unusual for even one actor from the Middle East to be included in the cast of a film like that, so I give them a little credit for including Omar Sharif at all, when they could have used Hungarian Yul Brynner. But if Anthony Quinn had been twins they probably would have given the Quinn Twins both roles and told Sharif to bugger off; Quinn really had a corner on playing foreigners back in the day.
The use of "Brown Face" "Black Face" "Red Face" "Yellow Face" etc. is utterly irrelevant to the quality of a movie.
These people are ACTORS. ACTING means that they are pretending to be someone they are NOT in real life. If you cannot stand to see an actor acting, then you really should stick to documentaries.
Exactly right. Thank you.
shareJust imagine if this kind of thing never happened. We'd never have gotten to see the greatest movie of all time: White Chicks.
shareSo you're saying white actors can play any race because it's... acting? WTF? You're okay with painting someone's face black or brown? gtfo, racist.
shareActors can play anyone/-thing, that's what acting is all about.
shareIf LoA were being made today, of course we'd expect Arab characters to be played by Arab actors; we'd take that for granted. The point is that times & attitudes were indeed different 60 years ago, and a film made then must be taken in the context of those times & attitudes. Does the film work on its own terms? In the case of this one, most definitely!
I'm a great supporter of more diversity in casting today. But how can I dismiss superlative work from the past for not being aware of 2020 attitudes & cultural changes? Yes, we can note that it would be more convincing to modern audiences with truly diverse casting; I can't & won't argue about that. But dismissing past masterpieces because they reflect the times in which they were made, rather than current times, pretty much means junking nearly all of our cultural heritage, and ignoring the richness, humanity, complexity & depth of that work at its best.
Do I sometimes wince at ugly racial portrayals in older films? Oh, yes! But presumably we're all adult enough & intelligent enough to recognize them, and to understand that even highly gifted & deeply humane creators of the past had their cultural blind spots. An ideological purity test for culture is never a good thing for culture, whether it comes from the right or the left.
Awareness & a conscious choice to do better going forward? A rediscovery of neglected diverse voices from the past? Being aware of cultural blind spots in great art from the past? Yes, to all of that. But let's be mature enough to appreciate what makes that art great & lasting, despite its flaws.
No difference between blacking/browning up and putting on a false beard It's called acting. People are far too touchy these days.
shareNo difference between that and putting on a false beard.
shareone more reason why Cleopatra is the greatest film ever made, no brown face or black face there.
shareYou neglect the fact that this was Omar Sharif's breakout role.
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