Sunday 5 December 2010

Rex Ingram's Mare Nostrum 1926



Lowry mentions Rex Ingram's Mare Nostrum in his filmscript for Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night in a sequence where the character Dick Divers walks past cinemas on Broadway in New York where this film is showing.

Mare Nostrum (1926) is a silent film set during World War I. It was the first production made in voluntary exile by Rex Ingram and starred his wife, Alice Terry, in the title role.



This novel by Blasco Ibáñez, written in 1917, was conceived during the First World War and, like the other two as part of this group, set in scenes of it.

In the films relating to it (to my knowledge) there are two movies, the first of 1926, directed by Rex Ingram (the director of The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse), starring Alice Terry Seen below with Rex Ingram) and Antonio Moreno, who also participated in other films of their works.



The other version dates from 1948 and is directed by Rafael Gil and performed by Maria Felix and Fernando Rey.

The plot of the novel is an apology for "Mare Nostrum" and the immense love that the author had it, tells the story of Ulises Ferragut, deep Mediterranean character: "The Mediterranean peoples were to Ferragut, the aristocracy of humanity, powerful weather had tempered man as anywhere else on the planet, giving it a dry strength and tough, tanned and bronzed by the sun and absorption of energy from the environment, his sailors went to the state of metal "

The novel begins with the children of Ferragut and his awakening to life and the desire to be a sailor, following the profession of his grandfather. This first chapter is a lesson in Greco-Roman mythology very interesting It tells, among others, the legend of "Peje Nicolao. In the night hours passed before the boats of his grandfather, Ulysses heard of "Peje Nicolao," a man-fish from the Strait of Messina, cited by Cervantes and other authors, who lived in the water remaining on the alms of the vessels. His uncle was a relative of "Peje Nicolao.
Translated from Art e Y Libertad Read more

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