Frescoes By Bogdanoff

Vivien Leigh in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

Glamorous Actress Stone

Not to be confused with The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, the film starring Vivien Leigh (and later played by that Damn Helen Mirren in a PBS TV production) as Karen Stone, an isolated woman considered beyond her prime − as she approaches 50(!), here I dare to compare March holidays on the ancient Roman calendar with select films featuring that zany Hollywood actress, Sharon Stone.

Martius
Martius (March), the Roman month devoted to and named after the god of war, Mars, was filled with numerous celebrations

The Ides of March
The most known festival was the Ides of March (Latin: Idus Martiae), which is the name of March 15 in the Roman calendar. The term ides was used for the 15th day of the months of March, May, July, and October, and the 13th day of the other months. This festival was a joyous day dedicated to the god Mars and a military parade was usually held. In modern times, the term Ides of March is best known as the date that Julius Caesar was killed in 44 B.C. Caesar was stabbed to death in the Roman Senate led by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus and 60 other co-conspirators.

Julius Caesar

According to the Greek historian Plutarch, Caesar was warned by a seer to be on his guard against a great peril on the Ides of March. On his way to the Theatre of Pompey (where he would be assassinated), Caesar saw the seer and joked “Well, the Ides of March have come,” to which the seer replied “Ay, they have come, but they are not gone.” This meeting is famously dramatized in William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, when Caesar is warned to “beware the Ides of March”.

Sophistication and Elegance

Basic Plumbing
Fast-forward 2,036 years and five days to March 20, 1992. It was on this date that Basic Instinct had its theatrical release in the United States. Like the dreaded day for Caesar,  Basic Instinct has lots of blood and gore, thanks to an ice pick and Catherine Tramell, the character played by Stone. Tramell is a successfull and very wealthy crime writer, and the main suspect in the brutal murder of Johnny Boz, a former rock star. Down-and-out detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) is on the case, and on Tramell’s tail. Like the citizens of ancient Rome, Tramell didn’t wear panties, as evidenced in the infamous interrogation scene where Stone’s character appears to be suffering from restless leg syndrome and can’t stop crossing and uncrossing her legs, resulting in the kootchipop seen around the world.

The similarities are uncanny! Catherine Tramell is the equivalent of the assassin of Caesar, who’s modern equivalent could be Johnny Boz. Freaky!

Feriae Martis
Mars’ birthday fell on the Kalends. The salii, his priests, were divided into two groups (sodales) of 12 men each who, following the etymology of their name from the Latin salire, would leap or dance in procession at festivals to Mars. The salii were of ancient, pre-Republican origin, patrician, and chosen for life from families with living parents (like the Vestal Virgins). Headquartered in the Curia Saliorum on the Palatine Hill, they were charged with caring for the shields (ancilia) of Mars, and singing and dancing through Rome beating swords on the shields, at the beginning and end of the war season, in March and October. The salii’s celebration in honor of Mars (Feriae Martis) lasted 24 days.

Pretty Perm

A Slice of Life
Like the 24 days it took to honor Mars, so is the amount of days it takes to wrap your mind around the plot of Sliver. Stone plays Carly Norris, a New York City book editor who manages to move into the spacious Sliver Heights building in Manhattan — on a book editor’s salary. How does she do this?

Ann Marie

Well, if That Girl’s Ann Marie, a struggling actress who lives in a spacious Manhattan apartment can do it, then why not? Maybe Ann’s boyfriend, magazine reporter Donald Hollinger (Ted Bessell) was really her pimp. In the original unaired pilot episode, Bessell’s character was named Donald Blue Sky, and he played Ann’s ‘agent’ instead of a reporter. Hmm. Anyway, so after Carly moves into this expensive high-rise, a bunch of people start to die, and there is a serial killer on the loose. What follows are a couple of the usual suspects, along with voyeurism and bad dialog.

Anna Perenna
The Festival of Anna Perenna occurs on the Ides of March. Much like the identity of who was killing off tenants in a highrise Manhattan apartment building, the identity of Anna Perenna (or Porenna) is a mystery, but she may be a personification of the year. The prolific Roman poet Ovid tells two stories about her, but they may be his inventions. In one, Anna was an old woman who gave cakes to the plebeians when they seceded (494 B.C.). In the other, she is Dido’s (Queen of Carthage) sister who was driven from Carthage to Latium after Dido’s suicide. In Latium, she incurred the wrath of Aeneas’ wife, fled, and was carried off by Numicus, god of a stream. When Aeneas’ servants went out searching for her, they followed her tracks to the river bank where they discovered she had been turned into a water nymph.

Swallows With Lilies No. 5 Fresco (by yours truly) inspired by a wall mural in an ancient harvest room, signifying spring.

In her article on Ovid’s treatment of the Ides of March in his Fasti, Professor Carole Newlands says Anna Perenna’s festival included the drunkenness and sexual and verbal freedoms typical of carnivalesque holidays like Lupercalia and Saturnalia. At Anna Perenna’s festival, reversal of typical Roman dignitas includes inversion of gender roles as when a drunken old woman drags along a drunken old man.

If she were a card, she'd be the Joker

Only in Vegas
Drunkenness? Sexual and verbal freedoms? Sounds like modern day Las Vegas. Which leads me to Ms. Stone’s role as Ginger McKenna in Casino. Like the ancient prostitutes of Rome, Ginger is a hooker who roams. She goes from casino to casino looking for unsuspecting rich dudes to roll. She hooks up with Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) and ends up marrying him. She’s still hooked on her old sleazy pimp boyfriend Lester Diamond (James Woods). Ginger is a truly tormented dame. She ends up having a baby with Sam, can’t give up Lester, has an affair with sleaze ball small-time mobster Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and falls into a downward spiral of booze and drugs. Ginger flees Las Vegas with money and jewels and hooks up with some lowlifes in a fleabag motel in Hollywood. She quickly becomes destitute and dies of a cocaine overdose. It’s your typical girl gets boy, girl still wants old pimp boy, girl finds new mob boy, girl leaves first boy, and girl ends up dead from a drug overdose in a fleabag Hollywood motel. It’s been done hundreds of times in cinematic history. What seems to be most confusing about Stone’s role is that her character’s name is Ginger, but she’s a blonde. Go figure.

Fast and the Day of Blood
March 16th marked the end of the carnival celebration which had started with the Terminalia celebration on the 23d of February. Like Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), it was the end of a feast period and beginning of a fast, only with the Romans, the celebration was in honor of Dionysus, Jupiter, and Mars.

A nine-day fast preceded the Dies sanguinis ‘Day of the Blood’. On the 22 of March, a procession of palms or a pine tree was brought to the shrine of Cybele so that the pine could be worshiped as a god. Two days later, at the Day of the Blood, the priests of Cybele slashed themselves and spun around to sprinkle her statue with blood. Afterwards, the priests washed the statue in the Almo River, a Tiber tributary.

Stone as Edith Ann

Basic Nonsence
What could be more natural to follow up this holiday, which features lots of blood and slashing, than Basic Instinct 2? Here, 14 years after the release of the film with the same name minus the 2, Stone reprises her role as Catherine Tramell. This time Tramell is living across the pond. The opening scene has Tramell driving a car at high speeds with her soccer playing boyfriend as her passenger, looking totally out of it. Tramell is using his hand to see if she still foregoes panties, while she is wild behind the wheel. Her scene is reminiscent of the car scene in Mahogany, where a rail-thin fashion model named Tracy (played by character Diana Ross) is a passenger in a car driven by out-of-control Sean, a high-fashion photographer (played by character Anthony Perkins), who is obsessed with Tracy and determined to have her all to himself — or else. Getting back to Cate Tramell, Stone plays her like Ross in that Mahogany scene, with some Courtney Love thrown in for good measure.

Tramell’s car ends up plunging into the Thames and her boyfriend drowns…or was he already dead? Tramell becomes the subject of yet another police investigation, and what follows is what could only be an advertisement for Stone’s plastic surgeon and nothing else. Stone is wacky in this part, and like ancient Rome, her career appeared to be in ruins after the film’s release.

Epilogue
Where Stone may have had mishaps at the box office, her life as an advocate shines.

AIDS Research Support
In April 2004, she was awarded the National Center for Lesbian Rights Spirit Award in San Francisco for her support and involvement with organizations that serve the lesbian, gay and HIV/AIDS community and performed Can’t Get You Out of My Head with Kylie Minogue in Cannes for AIDS research. She was presented the award by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Chinese Earthquake Controversy
Stone sparked criticism for her comments made in an exchange on the red carpet with Hong Kong’s Cable Entertainment News during the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival on May 25, 2008. When asked about the 2008 Sichuan earthquake she remarked:

“Well you know it was very interesting because at first, you know, I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And so I have been very concerned about how to think and what to do about that because I don’t like that. And I had been this, you know, concerned about, oh how should we deal with the Olympics because they are not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who is a good friend of mine. And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that Karma? When you’re not nice then the bad things happen to you?”