Suez (1938)

Benjamin Disraeli: [to the House of Commons] By all means support this policy; by all means rally round the Prime Minister; by all means follow cheerfully and unquestioningly his leadership. All of you... who are as anxious as he to see England reduced to the standing of a third-rate power!

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Prime Minister: [to the House of Commons] Our first duty is to the mother country, England.
Members: Hear, hear!
Prime Minister: I would not trade the meanest English county for all our colonial possessions!

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Toni Pellerin: Look! A rainbow! Oh, Grandfather says there's a pot of gold at the end.
Ferdinand de Lesseps: One end in the Mediterranean and the other in the Red Sea. What a pot of gold for the world if they could be joined: the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Look, Toni! That water in the old gulf. Just as it was centuries ago, when the Phoenicians sailed through. Can you imagine ships sailing right through here where we're standing?
Toni Pellerin: Ships?
Ferdinand de Lesseps: Yes. Not ancient galleys but modern ships, steamers, sailing a short trade route to the East. It could be done: no elevations, no rock formations, just a simple sand... ditch. (Heh heh heh. And I was told I was going to dig ditches.) There's fate in this, Toni. Something sent me here to Egypt when I didn't want to come, kept me here when I wanted to leave. I thought it was a dead end, has been up to now. But I can make this -- I can make this spot that we're standing on the crossroads of the Earth. Why, think of it, Toni, a canal stretching through to the Mediterranean, open to the ships of all nations! It could be done, and I can do it. I was looking for a way to serve France, and I think... I think I've found a way to serve the world.

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In an interview in the late 1970s, director Allan Dwan talked of the censorship battle he had with the Hays Office over the wet-shirt scene, in which Annabella's erect nipples are on prominent display. "I wanted them to show," he said. His argument with the Hays Office was, "Have you ever seen a nude woman? Ever seen your wife nude? There was nothing there that wasn't positively true to life ... you knew she was going to be sexy ... that's why you picked her. The audience knows. This is my idea of giving it to them. All women are alike - they can go to the mirror and see that anytime." The matter was dropped as re-shooting the scene would have cost too much as the studio would have had to rebuild the entire set. Dwan said that his nemesis, studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck, was pleased with the picture.
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