Rabbit, rabbit. As Bertie Owen, my faithful one-lunged laptop, is still having trouble with the idea of not cooking himself to death in half-hour installments, please find herein a short review of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra (1963).
The shortest version is that for all its reputation as a four-hour camp-fest, Cleopatra is not a bad film at all; it is in fact a good film, but it is doubtful that it could ever have been good enough to make up for nearly bankrupting 20th Century Fox. Its production woes are almost as legendary as its subject matter, encompassing two different shoots from scratch in as many countries and under as many directors (Rouben Mamoulian in London, Mankiewicz in Rome) with a revolving door of a cast and a shooting script that never existed as such, being written and rewritten, as if Penelope of Ithaka were in the movie business rather than textiles, each night for the next day's scenes. Elizabeth Taylor successfully negotiated for an unprecedented million-dollar contract and then almost died of pneumonia during the failed British shoot whose elaborate sets and costumes, abandoned by Hollywood, were presently, gloriously co-opted by Pinewood Studios for Carry On Cleo (1964). Her marriage did die, along with Richard Burton's, right on set before God and the paparazzi, and on some level I feel any film whose presiding deities are Isis and Venus should have seen that coming. The budget exploded. The studio imploded. Mankiewicz's original plan of two back-to-back movies—Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra—was forcibly condensed in the cutting room into one 248-minute Cleopatra which was then further shortened for general release, although the premiere version has since been recovered and is what I saw on 70 mm on Thursday night. It was the highest-grossing film of its year. It did not make back its original costs. Considering those were $44 million in 1963 money, nobody should look surprised. I don't even want to get into its historical accuracy: Mankiewicz was the writer-director who put Latin graffiti on the sound stages of Julius Caesar (1953), so I don't believe his artistic choices were made in ignorance, but since it is recorded nowhere in Plutarch or Suetonius or Appian that the last spasm of the civil wars of the Roman Republic was inaugurated by Octavian personally shanking Sosigenes of Alexandria in the Forum of Rome, I think we can leave the historicity of the production somewhat permanently aside. I tend to associate the term film maudit with cult objects, experimental films, stuff that's so weird it risks your sanity to see it, but Cleopatra makes a good case for a mainstream application of the term.
And yet I have trouble thinking of a filmed interpretation that I like better, even the 1934 pre-Code version with Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra and Henry Wilcoxon as Antony and a bargeful of catgirls as a hell of a thing to see after midnight on a big screen. Four hours gives a smart script a lot of time for characterization as well as pageantry and Mankiewicz's script is not dumb. Neither is its leading lady. Taylor's Cleopatra is the most political Cleopatra I have seen: a strategist as well as a survivor, ambitious and aware at every second of the effect she is making, the power that is hers and the power she has to leverage from the men around her; her body with its beauty and fertility is the obvious instrument, but her brain and her fearless showmanship are underestimated at her opponents' peril. Descendant of one of Alexander's generals, she sees herself as the inheritor of his dream of empire, Alexandria at the heart of the world. If she must ally with Rome to realize it, then "the cloak of Alexander cannot be too heavy for Rome and Egypt to carry together." And the script is on her side. The famous anecdote of the carpet makes a disarmingly goofy entrance, spilling a black-haired, violet-eyed girl with little in the way of royal paint or jewelry face-down at the feet of Rex Harrison's amused Caesar: within seconds she's sizing him up, challenging his colonial complacency, criticizing his maps. He speaks flippantly of her divine titles and she corrects him with a cool burn on the fabled ancestry of the gens Iulia: "I am Isis. I am worshipped by millions who believe it. You are not to confuse what I am with the so-called divine origin that every Roman general seems to acquire together with his shield." An early confrontation in her bath is carefully staged to play up to Roman expectations of Eastern decadence and yet to demonstrate that this young queen is no provincial—reclining among an Oriental fantasy of waving fans and diaphanous veils, she's listening to a musical recitation of the poetry of Catullus, who famously declared (among other invective that could never have been translated nicely enough for the screen in '63) nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere, / nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo. In the aftermath of the siege of Alexandria and her brother's death offscreen in the Battle of the Nile, she meets Caesar's admission that he didn't trust her enough to tell her about the reinforcements coming from Pergamon with the reveal that she not only had him watched but spied on him herself, down to his most intimate secret of seizures and headaches: truth for truth.
To be very clear, I am not saying that Taylor's Cleopatra is never loving, or generous, or spontaneous, or afraid of loss; she can be all of these things and slyly funny besides. But she is Egypt's queen, and Egypt itself, and neither she nor the script forgets it. Her entrance into Rome is an eight-and-a-half-minute showcase of political theater: waves of dancers with silks and colored smokes, tribal regalias of Africa and Egyptian friezes come to life, archers and cavalry, a flight of live doves, and finally the daughter of the Ptolemies herself, drawn through the Arch of Constantine on an enormous sphinx as black as the Nile against the red-bannered dazzling whiteness of the Forum's marble.1 The crowd screams for her, exactly as they would for the modern celebrity she extra-diegetically is. She is clad like Isis herself in feathered gold, her young son by Caesar glittering as Horus at her side. Borne down to the Mars-red carpet on the shoulders of men as black and gold as her sphinx, she bows deeply before her lover, her husband in the Egyptian rite, the man who is all but king of Rome. And as she raises her eyes to triumphant Caesar, she winks. It is almost over the top, except it tells the audience unambiguously what is going on. The procession is a spectacle of submission for the punters: all the fabulous wealth of Egypt at Caesar's feet, all that exotic beauty and he knocked her up to boot. Let the Senate fume; the people of Rome are eating it up. And they have managed it all between the two of them, like a director and his star. (Fortunately this metaphor does not extend so far as to get Mankiewicz assassinated, although I'm sure Darryl F. Zanuck at least thought about it.)
( You have a way of mixing politics and passion. Where does one begin and the other leave off? )
Okay, that wasn't short at all, but I had to write it in blocks and it took me days; it had all the frustrations of writing to wordcount while not actually being over any sooner. I don't understand Cleopatra's reputation as a flop or a trashy pleasure at best. I liked it a hell of a lot better than DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). It was almost enough to make me forgive Mankiewicz for the hack job he did on The Quiet American (1958). I know no one in their right mind would have given him money for it, but I came away genuinely, weirdly sorry that he never wrote or directed a version of the Pharsalia, because at times his script for Cleopatra has the anti-epic, black-comic edge that characterizes Lucan's poem: Octavian seasick at Actium, Antony's repeated attempts at a heroic death; in Shakespeare, he can get an ear for the best lines in the play, but when Burton addresses the crowd at Caesar's funeral, we can't even hear a word he says. And the film is, in fact, stunning on a big screen: the monumental architecture, the lavish set dressing, the hyper-real saturation of Technicolor which does half the immersive work of the cinematography. It was well received by its audience. Once or twice they snickered at some moment they thought melodramatic, but more often they laughed in appreciation or even cheered, which is a great thing to hear two thousand years after the fact. (When Antony returns to Cleopatra as an awkwardly married envoy of Rome and she puts him on his knees for it, both![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I heard an impressed "DAAAMN.") Expenses, editing, and ill health be damned, as far as I'm concerned the film is entirely worth its four hours and probably even its $44 million. This spectacle brought to you by my strategic backers at Patreon.
1. I know the Arch of Constantine wasn't built until three centuries after Cleopatra's death, and you know that Roman monuments and statues were as brightly painted as anything else in the ancient world, but I said I wasn't getting into historical accuracy because otherwise that'll be a review of its own and I'm sticking to it. Just for the record, however, let me note that Taylor's costumes are a gorgeous panoply of '60's fashions intermittently influenced by Greek and Egyptian styles, she looks great in all of them, and I hope no one ever tried to explain that leopardskin duffel coat she wears to the Battle of Actium.
The shortest version is that for all its reputation as a four-hour camp-fest, Cleopatra is not a bad film at all; it is in fact a good film, but it is doubtful that it could ever have been good enough to make up for nearly bankrupting 20th Century Fox. Its production woes are almost as legendary as its subject matter, encompassing two different shoots from scratch in as many countries and under as many directors (Rouben Mamoulian in London, Mankiewicz in Rome) with a revolving door of a cast and a shooting script that never existed as such, being written and rewritten, as if Penelope of Ithaka were in the movie business rather than textiles, each night for the next day's scenes. Elizabeth Taylor successfully negotiated for an unprecedented million-dollar contract and then almost died of pneumonia during the failed British shoot whose elaborate sets and costumes, abandoned by Hollywood, were presently, gloriously co-opted by Pinewood Studios for Carry On Cleo (1964). Her marriage did die, along with Richard Burton's, right on set before God and the paparazzi, and on some level I feel any film whose presiding deities are Isis and Venus should have seen that coming. The budget exploded. The studio imploded. Mankiewicz's original plan of two back-to-back movies—Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra—was forcibly condensed in the cutting room into one 248-minute Cleopatra which was then further shortened for general release, although the premiere version has since been recovered and is what I saw on 70 mm on Thursday night. It was the highest-grossing film of its year. It did not make back its original costs. Considering those were $44 million in 1963 money, nobody should look surprised. I don't even want to get into its historical accuracy: Mankiewicz was the writer-director who put Latin graffiti on the sound stages of Julius Caesar (1953), so I don't believe his artistic choices were made in ignorance, but since it is recorded nowhere in Plutarch or Suetonius or Appian that the last spasm of the civil wars of the Roman Republic was inaugurated by Octavian personally shanking Sosigenes of Alexandria in the Forum of Rome, I think we can leave the historicity of the production somewhat permanently aside. I tend to associate the term film maudit with cult objects, experimental films, stuff that's so weird it risks your sanity to see it, but Cleopatra makes a good case for a mainstream application of the term.
And yet I have trouble thinking of a filmed interpretation that I like better, even the 1934 pre-Code version with Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra and Henry Wilcoxon as Antony and a bargeful of catgirls as a hell of a thing to see after midnight on a big screen. Four hours gives a smart script a lot of time for characterization as well as pageantry and Mankiewicz's script is not dumb. Neither is its leading lady. Taylor's Cleopatra is the most political Cleopatra I have seen: a strategist as well as a survivor, ambitious and aware at every second of the effect she is making, the power that is hers and the power she has to leverage from the men around her; her body with its beauty and fertility is the obvious instrument, but her brain and her fearless showmanship are underestimated at her opponents' peril. Descendant of one of Alexander's generals, she sees herself as the inheritor of his dream of empire, Alexandria at the heart of the world. If she must ally with Rome to realize it, then "the cloak of Alexander cannot be too heavy for Rome and Egypt to carry together." And the script is on her side. The famous anecdote of the carpet makes a disarmingly goofy entrance, spilling a black-haired, violet-eyed girl with little in the way of royal paint or jewelry face-down at the feet of Rex Harrison's amused Caesar: within seconds she's sizing him up, challenging his colonial complacency, criticizing his maps. He speaks flippantly of her divine titles and she corrects him with a cool burn on the fabled ancestry of the gens Iulia: "I am Isis. I am worshipped by millions who believe it. You are not to confuse what I am with the so-called divine origin that every Roman general seems to acquire together with his shield." An early confrontation in her bath is carefully staged to play up to Roman expectations of Eastern decadence and yet to demonstrate that this young queen is no provincial—reclining among an Oriental fantasy of waving fans and diaphanous veils, she's listening to a musical recitation of the poetry of Catullus, who famously declared (among other invective that could never have been translated nicely enough for the screen in '63) nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere, / nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo. In the aftermath of the siege of Alexandria and her brother's death offscreen in the Battle of the Nile, she meets Caesar's admission that he didn't trust her enough to tell her about the reinforcements coming from Pergamon with the reveal that she not only had him watched but spied on him herself, down to his most intimate secret of seizures and headaches: truth for truth.
To be very clear, I am not saying that Taylor's Cleopatra is never loving, or generous, or spontaneous, or afraid of loss; she can be all of these things and slyly funny besides. But she is Egypt's queen, and Egypt itself, and neither she nor the script forgets it. Her entrance into Rome is an eight-and-a-half-minute showcase of political theater: waves of dancers with silks and colored smokes, tribal regalias of Africa and Egyptian friezes come to life, archers and cavalry, a flight of live doves, and finally the daughter of the Ptolemies herself, drawn through the Arch of Constantine on an enormous sphinx as black as the Nile against the red-bannered dazzling whiteness of the Forum's marble.1 The crowd screams for her, exactly as they would for the modern celebrity she extra-diegetically is. She is clad like Isis herself in feathered gold, her young son by Caesar glittering as Horus at her side. Borne down to the Mars-red carpet on the shoulders of men as black and gold as her sphinx, she bows deeply before her lover, her husband in the Egyptian rite, the man who is all but king of Rome. And as she raises her eyes to triumphant Caesar, she winks. It is almost over the top, except it tells the audience unambiguously what is going on. The procession is a spectacle of submission for the punters: all the fabulous wealth of Egypt at Caesar's feet, all that exotic beauty and he knocked her up to boot. Let the Senate fume; the people of Rome are eating it up. And they have managed it all between the two of them, like a director and his star. (Fortunately this metaphor does not extend so far as to get Mankiewicz assassinated, although I'm sure Darryl F. Zanuck at least thought about it.)
( You have a way of mixing politics and passion. Where does one begin and the other leave off? )
Okay, that wasn't short at all, but I had to write it in blocks and it took me days; it had all the frustrations of writing to wordcount while not actually being over any sooner. I don't understand Cleopatra's reputation as a flop or a trashy pleasure at best. I liked it a hell of a lot better than DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). It was almost enough to make me forgive Mankiewicz for the hack job he did on The Quiet American (1958). I know no one in their right mind would have given him money for it, but I came away genuinely, weirdly sorry that he never wrote or directed a version of the Pharsalia, because at times his script for Cleopatra has the anti-epic, black-comic edge that characterizes Lucan's poem: Octavian seasick at Actium, Antony's repeated attempts at a heroic death; in Shakespeare, he can get an ear for the best lines in the play, but when Burton addresses the crowd at Caesar's funeral, we can't even hear a word he says. And the film is, in fact, stunning on a big screen: the monumental architecture, the lavish set dressing, the hyper-real saturation of Technicolor which does half the immersive work of the cinematography. It was well received by its audience. Once or twice they snickered at some moment they thought melodramatic, but more often they laughed in appreciation or even cheered, which is a great thing to hear two thousand years after the fact. (When Antony returns to Cleopatra as an awkwardly married envoy of Rome and she puts him on his knees for it, both
spatch and I heard an impressed "DAAAMN.") Expenses, editing, and ill health be damned, as far as I'm concerned the film is entirely worth its four hours and probably even its $44 million. This spectacle brought to you by my strategic backers at Patreon.1. I know the Arch of Constantine wasn't built until three centuries after Cleopatra's death, and you know that Roman monuments and statues were as brightly painted as anything else in the ancient world, but I said I wasn't getting into historical accuracy because otherwise that'll be a review of its own and I'm sticking to it. Just for the record, however, let me note that Taylor's costumes are a gorgeous panoply of '60's fashions intermittently influenced by Greek and Egyptian styles, she looks great in all of them, and I hope no one ever tried to explain that leopardskin duffel coat she wears to the Battle of Actium.
