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As an almost all Greek thing, I'm flattered
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.)
Especially because she is a woman with power, I appreciate that her downfall is not simply love, as it might be in a more standard, misogynistic retelling. She doesn't lose her edge with her heart, make panicked, weak decisions out of overriding femininity: it is not being in love with Antony that drives the tragedy of the film's second half. It is the fact that Burton's Antony is a good match for her in love, but a poor one in politics, and neither of them realizes how much until it's too late. "Show me a city and I'll tell you how to take it," he admits at last, "let me face an army and I'll smell out its weak points and hit them hard where they are. Make me to sit down, talk in whispers of this and that, with an emphasis here and a shrug there, and I'm soon confounded and defeated. Meaning to do the best, I suppose I . . . I suppose I could not have done worse." He is speaking of his marriage to Octavia Minor, Octavian's sister, which he viewed as a harmless gesture of keeping the peace between the uneasier two-thirds of the Second Triumvirate and which Cleopatra understood at once as a dangerous subordination to a man who would never settle for a third of anything, not to mention a public repudiation of her. As good a general as he was in Caesar's life, as faithful an avenger as he was after Caesar's death, what this Antony is not is any kind of statesman, in Caesar's shadow or out of it. But neither, and perhaps more fatally, is he any kind of Alexander. On the eve of Actium, as he drinks steadily and fires his own commanders left and right, it's apparent to the audience that even if he can't admit it to himself, he's fighting to lose. The reasons are unclear—despair, self-disgust, some buried awareness that to defeat Octavian would leave him in charge of this strange new shape his world is taking. (Antony more than any of the other principals suffers from plot compression: we see enough of him competent and energetic in the first act that we can understand Cleopatra's passion in the second, beyond the fact that he's played by Richard Burton and the sexual chemistry between him and Taylor is almost enough to pull the film singlehandedly across any gaps left by the four-hour edit, and a mordant sense of humor counts for a lot with me, but we still have much less idea of what he looked like stable before he started to spin out.) Whatever his qualms, they take Cleopatra by surprise. She fought her brother for the throne and won; Caesar marched a legion on Rome. Octavian plays by the rules of republic only so far as they bring him closer to empire. Years ago in Rome, before Philippi and Tarsus, she watched Antony catch the fire of a dream and pledge his legions to Caesar to help conquer "a world beyond the wildest dreams of even Alexander." It never occurs to her that on his own—with only her—he would not do the same. It's an interesting, risky framing of a not-quite-triangle that suggests some kind of alt-historical OT3 might have served everyone's ambitions and temperaments best. Given the production circumstances, I can't tell if Mankiewicz actually wrote it in from the start or if the idea emerged at some point in post, but I can say I haven't seen it before.
As for the rest of the cast, I thought at first that Rex Harrison was doing his best Rex Harrison and Mankiewicz had just written a conveniently Harrison-like Caesar, but in fact he's doing something unusual in this film: he's vulnerable. Some of it is physical, as when he confesses his fears to Cleopatra after the near miss of a seizure: "One day it will happen where I cannot hide, where the world will see me fall. I shall tumble down before the mob, foam at the mouth and make them laugh, and they'll tear me to pieces." But it is also that he never has the upper hand over his co-star, not politically, not romantically. Early in his time in Alexandria, Caesar hears the disapproving claim that Cleopatra "chooses in the manner of a man rather than wait to be chosen after womanly fashion" and unlike most of Rome's rumors about her, this one proves to be true. His one attempt to treat her with the casual possessiveness their respective ages and positions of power would traditionally support is rebuffed with the cold and accurate "I promise you, you won't like me this way." Their real relationship proceeds from a foundation of mutual chessmastering. Each has something the other wants; each is something the other appreciates; it comes out to love, but I am not sure that it is romantic love as a modern viewer would recognize it. Though she wears a collar of gold coins stamped with his profile for three years in the wake of his assassination, their scenes together leave the impression of more emotion on his side, the way he delights in her audacity and dotes on their son; it is rare to see Harrison as the more loving one and I'm impressed with Mankiewicz for getting that performance out of him. (Neither Moss Hart nor George Cukor could do it for My Fair Lady.) I suspect most of Martin Landau's part as Rufio went the way of Antony's backstory, but he's lanky and loyal and his intensity suggests a hard-bitten military history that does not save him from the vortex of tragedy any more than grand gestures save his more flamboyant superiors. I don't have much to say about Andrew Keir's Agrippa because he is the one characterization in this entire film I object to: he's too much of a scowling heavy for me to picture him personally inspecting the Cloaca Maxima, by which I mean sailing a boat through one of the earliest sewer systems in the world. I am always happy to see Pamela Brown in a movie, even when she's a random fire oracle. But if we're talking performances, the one after Taylor's that really gets my attention is Roddy McDowall's tremendous turn as Octavian. Normally an actor of great and seemingly unconscious charm, here McDowall just shuts it off; he makes the future Augustus a fragile monster with no gears between unearthly detachment and imperial furor, cold and fey. It's a striking reversal of the tradition where Antony is the sexually ambiguous sybarite seduced by the glamour of the East. For Mankiewicz, Octavian's Cato-style Roman stoicism is the more perverse. He's fair-haired for the part and it looks as natural on him as it does on John Hurt's Caligula; he's as closemouthed as Calvin Coolidge in a toga (when Antony is needling him about the tight rein he keeps on his virtue, his riches, and his words, I do hear an echo of "You lose" in Octavian's curt "That too") or he makes the listener's hair stand on end. "The soup is hot. The soup is cold. Antony is living. Antony is dead." It is not humanizing at all to discover that he spent the sea-battle of Actium prone with nausea, raising his head to take the victorious news from Agrippa and then collapsing indifferently again as the ship rolls. The internet tells me he was heavily tipped for an Oscar until the studio botched the nomination process, which feels about right for this film.
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.)
Especially because she is a woman with power, I appreciate that her downfall is not simply love, as it might be in a more standard, misogynistic retelling. She doesn't lose her edge with her heart, make panicked, weak decisions out of overriding femininity: it is not being in love with Antony that drives the tragedy of the film's second half. It is the fact that Burton's Antony is a good match for her in love, but a poor one in politics, and neither of them realizes how much until it's too late. "Show me a city and I'll tell you how to take it," he admits at last, "let me face an army and I'll smell out its weak points and hit them hard where they are. Make me to sit down, talk in whispers of this and that, with an emphasis here and a shrug there, and I'm soon confounded and defeated. Meaning to do the best, I suppose I . . . I suppose I could not have done worse." He is speaking of his marriage to Octavia Minor, Octavian's sister, which he viewed as a harmless gesture of keeping the peace between the uneasier two-thirds of the Second Triumvirate and which Cleopatra understood at once as a dangerous subordination to a man who would never settle for a third of anything, not to mention a public repudiation of her. As good a general as he was in Caesar's life, as faithful an avenger as he was after Caesar's death, what this Antony is not is any kind of statesman, in Caesar's shadow or out of it. But neither, and perhaps more fatally, is he any kind of Alexander. On the eve of Actium, as he drinks steadily and fires his own commanders left and right, it's apparent to the audience that even if he can't admit it to himself, he's fighting to lose. The reasons are unclear—despair, self-disgust, some buried awareness that to defeat Octavian would leave him in charge of this strange new shape his world is taking. (Antony more than any of the other principals suffers from plot compression: we see enough of him competent and energetic in the first act that we can understand Cleopatra's passion in the second, beyond the fact that he's played by Richard Burton and the sexual chemistry between him and Taylor is almost enough to pull the film singlehandedly across any gaps left by the four-hour edit, and a mordant sense of humor counts for a lot with me, but we still have much less idea of what he looked like stable before he started to spin out.) Whatever his qualms, they take Cleopatra by surprise. She fought her brother for the throne and won; Caesar marched a legion on Rome. Octavian plays by the rules of republic only so far as they bring him closer to empire. Years ago in Rome, before Philippi and Tarsus, she watched Antony catch the fire of a dream and pledge his legions to Caesar to help conquer "a world beyond the wildest dreams of even Alexander." It never occurs to her that on his own—with only her—he would not do the same. It's an interesting, risky framing of a not-quite-triangle that suggests some kind of alt-historical OT3 might have served everyone's ambitions and temperaments best. Given the production circumstances, I can't tell if Mankiewicz actually wrote it in from the start or if the idea emerged at some point in post, but I can say I haven't seen it before.
As for the rest of the cast, I thought at first that Rex Harrison was doing his best Rex Harrison and Mankiewicz had just written a conveniently Harrison-like Caesar, but in fact he's doing something unusual in this film: he's vulnerable. Some of it is physical, as when he confesses his fears to Cleopatra after the near miss of a seizure: "One day it will happen where I cannot hide, where the world will see me fall. I shall tumble down before the mob, foam at the mouth and make them laugh, and they'll tear me to pieces." But it is also that he never has the upper hand over his co-star, not politically, not romantically. Early in his time in Alexandria, Caesar hears the disapproving claim that Cleopatra "chooses in the manner of a man rather than wait to be chosen after womanly fashion" and unlike most of Rome's rumors about her, this one proves to be true. His one attempt to treat her with the casual possessiveness their respective ages and positions of power would traditionally support is rebuffed with the cold and accurate "I promise you, you won't like me this way." Their real relationship proceeds from a foundation of mutual chessmastering. Each has something the other wants; each is something the other appreciates; it comes out to love, but I am not sure that it is romantic love as a modern viewer would recognize it. Though she wears a collar of gold coins stamped with his profile for three years in the wake of his assassination, their scenes together leave the impression of more emotion on his side, the way he delights in her audacity and dotes on their son; it is rare to see Harrison as the more loving one and I'm impressed with Mankiewicz for getting that performance out of him. (Neither Moss Hart nor George Cukor could do it for My Fair Lady.) I suspect most of Martin Landau's part as Rufio went the way of Antony's backstory, but he's lanky and loyal and his intensity suggests a hard-bitten military history that does not save him from the vortex of tragedy any more than grand gestures save his more flamboyant superiors. I don't have much to say about Andrew Keir's Agrippa because he is the one characterization in this entire film I object to: he's too much of a scowling heavy for me to picture him personally inspecting the Cloaca Maxima, by which I mean sailing a boat through one of the earliest sewer systems in the world. I am always happy to see Pamela Brown in a movie, even when she's a random fire oracle. But if we're talking performances, the one after Taylor's that really gets my attention is Roddy McDowall's tremendous turn as Octavian. Normally an actor of great and seemingly unconscious charm, here McDowall just shuts it off; he makes the future Augustus a fragile monster with no gears between unearthly detachment and imperial furor, cold and fey. It's a striking reversal of the tradition where Antony is the sexually ambiguous sybarite seduced by the glamour of the East. For Mankiewicz, Octavian's Cato-style Roman stoicism is the more perverse. He's fair-haired for the part and it looks as natural on him as it does on John Hurt's Caligula; he's as closemouthed as Calvin Coolidge in a toga (when Antony is needling him about the tight rein he keeps on his virtue, his riches, and his words, I do hear an echo of "You lose" in Octavian's curt "That too") or he makes the listener's hair stand on end. "The soup is hot. The soup is cold. Antony is living. Antony is dead." It is not humanizing at all to discover that he spent the sea-battle of Actium prone with nausea, raising his head to take the victorious news from Agrippa and then collapsing indifferently again as the ship rolls. The internet tells me he was heavily tipped for an Oscar until the studio botched the nomination process, which feels about right for this film.
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.
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Thank you!
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Great phrase. And there's so much about Hollywood it explains...
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Thank you. It suddenly seemed right.
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I would believe it had an effect. And more generally that weird pop-cultural blurring where audiences are terrible at distinguishing acting from autobiography. Because they met in the public eye as Cleopatra and Antony, I was left wondering if Taylor and Burton ever really got out of the story. Maybe into Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but I'm not sure that should be considered an improvement.
This does tend to happen with a lot of performers (cough *William Shatner* cough) and it’s quite unfair.
I've recommended you The Intruder (1962), right? Shatner is distressingly good there.
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I've never seen anything but bits of it, and I always found it fascinating and marvelous to look at. Your review makes me want to see it.
not allowed
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Oh, interesting. Because of the scandal?
I've never seen anything but bits of it, and I always found it fascinating and marvelous to look at. Your review makes me want to see it.
I hope you enjoy it if you do. It will still be marvelous to look at no matter what.
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Aw, I'm sorry.
... and, lol, this is the short review? ;-D (I haven't seen Cleopatra, so I can say nothing else. Although I have seen Carry on Cleo more times over my life than a person should probably admit to.)
(Still, I suppose it's fair enough: it is an epic film, of course. *nods*)
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It's shorter than it could have been!
(I haven't seen Cleopatra, so I can say nothing else. Although I have seen Carry on Cleo more times over my life than a person should probably admit to.)
"Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me!"
(I have only seen Carry On Cleo once, but it was several years before Cleopatra, which is typical of my relationship with . . . everything, really.)
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My Dad never watched classic films, but he did watch a lot of comedies like the Carry Ons, and my sister and I watched most of my Dad's films, so it's was a long time before I saw pretty much any of the things that they parodied in some of them. In some cases, I still haven't. It only adds pleasure when you finally get it, I'm sure! *nods*
(Long reviews are cool, of course; I didn't mean to sound mean about it - I hope I didn't!)
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It worked for Cleopatra, at least.
(Long reviews are cool, of course; I didn't mean to sound mean about it - I hope I didn't!)
We're good! When I set up this Patreon, I drastically underestimated how much I would want to talk about movies I actually find interesting.
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Thank you.
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Roddy McDowall: best Octavian/Augustus of them all until, arguably, young Octavian in the tv show Rome. (I think Brian Blessed did a great job with Augustus as written in "I, Claudius" and with his death scene proved once and for all he can actually do fantastic acting without any voice at all, but that benevolent and sentimental patriarch Augustus was, well, about as accurate as grumpy thug Agrippa in "Cleopatra".) Wasn't he also bff with Elizabeth Taylor ever since they were child stars together?
It's an interesting, risky framing of a not-quite-triangle that suggests some kind of alt-historical OT3 might have served everyone's ambitions and temperaments best.
I got that vibe, too. I mean, this Antony being jealous of dead Caesar and under the impression he can't measure up to him in Cleopatra's eyes is in the dialogue, but the way it's played and keeping his own relationship with Caesar in mind, you go the impression he'd have been happiest in an OT3 with Caesar and Cleopatra. And now I regret it being too late for Yuletide to ask for someone to write that AU for me. Because the only one I could see seriously minding that arrangement would have been Fulvia, and she doesn't exist in this 'verse.
Re: the Caesar and Cleopatra dialogue, I was reminded of not just Mankiewicz' own but his brother Herman's 30s/40s scripts in the past - it has that quick erudite bantery vibe with the occasional verbal stiletto.
re: the movie's reputation - like an earlier commenter, I suspect ET's later image coloured the way it is perceived. It occurs to me that this holds true for Burton and Antony as well, though somewhat differently - i.e. the whys and wherefores of Antony falling apart today aren't really questioned because he's played by Richard Burton, so of course he's a self destructive hard drinking man. (BTW, the authors of Furious Love, an entertaining and sympathetic account of the whole Burton/Taylor saga, make a good case that it Richard Burton's movie acting changed for the better through Elizabeth Taylor - that until her, and in "Cleopatra" as well, he was very much a theatre actor dialing it up too much for the screen as many theatre actors did, but that he learned miniscule reactions and stillness from her, and you can see the difference in "Becket" in contrast to O'Toole, and then of course in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", where his George in a way is the very opposite of Antony and most other Burton characters.
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Yessss! It’s probably been too many years, but I’d really like to have seen that actor play Dorian Gray, having watched his Octavian subtly and seamlessly go from handsome young man to still-handsome-but-somehow-frozen-looking young man.
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Okay, that interests me.
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One of the things I really enjoyed about Mankiewicz's script, aside from the fact that it is casually, ridiculously literate, is that even when I disagreed with his decisions (Sosigenes' death, for example: it doesn't match the impression we otherwise receive of Octavian as a politician who doesn't get his hands dirty—he has doctor's notes for both Philippi and Actium—and if he had wanted the Egyptian envoy dead, he could just as easily have pointed the hostile crowd at him), I never felt I had to worry that he just didn't know his material. He did prune the supporting players ruthlessly.
Roddy McDowall: best Octavian/Augustus of them all until, arguably, young Octavian in the tv show Rome.
I still need to see that. I watch much less TV than film in general, but I was actually aware of Rome while it was airing: I just had no way to watch it and it was not until several years after the fact that anyone made it sound like a take on history I would enjoy rather than yell at the screen about anyway. What do you like about its Octavian?
(I think Brian Blessed did a great job with Augustus as written in "I, Claudius" and with his death scene proved once and for all he can actually do fantastic acting without any voice at all, but that benevolent and sentimental patriarch Augustus was, well, about as accurate as grumpy thug Agrippa in "Cleopatra".)
I imprinted enormously on I, Claudius in high school, book first, then series, as is almost certainly obvious from my icons, but I don't disagree with any of this sentence.
Wasn't he also bff with Elizabeth Taylor ever since they were child stars together?
He was; they met filming Lassie Come Home in 1943. There are some great candid shots of her on the set of Cleopatra that were taken by him.
And now I regret it being too late for Yuletide to ask for someone to write that AU for me. Because the only one I could see seriously minding that arrangement would have been Fulvia, and she doesn't exist in this 'verse.
I regret it, too, because I would read the daylights out of that.
Re: the Caesar and Cleopatra dialogue, I was reminded of not just Mankiewicz' own but his brother Herman's 30s/40s scripts in the past - it has that quick erudite bantery vibe with the occasional verbal stiletto.
Yes! And it's a very flexible register of language, which can take a while to notice because so much of it sounds so naturally epigrammatic; it can scale up into the high rhetoric of Antony's love-confession or Octavian's demagoguery without toppling completely into the purple. I mean, the script has its share of tin ear and even lines whose delivery doesn't quite come off. But when it's on, it's really on.
It occurs to me that this holds true for Burton and Antony as well, though somewhat differently - i.e. the whys and wherefores of Antony falling apart today aren't really questioned because he's played by Richard Burton, so of course he's a self destructive hard drinking man.
And the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra is read through the scrim of the tabloids; I suspect you're right. How annoying.
and you can see the difference in "Becket" in contrast to O'Toole, and then of course in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", where his George in a way is the very opposite of Antony and most other Burton characters.
Becket was the first place I saw Richard Burton—in my own confusion of actor with role, it means I always associate him with the line "He's drunk and wenched his way though London, but he's thinking all the time." Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was the second. I don't think he's always too big for the screen pre-1963, but I agree that he got much better at quietness. I hadn't heard it linked with Cleopatra before. That's neat.
Fair warning that I have been awake for two days by the time I'm answering this comment, but your icon is perfect.
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I, Claudius: oh, I love it to bits as well, both book and tv series, and it remains probably my favourite historical tv series of all times. But its Augustus is definitely not my idea of Augustus at any point of his life. (This said, again: his death scene is one of the most stunning things I've seen, and I get why director Herbert Wise singled it out as his favourite scene of the entire show in terms of acting against stern competition. You know exactly when Augustus dies, and this despite the camera never cutting away and Blessed not making a sound. It's all in the eyes.)
re: Burton's changing acting due to Taylor: we have no less an authority on this than Mike Nichols, in the audio commentary on the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf dvd. Quoting from my transcription after watching/hearing it: Arguing against the perception that Elizabeth Taylor learned how to really act from her husband, he says as far as he could see it was more the other way around as far as movie acting was concerned, which is different from stage acting, that he could see Burton observing her, and that he, Nichols, learned as well (remember, it was his first film). What just seemed good but not excellent during shooting suddenly took on a new dimension and became great when he saw the daily rushes and realized what she had done which the camera had picked up but one couldn't see standing six or eight feet away, etc., and when he got to scoring the movie he realised she had left beats for musical cues as well, without making the performance seem wrong if the music was lacking. He doesn't think she could explain it if you asked her; he thinks it came from a lifetime (and due to childhood stardom, it was already a life time back then) in front of the camera, and knowing how to interact with it in a way few movie actors could.
re: icon - when I saw it I knew I had to have it. I'm so glad the icon maker managed a screen cap of this particular moment. :)
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Thank you! This is one of the nicest things anybody can say about a review of mine, and then I can panic about steering them wrong.
But a properly political Cleopatra! Nobody told me this movie was built around that!
The first I heard of it was honestly from
Taylor's outfits are amazingly anachronistic, and I can see them being a dealbreaker for viewers who expect at least a pretense of conformity to the historical record. (The men's costumes are a little better, although Burton consistently wears the shortest tunics known to man; occasionally he goes to mount a horse and one feels the masculine equivalent of boob tape must have been employed. More seriously, Cleopatra once again reminded me that I wish it were more culturally acceptable right now for people who aren't women to wear jewelry, since it looks just as good on them. Bracelets, rings, shiny things in general: there's a reason everyone wore them for thousands of years.) Nonetheless, she carries them off. She isn't just onscreen for four hours looking classy. She's giving a performance and she's giving a good one. I don't care how much supporting power Harrison and McDowall lend, the movie would fold up like damp newsprint around her if she weren't up to it.
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I saw a review of HBO’s Rome that complained their Cleopatra was portrayed as a “nymphomaniac,” even though it was made perfectly clear in the scenes they were referring to (in which she sleeps with one of the protagonists, who is guarding her on her way to meet with Caesar) that she’s not doing this just for fun: she knows she has to get Caesar as an ally, she knows he’s the man who has everything but an heir, and she’s calculated her ovulation time, but she’s still a week away from reaching Caesar’s camp, and anyway he’s been married before to women who’d had children by previous husbands, so maybe he’s the one who’s barren and not them….
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That's very clever, actually, and I'm surprised I haven't seen it or some variant more often in fiction.
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I'm really glad! I actively enjoyed this movie and I now wish more people would give it a chance!
The interactions between Cleopatra and Caesar are excellent, and that entry into Rome!
It was stunning on a big screen and it was meant to be. It has the same effect on the audience out in the theater as it does on the audience in Rome. If a print ever circulates near you, I really recommend it.
shewhomust beat me with the comment about your Penelope line--that's a real winner.
Thank you.
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And yes,
...as if Penelope of Ithaka were in the movie business rather than textiles
is a fabulous line.
I hope Bertie Owen's fever will abate, with no lasting ill effects.
Nine
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Thank you. I'm hoping it has been reconsidered by people with more cultural clout than me.
is a fabulous line.
It occurred to me naturally, but enough time has elapsed since writing that I am pleased with it.
I hope Bertie Owen's fever will abate, with no lasting ill effects.
I appreciate the good wishes and will tell him so. I suspect I am going to need to do something.
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I had seen pieces of it on TCM, but in hindsight not enough to get a real feel of the film, and definitely not enough to showcase any of the larger performances. I was not expecting what I got.
I particularly liked Roddy McDowall's performance.
He would have deserved his Oscar.
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But it’s always remained a favorite of mine and I could easily write a response as long as your review, but, in short, I agree with your summation that it was worth the four hours and possibly the $44 million. And my mother once made me a fake fur leopardskin duffel like the one at Actium because she knew I loved that costume, needed a new coat (maxi everything was in style then) and she got a deal on good fake fur (not the plush fuzzy kind).
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Thank you!
Back there, it was AN EVENT and shown over two nights. Night One would be up to Cleopatra leaving Rome after Caesar's assassination, which, I believe, was the intermission point.
It is, with her ship disappearing into the dark beyond the lit cresset; it breaks quite nearly between her life with Caesar and her life with Antony. At that rate they might as well have stuck with Mankiewicz's original two-movie plan!
(The projectionist who introduced the screening explained that the cut footage is considered to have been almost certainly destroyed, but since no one expected the complete Metropolis to surface in Argentina, I'm going to keep my fingers crossed.)
(I wouldn't recommend sitting through that in a theatre then giving birth a week later.)
Oh, God, no. The backache alone.
But it's always remained a favorite of mine and I could easily write a response as long as your review, but, in short, I agree with your summation that it was worth the four hours and possibly the $44 million.
I'm happpy to hear other thoughts; I'm underslept, not territorial.
It is very definitely not a movie where you can't tell where the money went.
And my mother once made me a fake fur leopardskin duffel like the one at Actium because she knew I loved that costume, needed a new coat (maxi everything was in style then) and she got a deal on good fake fur (not the plush fuzzy kind).
That is splendid.
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Thank you. Bertie Owen is at this point my longest-lived computer and I am sentimentally attached to him as well as flat broke.
I will baby almost any electronic device well past its proper working lifespan just because I don't want to go through that "hmmm these buttons don't feel like the buttons I'm used to, and why is that menu in a different place" stage.
Yes! That! I don't even want a different OS, let alone a different machine.
(I don't have my grandfather's watch, but I have his tefillin. It sees somewhat less regular use, but I take your metaphor.)
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Plus, and irrelevantly, I have a soft spot for Elizabeth Taylor.
Also, I love the idea of Penelope putting off suitors till the never-ending business of rewrites is done! I'm utterly convinced!
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If you have a soft spot for Elizabeth Taylor, chances are very high you will like this film. I'm not saying it doesn't have issues, but she isn't one of them.
Also, I love the idea of Penelope putting off suitors till the never-ending business of rewrites is done! I'm utterly convinced!
Thank you!