I am surprised that the blockbusters of the 1960s
were not among the first movies to appear in DVD format. Regardless of their artistic merits, most of these productions were made with state of the art
resources of the movie industry at that time, such as wide-film processes like Todd-AOŽ or
Ultra-PanavisionŽ that yielded far sharper images than were possible at that time using conventional anamorphic lenses. And at a time when
monaural optical sound was still employed for the release prints of most movies,
multi-track stereo recording which has become commonplace today was used to liven up the chariot race in
Ben-Hur or the battle sequences of Cleopatra. But it was only last year that
Ben-Hur appeared in DVD, and Cleopatra has just come out a few month
back.
Cleopatra was always more of an event than a
motion picture, much less a work of art. When the film finally appeared in
theaters after a couple of years of mainly adverse publicity while it was in
production, the end result of Fox's costly labors was viewed primarily as
evidence found at the scene of a crime. Audiences were far more interested in
sniffing out clues to the Burton-Taylor romance than in following the saga of an
ancient Egyptian queen's rise and fall. Much of this odor of disrepute still
clings to the production almost forty years later, and it gives a special cachet
to the well-made documentary which accompanies the two disk set of the movie
itself.
In fact, the documentary offers an unusually
candid account of the making of what turned out to be a celluloid Frankenstein
monster that nearly destroyed a great studio, inflicted a crippling humiliation
on producer Walter Wanger, and seriously impaired the health and credibility of
Joseph Mankiewicz. By so conscientiously chronicling the history of the
Cleopatra debacle, the documentary not only supplies an indispensable ancilla
for understanding the movie, but offers a glimpse into the politics of commercial
film production only surpassed by books like Lillian Ross's Picture and John Gregory
Dunne's Studio.
No one should complain that it's difficult to see
where the money went that the making of Cleopatra consumed. In that respect the
movie is much closer to recovering the spirit of Ancient Rome than in any
other. And in contrast to the previously available
pan-and-scan video, the new DVD provides an excellent showcase for the movie's
glamour, reproducing the aspect ratio of Cleopatra's
65/70mm Todd-AO cinematography and the original multi-track stereo recording.
Of the three blockbusters from the period that
are still worth taking a look at, Ben-Hur is the most solidly constructed,
Cleopatra the most ambitious, and The Fall of the Roman Empire the most
enjoyable to watch. None of these productions could be called a masterpiece.
Ben-Hur is pedestrian, with only a brief glimpse of William Wyler's genius for
dramatizing conflict when Ben-Hur and Messala confront each other as the latter
lies dying. The Fall of the Roman Empire is history as a comic book, whose
strongest assets are an incredibly beautiful Sophia Loren, the bravura
performances of Alec Guinness and James Mason in supporting roles, and the
striking 65/70mm color cinematography of Robert Krasker.
But the case of Cleopatra is the saddest of all,
since the film inevitably will be judged on the basis of its pretensions rather
its merits. In making Cleopatra. Joseph Mankewicz was both laying claim to
territory that had been previously staked out by William Shakespeare and George
Bernard Shaw, and attempting to combine intimate drama with historical spectacle
in a motion picture. Shrewder directors of an older generation, rightly sensing
the perils of such an enterprise, had usually concentrated on the spectacular or
the dramatic side, instead of trying to straddle both sides at once.
To cite two representative examples, the most
famous director of historical epics in the American cinema, Cecil B. DeMille,
always came down on the side of spectacle, often settling for a superficial
treatment of dramatic relationships--although his stars, like Gary Cooper,
Claudette Colbert, or Charles Laughton, more often than not managed to compensate for the
shortcomings of his scripts. By contrast, George Cukor, like Max Ophuls
(The
Earrings of Madame de...[1953]) or Luchino Visconti (Senso [1954]), in films
such as Little Women or
Camille, kept the historical setting as unobtrusive as
possible and placed the drama in the foreground.
Mankiewicz had set himself a challenging task,
and the film, if not the director himself, failed to rise to the occasion. In
all fairness, it is worth noting that Mankiewcz--as the documentary
explains--had envisioned a six hour epic, but Darryl F. Zanuck hacked the
film down to its present length. Perhaps the effect would have been different
with the missing footage, but I doubt it. The classic example of a mutilated
movie--far more brutally so than Cleopatra--is Erich Von Stroheim's Greed, and
what remains of it is still an unequivocally great work. But nothing in
Cleopatra ever rises to those heights, and it seems an off chance that the other
half would serve as a catalyst to turn lead into gold.
It would be malicious but far from inaccurate to
state that Cleopatra ends when Rex Harrison departs the scene midway through the
movie--everything that comes after is just a protracted, tedious obsequy for the
manes of Julius Caesar. Although Harrison sometimes sounds a bit too much like
Henry Higgins gone astray in Ancient Egypt, he tears through his part with
gusto, bringing to it an irreverent Shavian wit otherwise absent from the movie.
However, the same can hardly be said of Richard Burton, who as Mark Antony seems
to be imitating Marlon Brando in the same role in Mankiewicz' earlier
Julius Caesar.
Although Brando was outclassed in that film by
James Mason as Brutus and John Gielgud as Cassius, he managed a very honest and
intelligent interpretation of the role. Burton, however, gives the impression of
suffering from a recurrent attack of constipation throughout Cleopatra, in a
performance which is no adequate demonstration of the skills of an actor who
ignited the screen in Tony Richardson's Look Back in
Anger. Even in John
Huston's lackluster transcription of Tennessee Williams' Night of the Iguana,
Burton gave a far more affecting performance as the defrocked and burnt-out
clergyman than he does of the tragic hero of Antony and Cleopatra here.
Elizabeth Taylor is a totally different story.
She was still a radiantly beautiful star when she made Cleopatra, and the movie
showcases her in a way few later motion pictures have done any leading lady. As
an actress she was far from untalented, but she lacked the ability to
imaginatively project herself very far outside the twentieth century--that would
have required the talents of Vivian Leigh, who had played the role in the film
version of G.B. Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra directed by Gabriel Pascal. When
Taylor is unwrapped from the famous carpet she looks dazzling, but any illusion
about what century she belongs in disappears the instant she opens her mouth.
The final shot in the movie shows Cleopatra in
her tomb, and it might well as serve as an apt metaphor for the entire movie.
The film is less a retelling of the lives of Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Mark
Antony than it is the interment of a star--and how does anyone become a star
except by being buried alive? George Cukor acknowledged the lesson in A
Star Is Born, and Manckiewicz confirmed it after his own fashion in The
Barefoot Contessa. Cleopatra is a true apotheosis, but it never quite manages to
make good its tragic pretensions until too late.
However, Cleopatra is equally the interment of the
studio system dedicated to creating stars by first burning away every shred of
their humanity. It stands first and foremost as a stele to a vanished industry that
didn't know it had vanished, but continued to believe in its own immortality. Instead of expending his time and energy on this
hopeless project, Mankiewicz would have done better to have made a movie about actors
making a movie about Cleopatra on location in Italy--that would have been a far
worthy more memorial.
In a certain way, that was what Jean-Luc Godard
did in Contempt, although that film concerned the making of a film version of the
Odyssey. Yet Godard's film is as much about the impossibility of returning to
the heroic age of the cinema as it is about the impossibility of returning to
the heroic age of Ancient Greece. By contrast, Cleopatra is an aborted act of
mourning: at the moment Mankiewicz should have consigned the old Hollywood to
oblivion, he instead tried to bring it back to life, and Cleopatra remains as
the monument to his failure to carry out either task.
This DVD is available from Amazon.com
Production data courtesy of The
Internet Movie Database
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E-mail Dave:
daveclayton@worldnet.att.net