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Cleopatra (1963)**DVD

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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