forget about love!
by Douglas Messerli
Waldemar Young and Vincent Lawrence
(screenplay, based on historical material adapted by Bartlett Cormack), Cecil
B. DeMille (director) Cleopatra /
1934
Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934
extravaganza, Cleopatra, rightfully
should be laughed away (which, upon several occasions it almost was in the
showing I recently saw at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), mocked, even
booed as it is rumored Italian audiences greeted it upon its first showing in
that country. Despite his legendary role in Hollywood filmmaking, DeMille might
have been better off as a grand wedding planner, an organizer of public
provincial festivals, or a circus impresario (the talent for which he memorably
displayed in his The Greatest Show on
Earth)—he might have succeeded at nearly any grand task other than climbing
behind a motion picture lens.
Whether it was biblical tales, historical romances, or just plain modern-day domestic dramas, DeMille knew how to boil their plots down to the most hackneyed of stews; and in Cleopatra he had the great advantage of being able to combine Shakespeare’s agèd chestnuts with a peppery suet of George Bernard Shaw and fruity chopped up historical stories in order to create a mince-meat pie that perfectly suited his old-fashioned tastes.
Letting loose entire choruses of nubile maidens swathed in swatches of sinuous, often see-through, sequined fabric, the director gave a prurient wink to the maddest of Hollywood decorators and set-designers who quickly corrected Cleopatra’s illegible hieroglyphs into fashionable Art-Deco domes.
As Anthony, the hunky Henry Wilcoxon, drops his mouth and widens his
eyes, Claudette Colbert purrs, “I was going to try to seduce you. But I now
know that all of that is impossible”—or something to that effect. And when, a
few moments later, the Egyptian slave girls pull out a large satin curtain to
hide the inevitable tête-à-tête between Cleopatra and her new “master,” we are
hardly surprised when the camera slyly pans down in the direction of the
audience to reveal Apollodorus (Irving Pichel) beating out the rhythm for his
oarsman to steer the queen’s barge back to Alexandria with her “captor”
captivated withal. It’s clear the Hays folk, just recently established, thank
heaven, hadn’t yet gotten their act together.
Despite the preposterous pomposity of this and previous scenes, we too
have somehow been tamed—or at least entertained—enough to hold back our
snickers. If nothing else, we have to admit, Colbert’s Cleopatra is one smart
beauty queen, worthy of every dollar the producers paid to so scantily clad her
bod. After all, anyone who can declaim the line, “I admire men who don’t love
women,” without a blink of irony, freezes all those who might declare this
quirky work to be merely a piece of camp—straight in their tracks.
Forget about love! Besides if we can’t be convinced that Cleopatra truly
loved Julius Caesar or his far more handsome successor, neither are the
historians certain that the Egyptian queen was simply struggling for her
personal and country’s survival, or whether she had really gone “over the top.”
If Colbert doesn’t quite have Garbo’s allure and her ability to assure us that
every man is the one for her, she’s great at pretense, even when her servants
spill the beans to Anthony that she’s testing out new poisons. Wow, can that
gal down the wine! Even a Mormon might take to drinking with her across the
plate. How could the apparent alcoholic Anthony resist? (a condition taken up,
I might add, years later by Richard Burton playing the same role). And can she
die?
Los Angeles, October 16, 2014
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2014).
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