Reeling Backward: "Cleopatra" (1963)

"Cleopatra" is remembered today almost entirely for its largeness -- its budget, its ambition, its length, the ego of its two stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the scope of its fiscal disaster. It was the top-grossing film of 1963 but still nearly put 20th Century-Fox out of business due to spiraling costs: $44 million for production and marketing, the equivalent of $340 million in 2016 dollars.

The film single-handedly killed off the big-budget Hollywood period epic for a couple generations. Many careers were sunk or least laid low for a time, including director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Though not Taylor and Burton, who scandalously carried on a public affair during the shoot while married to other people, eventually leaving their spouses to wed and star in a number of other notable pictures together.

Its name has become synonymous with the term "flop," often mentioned in the same breath as "Waterworld," "Ishtar" and "Heaven's Gate." Taylor's health often delayed shooting, including an emergency visit to the hospital where she received a tracheotomy, resulting in a scar that's visible in many shots. Her weight also fluctuated dramatically over more than a year of shooting as a result of her medical issues -- the London sets were torn down and rebuilt in Italy during the hiatus -- so that Cleopatra's double chin and waistline come and go from scene to scene.

There is in fact so much ridicule associated with "Cleopatra" that people tend to look past its magnificence.

Yes, at four hours and change it is entirely too long (especially with the curious omission of an intermission, direly testing patience and bladders). Things flow well until about the 2½ hour mark, when the brooding romance between the Egyptian queen and Mark Antony sends the film into a torpor, revived only at the end with the pair's dramatic deaths, recalling Romeo and Juliet.

It seems like there is a solid hour of screen time in which Burton does little more than swig from his ever-present flagon of wine and shout ineffectually at those around him.

Yet the grandness of its spectacle cannot be denied. The procession of Cleopatra into Rome should rightly be regarded as one of the most opulent, jaw-dropping moment in cinematic history. The scale of the sets, thousands of extras, Cleopatra's moving sphinx stage -- the mind boggles trying to take it all in at once.

"Cleopatra" may have cost a boatload, but the millions are right there on the screen to behold.

The story actually covers about 20 years of history, and fairly faithfully. Julius Caesar -- played by Rex Harrison in one of his best performances, I think -- comes to Alexandria while fighting enemies on all sides. He had previously installed teenage siblings Cleopatra and Ptolemy as co-rulers of Egypt, but the brother had pushed her out.

The much-older Caesar regards the young Egyptian girl as an impertinent pest, but in time he comes to see her as a prized pupil in the ways of leadership, and eventually something more intimate. Taylor plays Cleopatra as an intensely intelligent and calculating person, who absorbs the wisdom of Caesar and then puts it to her own use.

She bore him a son, Caesarion, and they wed despite Caesar already being married to a proper Roman woman. Upon being named dictator for life -- but still requiring the consent of the Senate to do anything -- he summons Cleopatra to Rome, resulting in the spectacle mentioned above. She is at the height of her powers, and Taylor positively thrums with authority and confidence.

Eventually Caesar is brought down and assassinated, and loyal right-hand man Antony shares leadership for a time with two others, notably Octavian, Caesar's cunning nephew. He's played by Roddy McDowell in a coy turn, clearly presented as homosexual, but a far superior politician and tactician than Antony.

Given stewardship of the eastern portion of the Roman Empire, Antony soon falls into Cleopatra's arms himself. Here, rather than using her wiles to distract a potential conqueror, Cleopatra seems to genuinely fall in love with the complex, proud Antony. Like Caesar he is accused by his peers of "going native," and is later summoned back to Rome and forced into a political marriage to Octavian's widowed sister.

Eventually Octavian, who would go on to become the first Roman Emperor, solidifies his power and maneuvers Antony into war, where his overconfidence undoes him in the naval Battle of Actium. It's an amazing sequence, with full-size ship replicas, flaming ballistas, the works.

Unmanned in defeat, Antony's despondency increases when his troops abandon him before a bold land attack against Octavian's legions. He took his own life and then Cleopatra took hers.

This all sounds fairly incredible, one woman at the center of so much pivotal history, but as I said the movie is actually pretty accurate to the known historical record. The film's major omission is removing any reference to the three children the pair had together, who were spared by Octavian and brought to Rome to be raised by his sister.

(Caesarion and Antony's other son by a previous marriage did not fare so well, literally dragged screaming to their executions.)

The cinematography, sets, special effects and costumes are lavish beyond imagining. The film won Oscars in all four categories, setting industry standards that could only be achieved today through the extensive use of CGI. "Cleopatra" also earned Academy Award nominations for best picture, sound, editing, music score and best supporting actor, for Harrison.

I was surprised by how much flesh there is in the film. Taylor appears nude twice, obscured by a towel during a massage and by the water of a bath. Various servants and such in the background are often scantily dressed. A dancer during the procession appears wearing only a thong and pasties over her nipples, which must have made quite an impression in 1963.

Martin Landau and Hume Cronyn are solid in supporting roles as cagey advisors to Antony and Cleopatra, respectively. Carroll O'Connor turns up as Casca, one of Caesar's leading murderers, and I admit encountering Archie Bunker in a toga was disconcerting.  Andrew Keir is a stalwart presence as Agrippa, a longtime foe of Antony's.

I'd been meaning to get to "Cleopatra" for several years, and am pleased by what I found. Like "Gone With the Wind," it's a terrific movie that got swallowed by a much longer film. The difference being that while the former is lavishly overpraised, "Cleopatra" deserves much better than to be regarded as a cinematic punchline.

Here is Hollywood moviemaking teetering at the end of its golden age, grand and gaudy, its flaws inseparable from its many virtues.

Reeling Backward: "The Seventh Cross"

"The Seventh Cross" reminds me very much of "Fury," another Spencer Tracy film that was profiled in this space some time ago. Tracy plays a decent Everyman who's hunted by the mob, and finds reasons for both hope and despair about the state of mankind during his run.

This film has additional political overtones since it was made in 1944 and set in 1936, before most of the world appreciated the threat of the Nazis' rise to power. Tracy plays the last of seven escapees from a German concentration camp. All the others have been captured and killed, their bodies strung up on trees at the camp that have been pruned and turned into crosses. The last, empty one is awaiting George Heisler.

Based on the novel by Helen Deutsch, screenwriter Anna Seghers doesn't even mention anything about why the men were imprisoned until more than halfway through the film. It turns out Heisler was a political agitator who spoke out about the takeover of Germany by Nazism.

Director Fred Zinneman doesn't take the gloves off in his depiction of the German people -- they're shown as being gleeful about the search for the escaped prisoners. In a disturbing scene one of the escapees, a former circus acrobat, flees the police across the rooftops of the town before intentionally plunging to his death.

Even small boys of the Hitler Youth enthusiastically scour the town for George, nearly discovering him in a woodpile.

There are some good Germans, though. The main example is Paul Roeder and his wife Liesel, played by the real-life married duo Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in their first onscreen pairing.

Paul is a friend of George who's so focused on his family and his job that he barely pays attention to the political unrest. He doesn't even know that George was sent to a concentration camp, and is now being sought by the authorities. The factory where he works has been busy cranking out weapons for the German build-up, but Paul doesn't care because his paycheck has swelled.

The veil over Paul's eyes is yanked away when he sees how his friend is being persecuted, and he soon becomes caught up in the underground movement. Cronyn would receive an Oscar nomination for his moving performance -- the only recognition he received from the Academy during his long career.

The film uses an interesting device that's effective, but it sort of gets misplaced. It starts out with narration by another escapee. After he is captured, tortured and killed, his narration continues as the voice of reason whispering inside George's head. The narration grows more and more infrequent, until it finally disappears for good. Storytelling tricks like that work only if the filmmakers are willing to fully commit to them, and here they seemed to lose faith in it.

Also unconvincing is a slapped-together romance between George and a hotel maid played by Signe Hasso. She helps him escape by hiding in her room, and then in the next scene Tracy is shown putting on his tie on. That's about as close to an explicit declaration of sexual intercourse having taken place as one got at that time.

"The Seventh Cross" is a decent thriller, one of the first prison break movies that became so popular after World War II. Spencer Tracy was one of those performers that audiences just immediately identified with and wanted to root for.

3 stars

Reeling Backward: "Brute Force"

I had high hopes for this 1947 prison movie starring Burt Lancaster, but was mildly let down by it. Still, it's an interesting enough film to make a few points about it.

One of the least successful things about the movie is also the most intriguing: A series of flashbacks as various prisoners recall the circumstances that led to them being locked up in Westgate Penitentiary. As a critic, I think it weakens the movie because it gives a lot of screen time to a bunch of minor characters who clearly are not the center of the story.

But in the genre of prison flicks, what's notable is that all the men are guilty -- up to and including the hero, Joe Collins (Lancaster). Usually in prison movies, even the best ones like "The Shawshank Redemption," filmmakers find it necessary to provide a protagonist who's innocent of his crimes. That gives them free rein to explore the dehumanizing aspects of imprisonment, with the hook that "it could be you," sentenced for a crime you didn't commit.

Not here. Every one of the flashbacks shows the prisoners willfully committing crimes, knowing it could send them to jail. One guy embezzles to buy his wife a fur coat, while another is a soldier who steals food for his Italian war bride. Collins' racket was knocking over banks to save up money for his wife's operation.

Another interesting choice is to have the main heavy, the prison guard Captain Munsey, depicted as an out-and-out evil character. Don't forget, in 1947 it was a pretty ballsy thing to portray the prisoners as decent men, and their chief incarcerator as a sadist. But that's exactly what he is.

Hume Cronyn, who I most remember as one of the lovable oldsters from "Cocoon," gives an icy and quiet performance as Munsey. It reminded me very much of Ralph Fiennes' portrayal of the Nazi prison chief in "Schindler's List" -- especially in one scene where he's cleaning his rifle. This is immediately followed by a brutal scene in which the captain beats a prisoner with piece of rubber tubing.

The other main characters are a sympathetic prison doctor, who's also a drunkard, and a prison tough named Gallagher (Charles Bickford) whose loyalties lie somewhere between Collins and Munsey. Gallagher orchestrates the prison gangs, trying to keep Munsey at bay while protecting the welfare of the prisoners. He's not above enforcing a code of justice that lives within the prison walls, such as arranging the murder of a prisoner who planted a shiv on Collins, sending him into isolation.

Interestingly, Gallagher's prison job is running the prison newspaper. This allows him to send his men into any part of Westgate, carrying information or smuggling contraband.

Oh, and Calypso singer Sir Lancelot has a minor role as a prisoner who narrates the goings-on through a sing-song commentary.

Anyway, they're building a drain pipe for no good reason that I can see, and Collins comes up with the idea of using it to attack the guard tower from two sides at once. Things go horribly awry, as you might expect.

Overall, the movie just didn't really go anyplace for me. The Collins character maintains a resolute opaqueness, and the Munsey character -- once we get over the shock of his harsh portrayal -- is kind of a one-note character.

I can't say as I was dying to escape from "Brute Force," but I wouldn't want be locked up with it, either.

2.5 stars