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: "No Way Out" (1950)

I first became aware of "No Way Out" because it shares the same title as a largely forgotten 1987 political thriller starring Kevin Costner, Sean Young and Gene Hackman that I am particularly fond of. Then I found out it was the first film appearance by Sidney Poitier, and also starred the great Richard Widmark in one of his inimitable villain roles. I knew I had to see it.

The movie was directed by Golden Age giant Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who also co-wrote it along with Lesser Samuels, and the two men shared an Oscar nomination for their original screenplay. It's a taut potboiler that accomplishes its narrative goals while also being quite brazen in its tackling of racial animosity circa 1950.

The word "nigger" gets bandied almost as much as your average Quentin Tarantino feature, along with a host of other racial epithets like coon, darkie and so on. Poitier, whose screen presence was defined by intelligence and grace, shows prodigious quantities of both as Luther Brooks, a first-year intern at the large county hospital who is on the receiving end of nearly all that vileness. Just 22 when the film was shot, Poitier is boyishly handsome and painfully thin.

On his first night working the prison ward, a pair of brother bandits from Beaver Canal are brought in with serious but non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. The elder, Ray Biddle (Widmark), leers and taunts at Dr. Brooks -- outraged that a black man is putting his hands on his brother. When Johnny Biddle (Dick Paxton) dies during a spinal tap because Brooks suspects he is suffering from a brain tumor, it turns into an all-out war of wills between the two men.

If Poitier is celebrated for his smarts, then perhaps no actor accessed anger as well as Widmark. In the right role -- like Tommy Udo in his screen debut in "Kiss of Death" just three years earlier -- hatred and resentment just emanated from Widmark like waves of a radiation from a nuclear meltdown.

Something about his rawboned face, the way his skull seemed to want to pop right out of his skin, set off by those enormous sapphire eyes, gave him a jackal's ravenous charm. Many of his characters, including Ray Biddle, drip with poisonous strain of humor that's funny only to them. He laughs at you, but the dead glint in his eye lets slip that he's kill you as soon as sneer at you.

Some predictable stuff happens -- Ray breaks out of the hospital prison ward, with the help of his "deef and dumb" other brother, George (Harry Bellaver), who can read lips and acts as a sort of spy for the family, visually eavesdropping on the conversations between the doctors and policemen who guard the prisoners.

Insisting that Brooks is responsible for Johnny's death, Ray whips up a race riot, rounding up his lug friends to stage an attack on the African-American part of town. The black men in the community get the drop on them, though, learning of the preparations and sending an even larger force to beat them to a pulp.

This results in perhaps the film's most singularly powerful moment, in which family members of the injured men crowd inside the hospital as their loved ones are brought inside. One woman can't stand to see Brooks treating her guy, and spits in his face. The stunned doctor simply walks away, fleeing out into the night.

Notable aside: screen icons Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee turn up in supporting roles as Dr. Brooks' brother and his wife. Though they did not get a screen credit, these are far meatier roles than the usual sort of background screen cameos you saw in this era. The husband leaves their shared home to go join the fight, talking about going for a walk. When his wife tries to stop him, his mother quietly admonishes the younger woman to let the man make his own choices.

I was expecting the Davis character to turn up dead or gravely injured -- that's how these kinds of movies normally go -- and was glad to see the film avoid the usual tropes. 

The film wastes some time and energy on Johnny Biddle's ex-wife, Edie (the sloe-eyed Linda Darnell), who gets sucked into the story. Ray refuses the doctors' request to perform an autopsy on his brother, ostensibly because he doesn't want to see him cut open but really because he fears Dr. Brooks was correct in his diagnosis of a brain tumor. So the chief resident, Dr. Wharton (Stephen McNally), and Brooks track her down thinking she's the next of kin.

Edie has escaped Beaver Canal, just barely, living hand-to-mouth in a tiny apartment with a job she hates. She goes to see Ray at the hospital, and here it's suggested they had an affair behind Johnny's back while she was still married to him. Ray, who has a brute's sense of cunning, stokes Edie's nascent racial resentment and convinces her to help him.

Her heart gets turned around, however, by Dr. Wharton's warm-hearted maid, Gladys (Amanda Randolph), who nurses her back to health after a drunken bender. Things wind up with Edie helping Dr. Brooks against Ray -- whose shield of raging machismo comes crashing down when his shot-up leg starts pumping blood all over.

I respected the way the filmmakers give depth and breadth to even the smallest characters, such as Lefty Jones, a black orderly played by Dots Johnson. Lefty has an angry scar down the side of his face, compliments of the likes of Ray Biddle. He and the other orderlies view Dr. Brooks as something of a personal hero, and are angry when he shows restraint at all the racial taunts. Their alignment is underscored by the similarities in the white outfits worn by the orderlies and Brooks' doctor kit.

It's a pretty bold thing for a movie in 1950 to show the righteous anger of the black man -- Lefty and his fellows don't even appear to get arrested for their assault on the Beaver Canal gang. "No Way Out" is one of those good movies that gets better the more you think about it.

Reeling Backward: "Alice in Wonderland" (1933)

To bone up for this Friday's release of Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland," I figured it would be a good idea to do a little research on previous film versions and the source material. As a boy, I didn't have much contact with the original book by Lewis Carroll, so I felt I needed some education.

I'm glad I did.

First of all, I hadn't realized that Lewis Carroll was a pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who reputedly came up with the basis for the story while on a boat trip with a friend and his three daughters.

The other thing I didn't know is that there was more than one book. The 1865 "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" was followed seven years later by "Through the Looking-Glass." In the many film adaptations, characters and story elements from both books are usually mashed up together. This isn't as hard as it sounds, since the novels were part of the literary nonsense movement that loved to play around with reality and perceptions.

So the Red Queen, Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and the White Knight all came from the second book, and have been shoe-horned into the movies.

The first Alice story begins when she chases the White Rabbit down his hole, while the second began when Alice becomes convinced there's a whole other world on the other side of the large mirror in her drawing room, and passes through it. The 1933 film version directed by Norman Z. McLeod from a screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz contains both entries: First she goes through the looking glass, then she falls down the rabbit hole.

There have been many film versions of the Alice stories -- including a Disney animated version and at least three silent films -- and none of them are really definitive. The 1933 is probably best known, mostly because it starred then-fledgling actors Gary Cooper and Cary Grant in small roles. (The photo accompanying this column is a publicity still of Grant with the costume he wore to play the Mock Turtle.)

The film hasn't been available on video until now, but a new DVD is being released in conjunction with the opening of Tim Burton's version, which I have no doubt will be a distinctive departure.

I guess the thing that most struck me while watching the 77-minute film (cut down from the original 90) is how easily it could have fit into the oeuvre of surrealists like Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, or even the acid-induced fantasias of the 1960s and '70s.

I suppose small children would enjoy the ridiculous nature of the goings-on, but I have to say I found the film rather tedious. It's a mash-up of Victorian etiquette and absurdist imagery -- such as Grant's Mock Turtle, a play on mock turtle soup. He's made up of different animal parts, with a cow's head, and isn't very happy about it.

My favorite scene was the introduction of the Red Queen, ordering "Off with their heads" for virtually everyone she meets. I did like the game of croquet played with flamingos as mallets.

Charlotte Henry plays Alice, and W.C. Fields turns up as Humpty Dumpty, and a very grumpy version, too. A young Billy Barty had small roles as two different babies, even though he was 9 years old at the time. It wouldn't do to have the Duchess tossing a real baby up into the area, so a Little Person was cast instead.

Gary Cooper's role as the very aged White Knight appears near the end of the film, with Alice calling him the nicest person she's met on her strange journey -- even though he keeps falling out of his saddle.

The Mad Hatter has only a small appearance in the book and movie, so it'll be interesting to see him turned into the main character in Burton's version, with Johnny Depp tackling the role. With all the twisting, changing and amalgamation of Lewis Carroll's stories in the 1933 and other film versions, I can't imagine that the new one will somehow be more offensive than the others.

1.5 stars



(Apologies for the video; since it hasn't been available on video before, all I could find were clips someone got from filming their TV when it played on Turner Classic Movies.)

Reeling Backward: "Julius Caesar"

At the risk of sounding foolish, I have never really cared for William Shakespeare.

When I say that, I'm talking about actual performances of his plays, as opposed to reading them. The Bard's work is really best experienced textually, where you can look at the words, repeat them to yourself, study them and -- as is often necessary -- research them to figure out just what the heck ol' Will was saying.

It's not just the half a millennium that has passed between us, with a changing set of historical reference points and the understandable migration of the English language over that time.

Shakespeare was writing for an extremely literate audience -- one that lived in a city large enough to support a playhouse, and populated by people rich enough to afford to go. So he wrote long, beautiful prose that no living person, now or then, could possibly conjure to their lips on the spur of the moment.

I guess that's the thing I've never been able to get past with Shakespeare: It just doesn't sound anything like real people talking. Even the very best orators are not off-the-cuff eloquent and cohesive in their speech -- just listen to the difference when President Obama doesn't have a teleprompter in front of him.

Or, to get the fully glory of "ums," "y'knows" and the general disorderliness of regular people talking, just tune in to any of the podcasts we do over at The Film Yap.

All this is a rather long wind-up to saying that although I appreciated the wonderful acting performances and production values of Joseph L. Mankiewicz' 1953 production of "Julius Caesar," I simply had too hard a time piercing the dense fog of beautiful but confounding dialogue to really appreciate the film.

The cast is magnificent. John Gielgud plays Cassius, the main instigator of the uprising against Julius Caesar, who had defeated all his enemies and been declared Rome's dictator for life. James Mason is Brutus, Caesar's good friend and "the noblest man of Rome," who leads the assassins because he feels Caesar has usurped too much power.

Caesar -- a relatively minor character in the play and film that bears his name -- is played by Louis Calhern. And Marlon Brando is Mark Antony, his best friend and right-hand man. Edmund O'Brien is Casca, Greer Garson is Caesar's wife Calpurnia, and Deborah Kerr is Brutus' wife Portia.

The story is well known, so I won't belabor describing the plot. The film's high point is Marc Antony's address to the Roman throng on the stairs of the Senate shortly after Caesar's murder, where he slyly indicts Brutus and his co-conspirators without ever coming right out and saying it.

But really, the most compelling figure of the film is Brutus, who is played by Mason as a man of pure heart struggling with inner conflict. Even Mark Antony honors Brutus, even as he maneuvers to oust him and capture power for himself.

The depiction of Caesar's murder is particularly bloody for a 1953 film, but since the play had scenes with his murderers dipping their hands in his blood and so forth, it would be hard to film a family-friendly version.

The costumes, sets and other production values are top-notch -- this film won the Academy Award for art direction.

Although I must say those Caesar haircuts are distracting -- you know the ones, where the hair is parted a the crown of the head and combed forward. No matter how handsome the actor, he always looks like he's wearing linguine with that style.

I also couldn't help but notice that both Mason and Gielgud wear Roman-style sandals, but with a high heel that adds a few inches to their height. Both actors were tallish, just under 6 feet, so the effect is to make them loom over most of the rest of the cast. I didn't notice any other actors wearing lift shoes, and if you glance at their feet when they're visible in a few scenes, it's rather comical.

I hope you won't think ill of me that I just can't get into Shakespeare -- at least rote recitations of his plays. I think the best way to experience his timeless works is with movies that recast his language and setting in modern idioms, like Baz Luhrmann's 1996 "Romeo + Juliet" or the 1995 version of "Richard III" starring Ian McKellan.

Or just under a good lamp, with reading glasses, if necessary.

2.5 stars