_Cleopatra_ (1963)

There you go, right there -- this movie defines "spectacle" for me. Even the bad parts make it good. The only reason I watched that Liz Taylor TV movie bio with Sherilyn Fenn was to see Fenn as Taylor as Cleopatra :)

the other thing is that she thot that the style devolped would work for everything, or a combo of that and the sodden hurtful ranting found in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, so she just rose the volume.

i think that whos afraid of virgina woolf was an embarrassing failure, and the beginning of the end for someone who was one of the best phyiscal actresses ever.

...Ned, have you seen De Mille's Cleopatra from the 1930s? If you like beautiful spectacle you will love it. De Mille invented this sort of thing, after all. I believe it won an Oscar for best cinematography. Claudette Colbert plays Cleopatra (I always want to pronounce it "Clee-oh-pat-ter"). Also it's only 100 minutes long. It's playing in Chicago on September 13 if you'd like to come. :)

It's kept me from renting it. But I've seen Satantango (seven hours) in the theater and The Nibelungen (five hours) at home....

No, heard about it though. It would be a very interesting compare/contrast.

I think it's the running length what has put me off.

Actually, one thing I like about it is that it is set up to have an intermission in what was then a fairly common practice (see Lawrence of Arabia for another example) -- related to that, the credit sequences and transitions between time/place are exquisite, taking stills or freeze frames and rendering them as worn, long-forgotten paintings that seem to have just been newly rediscovered. It's an absolutely lovely touch, and in combination with the extremely restrained main theme making the opening credits in particular very noteworthy (a modern comparison musically might be how the main Lord of the Rings theme at the start of each film and presumably the last as well is so thoroughly delicate and quiet).

Mankiewicz (not the original instigator of the film; he was actually the second director to tackle it after Rouben Mamoulian bowed out of initial filming) felt that a proper version of the film would be around six hours and lobbied for a two separate films at three hours each, but by that time the cost overruns had reached such levels that Darryl Zanuck vetoed it and oversaw the four-hour cut that currently exists. (There's a couple of extremely abrupt cuts that had to be at Zanuck's hands, along with some strange and sudden fades, but nothing too jarring in the end.) Mankiewicz's heirs in particular have been searching for the lost footage ever since and apologists will have it that apparently some of Burton's best acting is found there, along with a generally more fleshed out story, but so far nothing has turned up, not even audio tracks to use in a reconstruction. You can sense what Mankiewicz was aiming for in the best examples of dialogue/acting/character involvement in the film -- to use his own terms, an 'intimate epic' -- and punishingly long as it would be, a six-hour cut might have made it work.

The opposite of the opening of Meet Me in St. Louis!

btw, i liked carry on cleo.

Well, like I said, I've loved the film from an early age. Usually caught it once a year or every other year during the eighties -- in some chopped up two night version on independent TV, most often. Taped a clean copy of the four hour cut some years ago and then sprung for the DVD when it finally came out.

Not being as familiar with Sirk as I could be, I won't argue the point on visuals -- but there's a lot going on there too, I think Anthony's take on the film as operatic is spot on. The bright scenes are indubitably lush -- gold, gold and more gold! -- but towards the end of the film the darker scenes as Antony and Cleopatra lock into their downward spiral are often strikingly lit and designed. *checks IMDB* Leon Shamroy, cinematographer, John DeCuir, production designer, full marks for both. They had the money to do whatever the hell they wanted and they did it.

Seeing this tonight at the Lightbox. Hopefully they've got in in the big theatre. Full roadshow with intermission--I think LBJ and Chubby Checker will be in attendance.

I bet most people who see this nowadays have the same reaction: "Why was this considered such a debacle?" It's just an old-fashioned spectacle, no worse than many and better than most. Burton gets a little carried away at times, Taylor and Harrison are good, Taylor's cleavage is, you know, spectacular (as is her grand entrance into Rome on her 50-story high Cleopatra-mobile). Not as campy as The Ten Commandments, but it has its moments: my favorite line was "Oh, it's you." I feel like I now, for the first time, fully understand what a diva is. The parts where Cleopatra and Mark Antony would passively-aggressively sulk about who had to make the effort to see whom were excellent. I'm often like that. Hey, I'm a diva.

It lacks De Mille's talent for inexorable momentum, which is to say it drags; and Harrison often turns Caesar into a second string rural Tory MP. But, yeah, it's no worse than other epics.

Not as campy as The Ten Commandments, but it has its moments: my favorite line was "Oh, it's you."

Haha I quoted that upthread somewhere. It's perfect.

It does drag at times, especially in the last hour. I'm cutting it some slack because I was half-expecting Harry Medved-level awful, and it wasn't that--it seemed old-fashioned in the best sense (craft, etc.). I thought the only really bad performance was from Cleopatra's brother, whoever he was--he was a little out there. But they ran him out of town right away, so that wasn't a big problem.

That was such a great line. Also Burton's rant about inbred cretins, and Taylor's "On your knees."

I watch The Ten Commandments every Easter and, haha, the fucking thing has no dead spots. It doesn't stop. Remarkable in its way.

And some great lines in its own right. What's the one from Anne Baxter to Charlton? "Oh Moses, Moses, you impetuous passionate fool!" Or something like that.

Found a transcript online and looked up my favourite line. It's after the Hebrews have been set free and, en masse, they're just about to leave Egypt. Joshua jumps up onto something and calls out the following:

Set the standard of each tribe before all the people. Levites in the center. Judah to the right. Ephraim to the left. Go!

He's addressing what looks to be a few thousand people. Barely raises his voice, but everyone seems to hear him just fine.

My favorite: "You old Nile crocodile!"

The one time Billy Crystal really made me laugh:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Qcv3YV4aA

The one time Rob Schneider made me laugh was something similar.

Okay so I finally got around to reading David Kamp's 1998 VF piece on the making of the film and oh my god:

Far more so than Taylor, Burton was flummoxed, unable to choose between his wife and lover, desperate to have it both ways. Speaking to Kenneth Tynan in Playboy after Cleopatra had wrapped, he futilely tried to defend the Liz-Sybil arrangement with a choice bit of baroque doggerel. “What I have done,” he said, “is to move outside the accepted idea of monogamy without investing the other person with anything that makes me feel guilty. So that I remain inviolate, untouched.”

Stoked to see this on the big screen tomorrow. Hope my ass holds up.

In terms of spectacles of this ilk, I thought The Egyptian (1954) was surprisingly fantastic. As camp, it’s just as good as any Maria Montez movie. But it has better production value (The Ten Commandments used its leftover sets). It’s only awkward when they try shoehorn Jesus Christ into the story despite it being set in 1300 BC. To be expected though since mid-20th Century Hollywood was Jesus-mad.

Yeah so a cinematic viewing has confirmed that this is actually really good. Not at all embarrassing among the company of similar ancient times spectacles of the era. For all the behind-the-scenes turmoil in its production, you wouldn't necessarily suspect anything was amiss from what's on screen. Exceptions: Liz's unexplained tracheotomy scar, and the sudden replacing of her son Caesarean with an Italian boy actor. More importantly, the money is on the screen. And despite its duration - 4 hrs 15 min + 10 minutes intermission - it doesn't really feel slow until the last 30 minutes, when you start to want Cleopatra to just reach for her asp already and wrap things up.

I've read the critic Judith Crist's 1963 pan of the film which was the piece that supposedly made her career, and tbh she makes some good points in it, but I think she falls into the trap of imagining an ideal version of the film rather than engaging with the film that was actually made.

Nice. I envy you the experience!

I do think the original plan of releasing this as two films - perhaps each 2 1/2 hrs in length - would have been the way to go. Because there is a fairly clean break between what would be parts 1 and 2. Personally I didn't mind spending an afternoon lounging around in air conditioning in the middle of a particularly rough NYC heatwave.

It's about to leave Max along with the rest of their Taylor collection. I screened Giant last week, so with that under my belt it still takes a few more days to talk myself into the 4 hours of Cleopatra tonight. But but but Would You Believe the streaming version they're hosting is cropped? It goes from proper 2.39:1 widescreen in the credits to full-frame 16:9 (1.78:1) on this first shot of Caesar, slicing off the edges of the frame, halving the tent on the right and losing a number of the soldiers on the left.

I mean, wtf? There are other old 2.39:1 films on streaming, including Max. Is this Disney's fault?

No wonder I have the Bluray

Truly delighted to learn that this will be the subject of the upcoming season of The Plot Thickens (appropriately enough given the host):

https://www.tcm.com/articles/Programming%20Article/021880/tcm-presents-the-plot-thickens