Cecil B DeMille 1934 USA
Starring: Claudette Colbert, Warren William, Henry Wilcoxon, Ian Keith, Gertrude Michael
When you say the word Cleopatra to a film fan there's a pretty good chance that they'll start talking about the 1963 Joseph L Mankiewicz epic with Elizabeth Taylor in the main role. This is a different, lesser-known incarnation with Claudette Colbert as the queen and Cecil B DeMille at the helm and surprisingly one in which Colbert outdoes Taylor in both venom and vampiness. As the film opens we see an unmade bed and as the camera pans across the room a man, apparently dead, with another trussed up beside him and a bird looking on - I'd heard stories about Cleopatra's reputation but, damn. As it turns out she's actually been kidnapped by the Prime Minister's forces and abandoned in the desert with the warning that she'll be killed if she tries to return. Within 15 minutes not only has she returned (unfurled from a carpet no less), she's seduced Julius Caesar into divorcing his wife and dispatched her abductor with a combination of nonchalance and a javelin. The scene is brilliantly written with the pair matching wits and exchanging barbs before the film unexpectedly cuts away from them, instead favouring the rumour-mill of Rome for the next 15 minutes. This may sound slightly anaemic in terms of narrative but it's all that's needed. Indeed, it's easy to see how Caesar could fall for her that quickly and, despite her apparently doing it to gain power, how Cleopatra could be heartbroken at the suggestion that he didn't really love her. Later big, dumb, beautiful Marc Anthony (a mildly wooden Henry Wilcoxon) travels to Egypt to bring her back to Rome in chains but is soon reduced from a manly general to a love-struck boy, bewitched at the incredible set-pieces that she (and DeMille) set out before him, one of beautiful women dressed as tigers jumping through flaming hoops and nets of clams filled with jewels. It's exactly the kind of spectacle you may expect from DeMille but actually the first in what's otherwise a rather talky, theatrical production. Still, the most shocking thing here is how much DeMille gets away with considering that the Hays Code had just taken effect; he even has an apparently naked but strategically lit slave girl holding an incense burner in each hand in the title sequence. Likewise, when Cleopatra appears in front of Caesar for the first time Colbert is wearing little more than your average WWE Womens Champion. I've got to admit a little disappointment in the lack of accents - at times it seems not to matter whether a character is Egyptian, Roman or Judean as they all have an American twang - but I can sort of except it in this case because no-one makes the effort. Still, for a film with a few flaws and only one really great actor/actress (Colbert) I liked this very much.
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