Tonight we were back with our old friend Cecil B. DeMille, director of Hollywood Spectaculars like "Sign Of The Cross" and "King Of Kings", both of which we watched last year. This evening's selection was DeMille's 1934 version of "Cleopatra", which was unknown to me until I discovered it, as usual, in a "DeMille" search of the library database. CBD's "Cleopatra" predates the monumental 1963 remake by nearly three decades, and runs only half it's length at an hour and forty minutes, but because it is a DeMille production it is still epic in scope and delivery.
Elizabeth Taylor is the most famous "Cleopatra", and I haven't seen her performance, but Claudette Colbert, who we saw in DeMille's "Sign Of The Cross" as the decadent Empress Poppaea, does a fine job here as the Egyptian Queen who uses her powers of seduction to ward off a Roman takeover of her country, by wooing first Julius Caesar and then his successor Marc Antony. In both of these roles for DeMille, Colbert is scantily clad and turns up the heat, which will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with her later roles in the 30s and 40s playing mostly "nice women".
Cleopatra is nice, but has only one option for survival (for herself and her country), which is to throw herself at the Roman leaders. I think we may have learned some if not all of the history of this story in 8th grade. I know we learned about Julius Caesar and the Ides Of March, but I did not know until tonight that Cleopatra was with him on that day, as his lover who was to help Caesar unite Rome and Egypt. Maybe they didn't teach us that part in school.
So, after the Ides, Caesar was toast and Marc Antony took over. A DeMille regular named Henry Wilcoxon does a great job of bringing Antony to life. I knew, again from eighth grade, that Marc Antony was a great Roman leader, and I knew from movies that he was in love with Cleopatra after Caesar was murdered, but I did not know the way in which he was in turn conspired against, by Senators who wanted Cleopatra out of the picture permanently because of the effect she was having on the Roman leaders. Octavius is the one who finally took a stand against her, and I learned all of this tonight watching the film, which is excellent both as history and entertainment. The sets (on Paramount sound stages) are as large-scale and elaborate as you have come to expect from DeMille, who was so far ahead of his time that he really was the first to create the Blockbuster movie paradigm that filmgoers are used to seeing now. He was making Major Motion Pictures 80 to 90 years ago, and he was making them to standards that, in some ways, surpass even the blockbusters of today.
Besides the larger-than-life filmmaking, what I took away from DeMille's "Cleopatra" was the history lesson. The story includes a few of the elements I knew in the back of my mind from "educational storage", like the romance between Antony and Cleopatra, and the Asp, but what involved me in the story was the details of Cleopatra's romances, first with Julius Caesar, and the reasons she let herself be taken under their authority.........or was it the other way around?
The story of Cleopatra is a story of female empowerment, not from an established platform gained over years and years of political battling, but from one woman's insight into the character of her male opponents. When she meets Caesar she knows instantly how to win his heart, and as it turns out, her desire is authentic. She is hoping to win peace through love and is not manipulating him.
But her deepest love develops for Marc Antony after Caesar is assassinated ("Et tu, Brute"?). Antony will also fall to his very soul for her, against his ingrained distrust of women. As a war general, he has spent his adult life around fighting men. He knows the strategies of battle, but not those of a woman's sexual psychology. His unfamiliarity in this regard will prove to be his undoing, though it is unlikely that any man could have been a match for Cleopatra's wiles or kept up with her plotting, even when she was doing the right thing and trying to save their lives.
Two Very Big Thumbs Up for DeMille's "Cleopatra", then. At 102 minutes, it moves along at an exciting pace and never drags, and the sets are of course incredible, as are Colbert's costumes.
Highly recommended along with "Sign Of The Cross" as a companion piece. /////
I am super sleepy so I will sign off and see you in the morning. Much love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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