February 25: Cleopatra (1963 – Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Rouben Mamoulian & Darryl F. Zanuck)

★★★★

This pop culture classic has a lot going for it.  Its visuals stun with their opulent grandeur.  The sets are justly praised, from the sheer-draped interiors to the justly famous pageantry of Cleopatra’s entry to Rome on a high sphinx platform surrounded by the exoticism of North Africa.  Costuming, too, creates visual pleasure, especially the series of gowns that Elizabeth Taylor wears, most inspired by Egyptian art.  They vary from pleated wraps to rich dresses in a variety fabrics and embroideries.  Her costuming in every sequence of the film is something interesting to look at.  Taylor’s makeup and hair styling also keep her as a focus for the eye, from her outlandish Egyptian eye style that can appear as blue eye-shadow or even sequins to her 60s-inflected piles of black hair.  Cleopatra always gives us something on screen worth looking at, generally around the character of the queen.

For all its problems, the script here also gives us points of narrative interest.  The film’s five-and-a-half hour run time gives us two tragedies of historic importance, the assassination of Julius Caesar and the deaths of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, as well as two different love stories in their entirety.  And though the script’s larger structure has serious flaws, each individual scene is a jewel of language with the wit and skill that we expect from dialogue crafted largely by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.  The writer's precision of the word choice encourages us to pay close attention to shifts in mood and character relationships throughout each scene.

But it’s also true that the script is the biggest problem in Cleopatra.  After colossal delays and budget overruns, Mankiewicz ended up writing as he was directing, and that’s obvious in the uneven, first-draft feel of the script.  The two halves of the film seem like separate movies, the first half a witty romance between an established older man and a vivacious younger woman and the second half a Shakespearean tragedy of domed love.  There’s little flow of tone between the two parts, and the only tenuous plot connection is Antony’s brief encounters with Cleopatra toward the end of the Part I.  In fact, the script misses many opportunities to develop Antony in its first half when such detail would have made the second part much deeper.

The haste of writing might also explain the muddled motivations of the central character, Cleopatra.  In the first half of the film, it seems she’s mostly in love with Julius Caesar, though the occasional line makes us wonder if power isn’t a big motivation, too.  This confusion comes to the fore in the second half, when Cleopatra’s motivation varies from scene to scene.  At one point, she’s pushing Antony to ever-greater achievement and using him for her own purposes, but at the next point, she’s a lover concerned for his happiness and well-being and distraught over him to the point to suicide.  In flipping Cleopatra’s motivation haphazardly between love and power, Mankiewicz’s script gives us a hero with little cohesion at the center of the film.

Mankiewicz doesn’t excel at directing action, either.  He produces grand-scale scenes well, like the one at the beginning of the film that shows the aftermath of a battle, but his direction of action is seems desultory.  Battle and fight scenes have an almost perfunctory quality to them, and Battle of Actium, the major naval battle that resulted in Antony and Cleopatra’s final military defeat, looks painfully like models with an occasional roman candle arcing over the scene.

So Cleopatra is not without its flaws.  Effective in individual scenes, its script lacks the larger structure that would have made this film more coherent and moving, and Mankiewicz misses his opportunity for great epic action.  Still, this sprawling movie has great visuals that hold our attention and dialogue that certainly entertains.  It’s worth spending time with for just those.