forget about love!
by Douglas Messerli
by Douglas Messerli
Waldemar
Young and Vincent Lawrence (writers, based on historical material adapted by
Bartlett Cormack), Cecil B. DeMille (director) Cleopatra / 1934
Cecil
B. DeMille’s 1934 extravaganza, Cleopatra,
rightfully should be laughed away (which, upon several occasions it almost was
in the showing I recently saw at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), mocked,
even booed as it is rumored Italian audiences greeted it upon its first showing
in that country. Despite his legendary role in Hollywood filmmaking, DeMille
might have been better off as a grand wedding planner, an organizer of public
provincial festivals, or a circus impresario (the talent for which he memorably
displayed in his The Greatest Show on
Earth)—he might have succeeded at nearly any grand task other than climbing
behind a motion picture lens.
Letting loose entire choruses of nubile maidens
swathed in swatches of sinuous, often see-through, sequined fabric, the
director gave a prurient wink to the maddest of Hollywood decorators and
set-designers who quickly corrected Cleopatra’s illegible hieroglyphs into
fashionable Art-Deco domes.
As Anthony, the hunky Henry Wilcoxon,
drops his mouth and widens his eyes, Claudette Colbert purrs, “I was going to
try to seduce you. But I now know that all of that is impossible”—or something
to that effect. And when, a few moments later, the Egyptian slave girls pull
out a large satin curtain to hide the inevitable tête-à -tête between Cleopatra
and her new “master,” we are hardly surprised when the camera slyly pans down
in the direction of the audience to reveal Apollodorus (Irving Pichel) beating
out the rhythm for his oarsman to steer the queen’s barge back to Alexandria
with her “captor” captivated withal. It’s clear the Hays folk, just recently
established, thank heaven, hadn’t yet gotten their act together.
Despite the preposterous pomposity of
this and previous scenes, we too have somehow been tamed—or at least
entertained—enough to hold back our snickers. If nothing else, we have to
admit, Colbert’s Cleopatra is one smart beauty queen, worthy of every dollar
the producers paid to so scantily clad her bod. After all, anyone who can
declaim the line, “I admire men who don’t love women,” without a blink of
irony, freezes all those who might declare this quirky work to be merely a
piece of camp—straight in their tracks.
Besides, by this time, DeMille, who had
apparently seen a couple of foreign movies, probably Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, soon after he plays
out the entire battle scenes between Anthony and Octavian heading their
Egyptian and Roman armies in a mad frenzy of montage. Who cares if we can’t tell the difference
between one side or the other? It’s a wow! Like filming in the old New York
Hippodrome! Pure spectacle! Yep, DeMille can always be relied upon to give you
that.
Los Angeles,
October 16, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment