A multi-coloured bore

At the Cinema
By Freda Bruce Lockhart
AST week's Press Show o , f AST week's Press Show o , f
Cleopatra ("A". Dominion) was held so close upon the CATtiour HERALD'S deadline as to leave me time only for the barest acknowledgment of the arrival of Elizabeth Taylor's Queen of Egypt.
After recollection, reading and discussiorl, my reaction remains that of my first impression : surprise that this monumental spectacle contains so few surprises. I do not mean in the sense that I knew exactly what was going to happen next. I was not that well briefed in Cleopatra's story.
But if I know that a leading commercial film company is sending one of its leading directors. three of the biggest international box-office stars and millions of dollars all over Europe to dig up Cleopatra: I expect the film they bring back will be technically and historically respectable. If I further learn that after innumerable false starts and delays the film to be shown lasts almost four hours (with intermission) I strongly suspect it is likely to be a multicoloured, mammoth bore.
So I found Cleopatra. Admittedly any margin for surprise was to find the film at the same time both better, and even duller than I had anticipated. This apparent contradiction means that while the script, which director Mankiewicz took on, is better written than
had expected; as a motion picture and as a love story it is far duller.
As a motion picture it simply does not move, The spectacle— and spectacular in a static way it emphatically is — consisted of gigantic set pieces, slabs of monumental masonry. They recalled the huge Victorian canvasses in heavy gilt frames which hung on precarious-looking chains all down the big staircase of my childhood.
If any of these pageant scenes
contains a little internal movement —as by the chorus of African dancers. or the unwieldly battles of Actium and Pharsailia, there seems no life to animate them. Only one of these great charades for me Caine tin even the imitation of life proper to spectacle. This was Cleopatra's (legendary?) arrival in Rome. 'The climax had been properly prepared, and .the moment when the Queen. clothed in gold from cap to toe. steps out of a gold machine--part chariot, part invasion barge, part escalator —is as magnificent a spectacular moment as anybody who wants spectacle could wish.
The golden skin is also the costume in which Miss Taylor looks most regal and most handsome. I should like to make clear that I have no prejudice against this actress. I have seen her appear brilliant as well as beautiful—notably in Suddenly Last Summer, A Place in the Sun and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I was prepared for her to be a striking Cleopatra. Instead I found her vulgar, often coarse and muddy-looking.
It has been suggested that Mankiewicz.wanted to play down the love story. the conventional image of the amorous queen. Insofar as he has written about a female animal of political rather than sexual ,passion and ambition. this is where the film is more interestMg than F for one anticipated. But there are too many trite aspects of a Cleopatra sitting in her bath playing with toy barges, or suddenly dressed oat in one of her exotic headdresses but in a gown suggesting a suburban store's dress sale, where Miss Taylor appears too small a schemer for the grandiose dreams of power to appear consistent.
Neither the love-scenes with Caesar (Rex Harrison) before the intermission. nor with Mark Antony' (Richard Burton) after it. catch any fire. Harrison is as good as expected hut no better. a character and an actor who can afford to underplay. Burton, though this too could have been part of a deliberate playing down of the conventional romantic popular image, makes Antony a sorry, crude successor to the subtler Caesar. I watched with total indifference while he died on his own sword but by the time Cleopatra's fingers feeling for a fig had found the asp, 1 had lost touch. Once again I found that four hours of almost any film is too great a strain on eyes, ears, and attention.
But against the slow solemn background of such large-scale spectacle it is difficult for actors to be more than mummies.
One thing has made me look back a little less unkindly upon the Taylor Cleopatra— the BBC programme which I turned to (if Eve McAdam will forgive my trespass) for illumination but which appeared to have strayed from Kindergarten time to late supper on the home.
On the other hand what a relief surely to turn from the sun-baked clay queen of Egypt to the Snow Queen herself. Queen Christina ("A". Empire) is second in the in the series of Garbo revivals. As the history of one of Europe's stranger and sadder but fascinating Catholic monarchs it may be still worse history than Cleopatra, but in many places Rouben Mamoulian's old film is a vastly better movie. The great scene those old enough will remember is where Garbo goes round the room fingering as if to print forever on her memory the objects in the room of her romance.