Cleopatra, page 15
Cleopatra on Film
Was it accidental that the stage name of Theda Bara, who played the Egyptian queen in the 1917 film Cleopatra, is an anagram of Arab Death? Whether or not it was intentional, the studio made much of it as they created a fake identity for a young actress, transforming Theodosia Burr Goodman from Cincinnati into either an Arab or (in some versions) an Egyptian, the daughter of a Frenchwoman and either a sheikh or an Italian sculptor. The official story was that she had spent her childhood in Egypt in the shadow of the Sphinx. Sexy, exotic, Eastern, the girl from Cincinnati was referred to in the popular press as “the Serpent of the Nile.”
The stills and sixteen seconds of film that remain and can be watched on YouTube are a perfect summation of the ways in which Cleopatra has been represented in visual art and on the screen: sly, sexy, exotic, half-naked. In a 1936 radio interview, Theda Bara, then fifty-one and retired from acting, described the “great fun” and challenge of making the film. The studio had no research department, and the actors had to find historical models for their own costumes. She claims to have worked with the curator of Egyptology at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it has been said that Bara, whose father was a tailor, cut the patterns herself.
Quite possibly the curator steered her away from the Egyptian collection toward the work of the orientalist painters, the lurid fantasies of Gérôme and Cabanel, the baroque ecstasies of Guercino. For Theda Bara’s Cleopatra, costume meant almost no clothes. Her outfits vary from Asian-themed nightgowns to something a stripper might wear. With diaphanous cloths wrapped around her hips, minimal breast plates, and her skirts falling open to the thigh, she’s a French painting gone pre–Production Code Hollywood. Among her more ornate articles of clothing is a skirt with a long train made entirely of peacock feathers.
In one of her most extravagant outfits, Bara is naked from the waist up except for two circular metal cages, like two coiled serpents, each wound around one of her breasts. These elaborate Art Deco adornments are attached to her shoulders by golden chains.
We can assume that the filmmakers had little interest in what the historical Cleopatra wore when she signed tax exemptions or met with the architects rebuilding Alexandria. Like the Cleopatra played by Vivien Leigh almost thirty years later, Theda Bara’s queen is feline, but less a kittenish nymphet than a burlesque sex symbol. Her vampish makeup recalls the famous photo of Colette sitting with her legs crossed and cat whiskers drawn on her cheeks.
Of course the producers calculated that sex and a practically naked woman would sell more tickets than a film about a woman making decisions about irrigation projects. The problem again is not the focus on Cleopatra’s love affairs but that the sole focus is on her love affairs. One wonders what the message was for young women at the start of the First World War: if you want to be famous, or immortal, find the richest, most powerful men and wear a transparent sarong and golden snakes on your breasts. And what did the film say to men? Women, especially Eastern women, were scheming, heartless, deceitful, and half-crazed with lust and sin.
The Theda Bara film has been said to have been at least partly inspired by H. Rider Haggard’s novel Cleopatra. With its antiquated language, its faux-archaic diction, the 1889 novel seems oddly modern, only because the prose style and the plot conventions of its genre—the exotic adventure fantasy—have not changed much over the intervening years. Ideally, the racist exoticism of Haggard’s work (most famously King Solomon’s Mines, which inspired several sequels and films) has by now been largely excised from the genre, but you can open Haggard’s novel at random and find a passage that would not seem out of place in a newly published romance.
Here is how the book begins:
By Osiris, who sleeps at Abouthis, I write the truth.
I, Harmachis, Hereditary Priest of the Temple, reared by the divine Sethi, aforetime a Pharaoh of Egypt, and now justified in Osiris and ruling in Amenti. I, Harmachis, by right Divine and by true descent of the blood King of the Double Crown, and Pharaoh of the Upper and Lower Land. I, Harmachis, who cast aside the opening flower of our hope, who turned from the glorious path, who forgot the voice of God in hearkening to the voice of a woman, I, Harmachis, the fallen, in whom are gathered up all woes as waters are gathered in a desert well, who have tasted of every shame, who through betrayal have betrayed, who in losing the glory that is here have lost the glory which is to be, who am utterly undone—I write, and by Him who sleeps at Abouthis, I write the truth.
Our narrator is a priest who has been ordered to drive Cleopatra and the Romans out of Egypt and restore the land to its true glory.
Disguised as a physician, Harmachis is with Cleopatra in her final hours and poisons her, watering her poison and hoping she won’t recognize him until he reveals his identity.
“What’s this?” she cried; “I grow cold, but I die not! Thou dark physician, thou has betrayed me!”
“Peace, Cleopatra! Presently shalt thou die and know the fury of the Gods! The curse of Menkau-ra hath fallen! It is finished! Look upon me, woman! Look at this marred face, this twisted form, this living mass of sorrow! Look! look! Who am I?”
She stared upon me wildly.
“Oh! oh!” she shrieked, throwing up her arms; “at last I know thee! By the Gods, thou art Harmachis!—Harmachis risen from the dead!”
In the novel, Cleopatra’s crime is that she has betrayed the temple priest for Mark Antony—and sold out Egypt to Rome. Haggard’s novel was meant to be entertaining, as I suppose it was for readers whose enjoyed extremely bad writing plus Eastern cruelty plus operatic Asiatic passion.
Why should the two Hollywood films about Cleopatra—Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 epic starring Claudette Colbert and the 1963 extravaganza with Elizabeth Taylor in the title role—be so much more upsetting than Boccaccio calling Cleopatra “truly notable for almost nothing, except her ancestry and beauty; she was known throughout the world for her greed, cruelty, and excess”? Perhaps because the films are closer to us in time, and we feel more responsible; perhaps because it takes so much longer to watch the films (the 1963 film is four and a half hours long) than to read Boccaccio’s brief damning sentences, so our investment is greater. Perhaps it was because Boccaccio was a better artist then the people responsible for the films. Or perhaps it is because the 1963 film was said to have been the most expensive movie ever made. So much money squandered on such a flawed production! It would be naive to complain that the films continue the long tradition of fixating on Cleopatra’s romantic life rather than her political and public one. In fact both screenplays feature battles, an assassination, and a historic public procession, but Cleopatra is, once again, more of a bystander than a ruler.
As “the cunning Queen of the Nile,” Claudette Colbert wields her beauty like a weapon. Playful, seductive, insinuating, she lures Roman leaders Julius Caesar (Warren William) and Mark Antony (Henry Wilcoxon) into her web. Though the film begins with a claim that it is based on “historical sources,” no source as far as I know exists for its opening scenes.
First we see Cleopatra’s maids bringing a sumptuous feast to her boudoir, only to find that she has vanished. She has been kidnapped, thrown into a speeding chariot, taken out to the desert, tied to a post, and left to die—like the damsel in the Victorian melodrama, bound to the train tracks by the mustachioed villain.
The kidnapping is her brother’s doing. Young Ptolemy XIII is back in Alexandria with Caesar, who is about to sign a decree making Ptolemy the sole ruler of Egypt. Can nothing be done to stop him? Her predicament gives Cleopatra an excellent reason to dream up the stunt of being rolled up in the carpet, smuggled back into the city, and dropped at Caesar’s feet.
But the brilliance of her plan pales beside the outfit that she has chosen for her journey in the rug: a low-slung skirt, open to the thigh, and a silken scarf wound around her neck, half covering her breasts. What is striking is not just that she is as naked as Theda Bara, as fetchingly nude as the women in the orientalist paintings. It is that the drape of the cloth and the way it follows her curves reminds us that clothing can be much more suggestive than bare flesh.
As the scene progresses, Cleopatra delivers one awful, cringe-worthy line after another:
“Women should be toys for the great—it becomes them both.”
“I’m no longer a queen, I’m a woman.”
“Pothinus absconded with me to the desert and left me there to die. But nothing could stop me from greeting you.”
“It seems strange to see you working. I’ve always pictured you either fighting . . . or loving.”
The film goes out of its way to display—and sensationalize—the profligacy and decadence of which Cleopatra has been accused. The film appeared at one of the low points of the Great Depression. Nineteen thirty-four was also the year Adolf Hitler declared himself head of the German state. The splendor of the Egyptian court, presided over by a Ptolemaic sex goddess, was surely intended to provide distraction from the country’s current and impending troubles.
Dissolving a giant pearl in a glass of wine would have seemed like a sad little party trick compared to the show Cleopatra stages within moments of luring Antony onto her barge. A bevy of dancing girls wriggle along the floor, each holding a large clam shell heaped with pearls and jewels. In an ecstasy of pride and orgiastic generosity, Antony and Cleopatra scoop jewels from the clam shells and fling them at a crowd scrambling to grab the loot until they are driven back by Egyptian officials with whips. Eventually, the riot morphs into a dance scene featuring women writhing in revealing leopard-skin costumes.
If each version of Cleopatra’s life reflects the era in which it was created, the vehicles for Theda Bara and Claudette Colbert illustrate the twentieth century’s discovery of the extent to which sex can sell a product. Of course this was nothing new. Cabanel and the other orientalist painters understood that the wealthy collector would feel more comfortable buying a canvas of a half-naked beautiful woman if she had a royal lineage: a historical figure with an exoticized background in the classics. But only in the twentieth century did Hollywood realize how profitable it could be: a passionate woman seducing two of antiquities’ most famous and powerful men.
Starting with Cleopatra being kidnapped and left to die in the desert, the DeMille film has a casual relation to the facts. Its most elaborate scene is one that historians are fairly sure did not happen: the triumphal procession announcing Cleopatra’s arrival to see Julius Caesar in Rome. It is widely agreed that both Caesar and Cleopatra had every reason for wanting to keep her visit to Rome quiet and avoid a spectacular show. But in the film we watch Cleopatra follow her lover in the riotous, heavily populated parade, regally enthroned on a float decorated with hawks and other symbols of Hollywood Deco Egypt.
At the end of the film, the snake bites Cleopatra in the breast, but it is done very tastefully and discreetly. The queen’s hands are decorously positioned to hide the fangs sinking into her flesh. Even after death she manages to remain not only upright but regal: our final glimpse of her, enthroned against an elaborate backdrop, recalls almost precisely the pride and dignity with which she presided over her triumphal entry into Rome.
Perhaps the only thing that can be said for the film, in contrast to other cinematic versions of Cleopatra’s story, is that it avoids the appalling racist caricatures found in the 1945 Caesar and Cleopatra and in the 1963 Cleopatra. In fact no actors of color appear to have been cast, though there is one distressing scene in which Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, tells her Roman girlfriend that her husband is in Egypt with his new mistress. It is all very giggly and feminine. The women are trying to figure out what Cleopatra looks like—that is, how serious a rival she is. It never occurs to them that anything would matter to a man except a woman’s beauty.
“Is she Black?” asks one of the women, and they dissolve in laughter. Why do these Roman women think the idea is so hilarious? Calpurnia and her friends are white and blond, their hair meticulously and tightly waved in the fashion of Hollywood thirties starlets. Cleopatra is no less white, but her black hair and tipped-up eyeliner is intended to signal something more . . . Asiatic.
The life of Cleopatra has again been transformed into a crowd-pleasing orientalist fantasy. For the price of a ticket, American moviegoers could go into a theater and let Cleopatra’s problems distract them from their own.
Many stories—some clearly true, some probably apocryphal—surround the making of the 1963 film now popularly known as the “Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra.” One anecdote concerns the first time Taylor actually watched the whole film on a screen—and vomited.
Even the film’s admirers can sympathize with Taylor’s response. Throughout much of the filming, she suffered from a series of serious illnesses and was repeatedly hospitalized. A severe bout of pneumonia required an emergency tracheotomy. On set, the married actress fell in love with her married co-star, Richard Burton. From the start, the Taylor-Burton love affair was tempestuous, allegedly marred by drunken violence.
And it’s quite simply a terrible film. Taylor is called upon to deliver lines that not even the greatest actor could say with a straight face—and it’s her job to make us believe them.
The film’s inordinate length is only one manifestation of its peculiar sense of its own grandeur and importance. It opens with a still shot of a closed theater curtain and a sign that announces the “Overture.” This lasts for two minutes and thirty-five seconds while quasi-Eastern orchestral music, cymbals twinkling and violins sobbing, play as we stare at the curtain.
The film begins with the aftermath of the Battle of Pharsalia. Military encampments dot the panoramic landscape along with pyres burning the corpses of those who have just been killed in Caesar’s war with Pompey. Rex Harrison delivers the opening line, “The smoke of burning Roman dead is just as black and the stink no less.” His entry into Alexandria, by boat, is elaborate. The Sphinx has been moved from the desert to the pier where the Roman ship docks. Pretending that they have come to shop at a farmers market on the palace steps, Julius Caesar is idly wandering about when the young pharaoh and his retinue appear.
Our awareness of the distance that we have traveled in the seventy years since the film was made comes with our first glimpse of the Black slaves bearing the litter on which Ptolemy rides. Their eyes are staring and vacant, their costumes pornographically skimpy, with elaborate loincloth pouches barely covering their genitals. Our unease is intensified by the film’s portrayal of Pothinus, Ptolemy’s “chief eunuch”—lisping, mincing, made up like a geisha. In case we still don’t get it, Caesar makes a eunuch joke: “Chief eunuch—an exalted rank, taken not without a certain . . . shall we say . . . sacrifice?”
Among the most bizarrely entertaining books written about Cleopatra is My Life with Cleopatra: The Making of a Hollywood Classic, by Walter Wanger, the film’s producer. An account of the nonstop crises that accompanied the making of the epic, the memoir reads like a cross between a film-set diary and the book of Job. Wanger describes a protracted horror show of costly mistakes, recalculations, revisions, wildly expensive setbacks. When Taylor insisted on being paid a million dollars, the studio proposed long lists of cheaper actresses, among them Joan Collins.
Considerable animosity was generated by the choice of the famous Hollywood hairdresser on whom Taylor insisted, a decision that enraged the British hairdressers’ union. The hem of Taylor’s ostrich-fringed gown caught fire, ignited by matches dropped on the floor. There were multiple changes of location, two directors, writers fired and hired; Lawrence Durrell was engaged to make the characters more nuanced. The insurance company kept insisting that the producers hire another actress to replace the ailing Taylor.
At one point, the production was sued for a hundred thousand dollars by an elephant wrangler who claimed that the company had insulted his elephants by describing them as “wild.” Replacement elephants were imported from the United Kingdom. The handmaidens and slave girls went on strike, claiming that their costumes were too revealing; it is hard to imagine outfits skimpier than the ones that made it onto the screen.
And all the while the budget kept going up, topping out (it was said) at $44 million, around $400 million in “today’s money.” The construction of the London set required, wrote Wanger, “142 miles of tubular steel; enough RR ties for four miles of track; 20,000 cubic feet of timber; seven tons of nails; 300 gallons of paint—in short, enough construction material for a development of about forty houses” (emphasis mine). Palm trees were imported from Holland. Cleopatra’s palace at Alexandria covered twenty acres. Its interior was almost as large and twice as high as Grand Central Station. Each major escalation in the budget necessitated meetings and fights and power shifts. Bad weather hampered the production, appropriately for a film set during an era in which everything depended on the flooding of the Nile.
Repeatedly Wanger explains why Cleopatra’s story was worth telling. “The whole canvas of this great world, with four dynamic personalities fighting for its domination . . . would appeal to every female in the world from eight to ninety. . . . It can be the last word in opulence [emphasis mine, again], beauty, and art—a picture women will love for its beauty and story. After all, it is the story of a woman who almost ruled the world but was destroyed by love.”
The story of a woman who almost ruled the world but was destroyed by love. It was also the story of a woman who ruled Egypt for twenty years but was destroyed by the Roman Empire. But that is not the story that Wanger and his colleagues are telling.
It was a “women’s picture” that promised to earn back the fortune spent on its creation. The film appeared in the same year as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the best seller that suggested that women might want more than children, housework, and the thanks of the local PTA. Possibly for the first time, Cleopatra was seen as a heroic figure, with power, children, love, sexual freedom, amazing real estate, and money. The film offered viewers a fantasy beyond that purveyed by Claudette Colbert and Theda Bara. It made the audience want to be the Egyptian queen with her passionate lovers and fabulous clothes—and despite her harrowing ending. Its producers knew that it was the kind of film that could burnish a career and turn a profit that would silence the critics who had said it could never work.
