Cleopatra

Kamala: I will introduce this one because it is one of my favorite movies ever. Cleopatra is famous for being the "biggest flop" in the history of American film. This doesn't mean it isn't good, in fact I think it is awesome. Cleopatra is a perfect example of a huge budget studio epic. And I mean HUGE budget. For Cleopatra's triumph in Rome, they covered Elizabeth Taylor in gold and paraded her along the streets of a realistic and large looking Rome on a 40 foot tall statue of Anubis being pulled by maybe 30-50 elaborately dressed slaves. This movie was a spectacle designed to draw public attention from television back to the failing studio system. It was received well, but didn't do phenomenally well in the box office and as a result 20th Century Fox was plunged into debt. Wikipedia says it cost the equivalent of $300 million 2007 dollars. Despite all of this I think it is a wholly enjoyable movie to watch.

Emily: Kamala didn't tell me that Rex Harrison would be in this one, his Julius Caesar was a pleasant surprise. Kamala gushed about how much she likes Burton/Taylor movies for like 5 minutes before we started it. Apparently this was their first film together, during the filming of which they fell in love and Liz dumped her husband at the time whose name I forget.

Kamala:Eddie Fisher

Emily: You are a nerd. Anyways it was soooo long. The director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz also directed All About Eve, the first movie we watched. I didn't like this one that much, they kind of tooled with the history and the screenplay was horrible. But, I am glad we watched it because it fits perfectly into our project. Cleopatra is a perfect example of a movie fraught with the problems indicative of the plight of the big studios in the early 1960s. There were conflicts over the casting, directing, editing, costumes, shooting location, and Elizabeth Taylor even became deathly ill and needed a tracheotomy at one point. The film was made with no shooting script and the screenplay in the final version is rumored to be mainly improvisation by the principal actors.

Kamala: I will admit it is a little long. Mankiewicz had trouble with Fox, and there are a few different cuts varying in length. We saw the premiere version that ran 234 minutes. Films like Cleopatra showed the faults of the studio system to budding filmmakers who wanted to be able to preserve their artistic vision. There was this character in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, released in France also in 1963, played by Jack Palance who was every director's nightmare producer, perverting Fritz Lang's austere and beautiful film version of Homer's Odyssey. Independent filmmakers were able to work outside of the constraints of producers like this who were a dime a dozen in the large studios.

Tomorrow we will watch a collection of recently released, small budget short films by William S. Burrows.



you can see her tracheotomy scar in that picture if you look closely