The Tale is in the Telling

It all starts with a crime.

A shoemaker named Pierre Picaud, living in France in 1807, was happily engaged to a beautiful, wealthy young woman. But the marriage was not to be.

Three men who Picaud considered his friends plotted against him and had him falsely accused of spying for England. Arrested and found guilty, Picaud was sentenced to Fenestrelle Fort, where he was assigned as servant to a rich Italian cleric. The cleric, over the years, grew to view Picaud as something of a son, and when he died he bequeathed him his fortune.

Upon his release from prison, Picaud decided to seek his revenge.

The first of his accusers was found dead with a knife in his throat. The words “Number One” were engraved on the handle.

The second accuser was found poisoned not long after.

The third was different. He had married Picaud’s fiancé, and so something more elaborate had to be planned. Loupian, as the third man was called, was father to a son and daughter. Picaud lured the son into a life of crime and arranged for the daughter to become a prostitute. It was all very elaborate, and everything went according to plan.

Until a fourth man entered the picture.

Unbeknownst to Picaud, his three friends had asked for the aid of a fourth in framing him. The fourth had declined, but had known of the plot, and so was worried his life was in danger. He deduced Picaud’s identity, and fatally stabbed him.

The police report was found, some years later, by a Parisian true crime archivist by the name of Jacques Peuchet. Peuchet published it in a collection of other intriguing murder tales in 1839.

Always on the lookout for inspiration, popular author Alexandre Dumas picked up a copy of Peuchet’s crime stories. Though Peuchet had a good idea of which stories would be interesting, he had an archivist’s skill for narrating (it’s cool, Peuchet, so do I). But Dumas saw the potential in the Picaud story.

He and his writing partner Auguste Maquet set about building a novel around the revenge tale. They changed numerous elements, drawing on an earlier novel they’d done called Georges, about a vengeance obsessed young man lashing out at the bigotry he’d suffered at the hands of his racist community.

For good measure, the Italian cleric was exchanged for actual historical figure Abbé Faria, and an enormous secret treasure was added, as well as some really good stuff about tunnelling out of an island fortress.

In 1844, the first instalment of The Count of Monte Cristo appeared and took France by storm. It was, and remains, a terrifically good story.

My BFF Richard Chamberlain as the Count in 1975

And it was popular! It was an international sensation the likes of which had never been seen before! Normally, a serialized novel would be published gradually in its originating language, then collected, then translated. But with Monte Cristo, each installment was translated right away, and published in magazines around the world. Everyone waited with bated breath to see what would happen to Edmond Dantés in his obsessive quest for revenge.

Time to move forward thirty years and across the Atlantic to the battlefields of the Civil War.

By this time, Monte Cristo was well rooted in the literary consciousness, but it was far from the mind of Major General Lew Wallace after the Battle of Shiloh. The number of Union casualties reported climbed higher and higher, and it was becoming apparent that the Confederates had won the meticulously planned battle. When Lincoln demanded an explanation from generals Grant and Halleck, Halleck blamed Wallace and his unit for the loss.

Wallace felt betrayed and slandered. He wrote to Grant several times asking for a formal enquiry, and tried to encourage William Tecumseh Sherman to help clear his name. Sherman urged patience.

The Shiloh controversy branded Wallace an ill-equipped leader who had failed his country and his fellow soldiers.

After the war, Wallace decided to try his hand at writing fiction. His first novel was about Cortez’s conquest of Mexico. Wallace, like many other officers of his generation, had fought in the Mexican-American War, and it was a subject that fascinated him. That first novel was called The Fair Hand, and it wasn’t much of a success, but the writing of it had so pleased Wallace that he decided to tackle a more ambitious project.

He would combine his own bitterness about the Shiloh affair with the plot and structure of one of his favourite books, The Count of Monte Cristo; and since he had enjoyed the researching of his first novel, he would choose another historical setting. This time, it would be Ancient Rome during the life of Jesus. He was an agnostic and totally uninformed about the place and time he chose, but he diligently studied all resources available at the Library of Congress, and imbued the Roman military with his experiences in the Union Army.

Veterans of the Civil War would find much familiar; unlike Monte Cristo, there was no need to understand the social impact of French politics in the Napoleonic era. All you had to know was the basic story of Jesus, and in 19^th century America, most people did.

Wallace called his second novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It was first published in 1880.

Author Lew Wallace

In the story of Judah Ben-Hur, three wrongful accusers became one man in the Roman tribune Messala. When the betrayed Ben-Hur finds himself working the oars aboard the slave ship, with every push forward he swears his revenge. Just as Edmond Dantés, he finds someone to educate him and help him make his fortune. Then he reappears in glitzy high society to begin his much, much simpler plan of running over his nemesis with a chariot. Judah Ben-Hur doesn’t like to waste time on panache.

Like Monte Cristo before it, it was a runaway smash hit. It was the first novel to be blessed by a Pope. It didn’t get a sandwich named after it, but it did have its own brand of flour. (Tie-in marketing wasn’t really cohesive back then.)

Ben-Hur changed everything for Wallace, even getting him a position as US ambassador to Turkey. Unfortunately, he could never quite escape was the black eye of Shiloh. It wasn’t until after Wallace’s death that Ulysses S. Grant officially explained that the loss had not been Wallace’s fault.

By 1907, the story of Ben-Hur was tightly woven into American popular culture. It was so ubiquitous that Canadian silent film director Sydney Olcott decided to make a quick and cheap fifteen minute silent film depicting the famous chariot race. Neither he nor the producing studio had obtained the rights to do so, and the book was still under copyright, at this time to Wallace’s widow.

In the early days of film, copyright infringement was par for the course. Nobody in Hollywood cared, and the copyright holders felt that there was little they could do about it.

Until Wallace’s widow and the publishers of Ben-Hur, Harper & Brothers, sued the pants off of Kalem Studios and The Motion Picture Patents Company, dragged them all the way to the Supreme Court and in 1911 had the law changed forever. From then on, if anybody wanted to make a film of any previously published work still under copyright, they had to obtain the production rights first.

And that brings us to our next batch of three men. These three weren’t planning on framing anybody for treason, or scapegoating their way out of a Civil War failure, they were trying to make a movie. It was 1925, their names were Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn and Irving Thalberg. They needed a good idea, a framework for their next major project.

Ben-Hur hadn’t been on anybody’s to-do list since the massive lawsuit, but as long as they could get the film rights, why not?

It was a little more expensive than they were hoping. After the copyright debacle in 1907, if you wanted to see a dramatization of Ben-Hur, you had to hit up a long-running play produced by Abraham Erlanger. The play had run, enormously successfully, for twenty-five years. The curtain had barely dropped on the final tour when the Goldwyn Company came a-knocking. Erlanger would not budge on his price for the production rights.

Expensive as it was, the three producers shilled out. There was this vision of the chariot race being shot to look like a painting by Alexander von Wagner, and nobody could shake it. It was a brilliant idea.

Wagner's painting. Click to embiggen.

1925’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was shot on location in Rome, at further expense. Everything was replaced at least once, including the director and the stars. The finished film was helmed by Fred Niblo, and featured Ramon Novarro as Judah Ben-Hur. The scenes featuring Jesus were shot in two-tone Technicolor, and the chariot race remains a spectacular feat of filming. The film clocks in at a comparatively lean two and a half hours, most of it concerning the race.

For a fun Easter egg, you can look at the gallery of stars watching in Roman garb as the chariots thunder by. There’s Louis B. Mayer himself, a very young Joan Crawford, the Gish sisters, the Barrymore brothers, Marion Davies, John Gilbert, Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, all chilling at the circus maximus.

The production was expensive and nobody made back what they put into it, but the film itself was a critical darling and scored big time with audiences. The publicity was excellent, and helped establish the new MGM studios.

Thirty years of relentless innovation and cut-throat deals later, MGM was no longer the new kid on the block. But things weren’t going so well financially. Television had begun to cut considerably into the profits of every studio, and MGM was among those struggling to keep afloat. Discussions of a remake of Ben-Hur had started in 1952, but it wasn’t until Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments raked in major cash for Paramount that the discussion became serious.

In 1957, MGM studio head Joseph Vogel announced that a new, glorious adaptation of Ben-Hur would begin shooting in 1958 and reach theaters in 1959.

One problem: nobody wanted to play Judah Ben-Hur.

The original choice, back in 1952, had been Marlon Brando. By 1957, that seemed like a terrible idea, so MGM approached the ever-golden Burt Lancaster. Lancaster shot down the offer right away. He thought the script was boring, and the way it used Jesus as a side character was kind of offensively weird (I love you so much, Burt Lancaster). Paul Newman declined because his first major film had been 1954’s The Silver Chalice about Ancient Greece, and he hated the beefcake ethos of epic films so much he’d vowed never to do another. “I don’t have the legs to wear a tunic,” he quipped. Rock Hudson, Leslie Neilson, and Geoffrey Horne also all said no.

Messala was easier to cast, since Messala is pretty much the best role. Director William Wyler had gotten his first choice, Charlton Heston. With nobody playing Judah Ben-Hur, though, there wouldn’t be a movie, so Wyler asked Heston if he’d be willing to switch roles.

About two seconds after this happened, Kirk Douglas offered to play Ben-Hur if they were really stuck and willing to pay him a ton of money. Heston was cheaper and had already agreed, so it was all settled.

The production is best described as “lavish” and “costly” – like every epic ever, it was too expensive and took too long to film.

But it did make its 1959 release date.

With a four hour runtime, of particular note is the chariot racing sequence. Again. It was an almost shot-for-shot copy of the 1925 version, with some extended tension and an extra stunt or two.

At the Oscars, Ben-Hur won an unheard of eleven Academy Awards; a record that would not be broken until 1997’s Titanic.

In 2001, the chariot race was once more diligently recreated, this time for the Boonta Eve Classic podracing sequence in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.

And tomorrow, you’ll get a chance to see another adaptation of Ben-Hur or another adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, depending on how you want to look at it. This time it stars Jack Huston of The Huston Dynasty, who was originally cast as Messala but had to switch roles when they couldn’t find anyone to play Judah Ben-Hur.

Director Timur Bekmambetov is especially pleased with (surprise!) the chariot race. He hasn’t copied the 1925 version, he’s decided to take a cue from how Nascar is filmed on mobile devices by audience members. So, like a YouTube video from Ancient Rome.

No matter how you feel about this latest version, no matter whether it sucks or does just fine, no matter how nauseated those chariot sequences make you, it’s a good thing that they’re trying something new with an old favourite.

Everything from the Parisian archivist to the Wallace novel to the 1959 version of Ben-Hur happened because somebody was “out of ideas.” And from one accounting of a true story, there have grown abundant retooling and retellings of a fictional story, which has doubtless indirectly influenced and melded with others on the road to creating new stories.

There’s often a sense, when a new remake or reboot comes out, that you shouldn’t mess with the classics. But that’s malarkey. Every idea needs to come from somewhere. So what if the beloved film version of Ben-Hur comes from Monte Cristo which comes from an essay on Picaud, which comes from real life? It’s probably a safe bet that Picaud got the idea for his revenge scheme somewhere else, too.

Maybe even from fiction. 

Suspense: A Friend to Alexander

“Alexander Hamilton is so hot right now,” historians probably say at historian parties, holding their champagne glasses while a string quartet plays chamber music.

With Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop biography of the first secretary of the treasure cleaning up at the Tonys, A-Ham is the current historical celebrity craze. Soon, he’ll be fighting vampires. You haven’t really made it until everyone forgets why you’re important.

In 1942, James Thurber – who you might know best as the author of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” – wrote one of his darkest, weirdest short stories. In it, an unhappy man is plagued by dreams of Aaron Burr, and becomes gradually obsessed with the duel that killed Alexander Hamilton. Things only go downhill from there, getting all fantastical and grim.

Popular radio series Suspense adapted the story no less than three times. 

It's called “A Friend to Alexander” and the version below is from August of 1943. It stars Geraldine Fitzgerald and Robert Young, and was adapted very faithfully by Fria Howard. Her script would also be used for the 1944 broadcast of the story, which featured Geraldine Fitzgerald reprising her role, but saw Robert Young replaced with Richard Whorf.

Click the video to listen:

The third broadcast featured a new script by Fran Von Hardesfelt, with John Dehner and Paula Winslow as Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. Howard's adaptation is extremely faithful to the short story, while Von Hardesfelt's is a little more loosey goosey.

If you'd like to read the original short story, it's anthologized in My World, and Welcome to It alongside less gothic stuff. 

Lux Radio Theater: Mayerling

With all of last week's talk of royalty and Cecil B. DeMille, I thought it was fitting to try to track down the Lux Radio Theater broadcast of Mayerling. It features William Powell as Prince Rudolf of Austria, a role originated by Charles Boyer in a 1936 French film of the same name. Though the original Mayerling had been an international success, it wasn't until 1938's Algiers that Boyer became well-known to American audiences.

Full disclosure: I haven't seen the film, so I don't know how faithfully this adapts it. What I do know is that though an American remake was in the works for many years, it didn't actually happen until 1968, when MGM decided it was a good fit for the tragically romantic Omar Sharif. In between, there was a French remake called Le Secret de Mayerling and a 1957 episode of Producer's Showcase featuring Mel Ferrer as Prince Rudolf and Audrey Hepburn as Mary Vetsera. The episode was later distributed in Europe as a feature film.

As C.B. tells us in the introduction to the play, all versions of Mayerling are based on a real event, the murder-suicide committed by Rudolf at his hunting lodge, taking the life of his young mistress. It was Rudolf's death that set in motion the events leading to the first World War. And, as you might suspect listening to the program, the true story is much more sordid than its romanticized counterpart.

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Upcoming Events:

I'll be participating in In The Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood's Joan Crawford Blogathon. It looks like it's going to be one a terrific opportunity to learn about a complicated woman and honour her contributions as an actress, so if you're at all interested in Joan Crawford, mark it on your calendar. And if you have a blog, sign up!

I've also been invited to join the Darlin' Dallasers Blogathon, which aims to highlight the work of Dallas favourites and guest stars in non-Dallas productions. There are already some great topics on the roster (including Son of the Blob directed by Larry Hagman), and I'll be highlighting Patrick Duffy's performance in a made-for-television movie about psychic ghosts. I'm so excited!

Cleopatra (1963)

This is my second of two entries for The Royalty on Film Blogathon. Check out the first entry here and learn more about the blogathon here.

If you’re a woman who’s had one lover too many, history isn’t very kind to you.

The number isn’t fixed. Cleopatra had, it’s generally agreed, two lovers total; hooking up with Caesar when she was eighteen, and then Marc Antony about six years later. That was it. Stories of her lavishness and seductive charms were written a century after her death; while contemporary accounts like to mention the fact that she spoke nine languages, and wasn’t particularly beautiful but was such a stellar conversationalist it made her seem beautiful.

For two millennia, the retellings of her reign (outside of her native Egypt) focused on making the story as vivid and sensational as possible. Cleopatra poisoned by a mixture of herbs? No. She was bitten by an asp on her arm. No, wait! On her breast!

And so it went, until there was very little left of the actual woman except gossip and Roman propaganda.

In 1963, it was probably a fate that seemed daunting and inevitable to Elizabeth Taylor.

During the early ‘50s, she had successfully transitioned from a child star to a critical darling with several major hits at MGM. In 1958, while working on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she’d been dealt a terrible blow when her husband, Mike Todd, died in a plane crash. The media quickly painted her as a tragic figure, until she began an affair with one of Mike Todd’s best friends, Eddie Fisher. Then she was painted as a homewrecker, with little regard for whether or not it was cool of Eddie Fisher to put moves on his dead friend’s vulnerable widow.

By the time Cat was released in theaters, the scandal had broken and MGM decided to use it in their favour, printing posters that featured a painting of Taylor posed seductively in her now-famous white slip. Things only snowballed from there. Suddenly, Last Summer – a grim fable about the ethics of lobotomies – was promoted with images of her in a white bathing suit. (Especially ironic if you know how the white bathing suit fits into the plot of the film.)

The worst blow was dealt with BUtterfield 8, the final project she completed for MGM, and the one that closed out her contract. In it, she plays a high price call girl, derided as a “slut” throughout the film. On MGM’s part, it was a cold and calculating manipulation of public opinion. In the life of Elizabeth Taylor, it was a charming moment where she got called a slut in the press, by the public, and also in the script at work.

She left MGM with a bad taste in her mouth, and an Oscar win for BUtterfield 8.

When 20^th Century Fox called her in 1959 to offer her the role of Cleopatra, she wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of playing history’s most notorious homewrecker. She was also looking forward to some time away from acting, presumably to process the sharp turns her life had taken in the previous year. Fox asked her what they’d have to pay her to get her to do the part. She sarcastically told them one million dollars.

They said yes.

She then asked for ten percent of the film’s profits, and told Fox to shoot the film in Todd-AO, a format she’d inherited the rights to from Mike Todd. She also wanted an additional salary of $50,000 a week for every week the film went over schedule, and a few key script changes to make Cleopatra into an actual woman with motivations and opinions. It was a very shrewd piece of negotiating.

Fox agreed to all of this. Regardless of the outcome, or people’s perceptions of her, Elizabeth Taylor was making bank on this thing. When all was said and done, she earned a cool seven million smackaroos. (That comes out to around fifty million in modern cash.)

But, like Cleopatra, the closer Elizabeth Taylor seemed to be getting to her own goals and happiness, the more her own story slipped out of her grasp.

A lot has been written about the bloated budget and messy years devoted to the production of Cleopatra. It remains the most expensive film ever made, and nearly bankrupted Fox when all was said and done (Taylor’s earnings a surprisingly small percentage of overall costs). And it took around three years to film, with numerous script changes – the first director, Rouben Mamoulian, had a very thin story with an allegedly inconsistent Cleopatra, mixing Taylor’s desire to play a strong world leader with the more torrid romanticized seductress of old. Mamoulian either quit or was fired, depending on who you ask, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz was suggested by Taylor as a replacement. Mankiewicz managed to smooth things out, but ended up getting his feet tangled in the life of Caesar.

Then, too, there was the infamous affair between Elizabeth Taylor and her co-star Richard Burton. Burton plays Antony in the film, and like Antony he was very much married when he took up with our Egyptian queen. She was still married to Eddie Fisher. People didn’t like seeing them cavorting on yachts, but they also couldn’t look away. And it all fit so nicely into the familiar Shakespearean scene of Cleopatra and Antony cruising the Nile on a pleasure barge.

More trouble was to come, though.

In the spring of 1961, Elizabeth Taylor nearly died of pneumonia. She survived because of an emergency tracheotomy, and public opinion was briefly on her side. It seems trite to say, but the ordeal stalled production further on a schedule that was already well beyond projections.

Eventually, the movie was completed, released, and a box office hit. But recovering those costs was a daunting prospect, and people still consider it a flop because of the cost-to-returns ratio.

So, what does this version of Cleopatra have that the 1934 version doesn’t?

It’s long. The finished product is four hours long, trimmed down from an original six hour cut. And the length is exhausting to watch. I seriously recommend taking two days, watching the Caesar portion on day one, then watching the Antony portion on day two. It makes it more like a mini-series, and it helps. But somehow, the elaborate set after elaborate set becomes less dazzling and more dull the longer you stay. You become numb to the glamour.

Cleopatra’s intellect is mentioned a few times, even the tidbit about the languages (though they cut the number down to seven for some reason, and it’s during a speech where her sexual prowess is the main focus of discussion). The scene where the Romans burn the Library of Alexandria and she has a meltdown about it is one of the best in the first half of the film.

Egypt’s political usefulness is more explained than in most versions, though erroneously and including reference to Egypt’s wealth of corn (?!), and Cleopatra’s plan to prevent her empire from becoming a province of Rome is more sound than it normally is. (Because normally it’s: “sleep with some dudes and see what happens.”)

There’s also some focus on Cleopatra as a mother, which had previously been avoided, and it’s handled well. Motherhood is a political strategy for the pharaoh, but also something that anchors her motivations. Her son and her country pull her in the same direction, because her son will one day inherit Egypt, and the fate of both is tied.

The most interesting addition is the emphasis on Cleopatra’s religion, and the scenes about godhood and the deification of leaders. In a couple of places, it’s way too mystical, particularly during the assassination of Caesar, but it’s a unique twist on the telling.

Ultimately, like Claudette Colbert before her, Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t happy with how the whole thing shook out.

“I was finally forced to see it in London,” she told interviewers Jerry Vermilye and Mark Ricci for their book The Films of Elizabeth Taylor, “knowing full well, after what I’d heard, that I’d be sick to my stomach. They had cut out the heart, the essence, the motivations, the very core, and tacked on all those battle scenes. It should have been about three large people, but it lacked reality and passion. I found it vulgar.”

She wasn’t being totally unfair. There’s a disconnect between the pillars of power, and the human element is noticeably absent in some key moments. But, it’s not really that bad.

And two overlooked supporting players deserve some recognition that they don’t always get, just because the scandals and the drama of the production tend to outshine the narrative of the film itself. Martin Landau as the ever-present Rufio, he who must explain all the politics to us without it feeling like a big old wad of exposition. Can he pull off the Roman helmets? No. Does it matter? Not when he gets the best line in the movie.

When the Roman armies are suffering from a desertion issue because of lack of supplies, Rufio tries to convince Antony to ask Cleopatra for aid, and that he has to be respectful and polite to her because she’s Queen of Egypt.

ANTONY: Queens! Strip them as naked as any other woman, they’re no longer queens.

RUFIO: It is also difficult to tell the rank of a naked general. And generals without armies are naked indeed.

Also bringing it home is Roddy McDowall as Octavian. It’s a performance that earned him a Golden Globe nomination, though he lost to John Huston in The Cardinal because the people who vote for Golden Globe recipients aren’t good at it. No matter how you slice it, in the story of Cleopatra, Octavian is the villain. McDowall, with a head of golden curls, sells the original emperor as a goldbricking, covetous, insecure mastermind. It’s well done.

Ultimately, though, for a film about Cleopatra, the movie fails to make her as relevant as her male counterparts. And it failed to do anything to help Elizabeth Taylor get away from her image as a homewrecker. It actually made it way worse.

In 1934, Claudette Colbert seized victory from the role of Cleopatra and mimicked the pharaoh’s strength and tenacity when she broke away from her over-sexualized public image. In 1963, Elizabeth Taylor inherited Cleopatra’s curse, when the story of her life became the story of her romances.

Maybe both pharaoh and movie star do get the last laugh, though.

Cleopatra’s name is one of the best known of the ancient world, and her popularity and mystique have led to a fascination with Egypt that has allowed her beloved nation’s treasures to be preserved. Elizabeth Taylor is warmly regarded as not just a movie star, but a woman whose philanthropic efforts continue to reverberate, even after her death.

And people rarely have nice things to say about the Romans or the Hollywood press. 

Cleopatra (1934)

Claudette Colbert was tired of being a sex symbol.

It all started in 1932 with The Sign of the Cross, an elaborate spectacle that director Cecil B. DeMille had managed to put together on a shoestring budget. The film is almost comically lurid, and between the scantily clad women being fed to crocodiles and the “Dance of the Naked Moon” it’s not exactly the standard Christian Epic. It made money, though, and Colbert’s part had been pretty good.

She played Empress Poppea, the beautiful second wife of Nero. The best of her scenes take place in a milk bath – “real asses’ milk” according to DeMille at a press conference, but in actuality just regular old powdered cows’ milk. The lights kept heating it up, so it soured quickly and smelled terrible; nevertheless, Colbert powered through her discomfort and delivered a memorable and intriguing performance.

That didn’t matter at all, though, because everybody was talking about her boobs. You could see ‘em when she was in the tub!

Even the Catholic Church was talking about Claudette Colbert’s popcorn catchers, and cited them as a reason they were forming the Catholic Legion of Decency to combat objectionable media. True fact.

It was understandable, then, that when 1934 rolled around and she was asked by DeMille to play Cleopatra she was hesitant. For the most part, history had painted Cleopatra as a seductress who used her perfumed wiles to get powerful men into bed with her.

The Romans had won the war, with her rival Octavian left standing to be in charge of the telling of the tale, and it was his version that trickled down to Shakespeare – responsible, for the most part, for the inaccurate elements that have become best known – and through Shakespeare into lavish Victorian paintings. But the Egyptology craze that had begun in the 1920’s was changing what the average non-Egyptian knew about pharaohs, and it soon became apparent that there was more to Cleopatra than a pair of soft lips whispering into the ears of powerful men.

Despite having appendicitis, Claudette Colbert agreed to do the picture.

(Remember all of this when you hear old stories about her being a difficult actress. She showed up to work a twelve hour day in a stinking pool of milk, did her next film with an exploding organ in her body, and was literally always on time with her lines learned, starring in three of 1934’s biggest money makers and critical successes. Then she wanted to take a vacation and asked for a raise, and boom. Difficult.)

With Warren William and his Barrymore-reminiscent profile joining as Julius Caesar, and newcomer Henry Wilcoxon set to play Marc Antony, things work out pretty good on the casting front. William was the king of the Pre-Code era, and like Caesar he would find himself becoming controversial as a new empire rose from the stones he had helped set. In his case, it would be a Hollywood changed by censorship and uncertain how to handle the mix of heroism and ethical dubiousness of his usual characters. By his early death in 1948, he was already a faded star.

Wilcoxon, on the other hand, would continue a long and fruitful career with DeMille, eventually producing with him on The Greatest Show on Earth, The Buccaneer, and The Ten Commandments. Like Antony, the death of his lauded mentor meant hard times for him, and his career struggled after 1959.

Both male leads acquit themselves well in Cleopatra, with the more experienced William turning in some unexpectedly boyish humour and gliding over the clunky, unnatural dialogue with ease. Wilcoxon is a sturdy figure, rough and unpolished in looks and mannerisms, and it suits his character, even if he doesn’t give the most convincing speeches.

Early DeMille films all have terrible, terrible, terrible dialogue, btw. It’s just how it goes. (Right at the beginning, an Egyptian asks a pushy Roman soldier: “What do you think you own, the earth?” The Roman soldier replies: “Yes!” It’s supposed to be insight into Roman arrogance. It’s super subtle.)

As a director, he was more concerned with what characters were doing rather than saying, and where they were doing things, what they were wearing while they did them, and how many extras could be in the shot watching. It was about spectacle. In the ‘30s – kind of like now – when people went to the trouble of paying for a movie ticket, they wanted to see something.

And, if nothing else, Cleopatra is certainly worth looking at.

The sets are dynamite. Art deco infused Ancient Egypt, gilded with gold and dwarfing the human figures with its grandeur. Highly stylized and completely historically inaccurate, the sets bring to life a concept missing in so many other films about pharaohs: that Egypt was bigger than those that ruled it. It was an ancient place even in the time of Cleopatra. She lived closer to man landing on the moon than she did to the year the pyramids were constructed, and she was doomed to be the last link in a chain that was being shattered by a Roman civil war. Early on, Cleopatra’s face is framed with an enormous sunken statue’s, the monument to the pharaoh of old slowly sinking into the sand as she begins, unknowingly, her quest to stop her empire’s demise.

Rome is full of airy gardens, and unexpected corridors. The sequence when Caesar parades through the streets is intriguingly claustrophobic, with its square buildings and narrow streets. As though Rome is an anthill, full of very dangerous ants.

Hans Dreier did the art direction. He’d later win an Academy Award for Sunset Boulevard.

The legendary Travis Banton did the costumes. The Romans are strutting peacocks, swathed in dramatic dark velvets, and shimmering silks. Octavian, especially, looks dandified and ornamental in his white enamel breastplate, and his first outfit that looks like something you’d be more likely to see on a Star Trek pleasure planet than in Egypt. Julius Caesar, as his position becomes more vulnerable unbeknownst to him, makes a shift from heavy fabrics and dark colours, to light white tunics.

It’s the women who stand out the most, though. Cleopatra herself is ornamented in winged crowns, golden cobras, scarab amulets, jeweled collars, strands of pearls, and very little fabric. The dresses for all the female characters are extremely low-cut, and none cut lower than those of the pharaoh.

Even though she looks gorgeous, the skimpiness was not what Claudette Colbert had been expecting. And it added fuel to the Poppea-boobgate fire, stoking her image as a sex-symbol and shifting the focus away from her performance. The costuming was exactly the kind of thing she’d been hoping to avoid.

But what about the role itself? Is Cleopatra different here than in all the male-driven stories before that ignore her role as politician in favour of amping up the girlfriend-of-famous-Romans angle?

Yes and no.

Ultimately, the story shifts gears from being a historical drama to being a tragic romance, which creates a sluggish third act and an indecisive Cleopatra. To the story – and Colbert’s – credit, we see her transform from a surly, 18 year-old princess caught up in world politics to a cool, even-headed manipulator. At the heart of her motivation is Egypt. A massive inheritance, mired in symbolism and tradition, that she loves above all other things.

Until Antony comes along, and reverses her seduction so successfully that she would hand Egypt over to its conquerors rather than risk his life.

Yikes.

Apart from having little bearing on what was actually going down during the Roman civil wars and the formation of the Roman Empire, it’s a blow to her characterization. Egypt is presented as the prize throughout, and when she tries to sign it away to Octavian, it’s an undignified and soppy moment for Cleopatra. (Albeit, it’s a sincere improvement over Theda Bera’s silent 1917 Cleopatra, who was a tyrannical sex-fiend with no sense of duty to her country.)

She becomes, unfortunately, defined by her romantic entanglements, rather than the nation she leads or the culture she’s desperately trying to preserve.

When all was said and done, Claudette Colbert managed to leverage the role into a new on-screen identity, though. It showed her what she didn’t want to be, and its box-office success and Oscar nominations, along with her other 1934 project, It Happened One Night, proved she was capable of carrying an impressive range of roles. She vowed that she would never, ever play the scantily clad seductress again, and she never did.

It was a big step forward in the story of Claudette Colbert, and a small step forward in how we tell the story of one of history’s most famous and misunderstood women.

But that’s not the last we’ll hear of Cleopatra this week! Tomorrow, we’ll be looking at the 1963 remake starring Elizabeth Taylor in some game-changing eyeliner.

And don’t forget to check out all the other fantastic entries in the Royalty on Film Blogathon!