Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) - film review

During his conquest of Egypt, Julius Caesar takes time off to soliloquise beside the great Sphinx.  As he does so, he is beguiled by a young woman of extraordinary beauty.  The woman is Cleopatra, joint heir to the throne of Egypt with her brother, Ptolemy.  Under Caesar’s kindly tutelage, Cleopatra changes from a demure ingénue to a self-confident and ambitious queen who soon puts paid to her young brother’s ambitions to be king.  But trouble is fermenting in Egypt.  The locals resent the presence of the Romans and are reluctant to pay the tribute that Caesar demands...

When Gabriel Pascal embarked on his most ambitious production, an epic adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra, you could be mistaken for thinking that he saw himself as the Cecil B. DeMille of British cinema.  The most expensive film to have been made in Britain up until that time, this Technicolor monolith to overweening self-indulgence proved to be a spectacular international flop and virtually bankrupted its main backer, the Rank Organisation, who incurred losses in the region of three million dollars.  Even Shaw was taken aback by the extravagance of the film, which was all the more unseemly as it was made at a time of national austerity, in the dying days of WWII.  A fair chunk of the colossal budget went on shipping in sand from Egypt so that the interior sets matched the exterior locations; apparently, no part of the British coastline could supply sand of the right hue.

Pascal was something of a devotee of Bernard Shaw.  Prior to this cinematic monstrosity he had produced two respectable adaptations of his work: Pygmalion (1938) and Major Barbara (1941).  Subsequently, not long after Shaw’s death, he produced a version of Androcles and the Lion (1952).  The big mistake that Pascal made with Caesar and Cleopatra was that he insisted on retaining the theatricality of the original play whilst trying to making it a bold cinematic epic to rival a Hollywood blockbuster.  Whilst the film is at times visually stunning, its lethargic pace and painfully hammy performances make it excruciating to sit through and you just wish the whole thing had been toned down by at least two orders of magnitude.

Had the budget and scope been somewhat more modest, this may have been a great film.  It has, after all, a fascinating story to tell and features a superlative cast.  It is the sheer insane scale of the production that makes it seem absurd, a misguided and totally pointless attempt by a British film studio to try and out-do its American counterparts. 

If Gabriel Pascal wanted theatricality, he got it in spades from his cast.  Even such well-regarded performers as Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh fail to rein in their histrionic excesses, gesticulating and articulating in a way that would be deemed overly expressive even in an amateur stage production.  This, coupled with Shaw’s reluctance to modify the dialogue he wrote for the original play, could explain why not a single character in the film is remotely convincing, why the plot drags at the pace of a very elderly snail  with a very large brick on its back and why, at the end of it, you wish that you had watched Carry On Cleo instead.

© filmsdefrance.com 2010

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