Film Review
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.
© James Travers 2010
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.