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- [00:01]
A
Off set, she's as languid as a cheater relaxing cat. Like at her Via Appia villa with her husband, three children, four dogs, two Siamese cats sipping champagne by the pool, letting the world come to her. And it does.
- [00:18]
B
That is how Vogue magazine in 1962 described the megastar Elizabeth Taylor, or Mr. Taylor, as they rather primly called her, who was then filming the most expensive movie ever made, Cleopatra, co starring Richard Burton.
- [00:37]
A
What captured the public imagination around this production, as what I have just read hints at, was how closely art seemed to follow life and life art. While they were filming in studios in Rome, Taylor was living a luxurious life worthy of Cleopatra herself at her out of town vill. And of course, she was having a real life affair with Burton, her lover in the movie Mark Anthony.
- [01:05]
B
In this episode, we're going to start by exploring this Cleopatra film and some of the intriguing stories that surrounded it and the near disasters it suffered. But we're also going beyond the celebrity gossip to look at some of the many earlier movies that recreated Cleopatra for the cinema and at what's coming up now. What does Cleopatra offer to film and what does film add to Cleopatra?
- [01:38]
A
And we've got a real expert here to help us. Maria Wyke, who is not only professor of Latin at University College London, working especially on Latin love poetry, but she also has an MA in film. And in 1997, she published the book on Roman movies, I mean, modern movies set in the Roman times. It's called Projecting the Past. And she is now currently one of the directors of a project on early silent films that were set in the ancient world.
- [02:09]
B
This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. And I'm Mary Beard.
- [02:17]
A
And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us. Now, this episode, Cleopatra on Celluloid.
- [02:42]
B
And really big welcome, Maria. It's great to have you with us sharing, I mean, your expertise in Roman movies go back many a decade and it's great to be able to tap into that. And we're going to start, I think we're going to start with the most famous Cleopatra film of all, which has to be the Taylor Burton film simply called Cleopatra. And we've already mentioned it, it was finally released in 1963, but it had an extraordinarily complicated, sometimes very, very alluring production history. And I wonder if you could give us, you know, fill in the background to this Cleopatra in its, in Its intricate and sometimes occasionally sort of squalid detail.
- [03:40]
C
Well, yes, thank you. So the film took, I think it was over a year to be produced. And because there were many production problems, I think it started out in Pinewood Studio in the uk and when Elizabeth Taylor became very ill and they had to stop production, they then ended up having to transfer the sand of Egypt from England to a location in Italy, which is where they made the rest of the film. So there were endless delays, endless problems with producing it in two different countries, endless problems with the ill health of Elizabeth Taylor. And then as the studio got really anxious about the ceaseless amounts of money that was being spent on creating the production. And when I've worked in archives, I saw telegrams back to the States from Cinecci Clar, the studio in Rome, saying, it is so expensive to get hold of thousands of leather sandals and all the Italians are taking us for a ride. The problem then occurred of the reports about an affair between Taylor and Richard Burton, which is why the film now is so notorious. But I guess one of the things that triggered that sense that the film was replicating real life, that you could see the adultery of Taylor and Burton in a film about Cleopatra and Anthony. One of the reasons why all that happened was because the film took so long to be made, the studio had to find ways to keep spectators interest. And one of the ways they did that, you know, you must come and see the film. The film will be coming to you sometime soon. So they would have. And so they created the most phenomenal publicity around things like Elizabeth Taylor in Rome. She was even called Liz Patra in some of the stories. Lispatra. Yes. And you were also told things like Taylor would choose her cigarettes, the colors of her cigarettes, to match the accessories in the apartments. And so there's a real sense of her expenditure and her extravagance as a sort of modern manifestation of the ancient Cleopatra. And the studios absolutely drew on that to glamorize Taylor, to make her seem more excessive, to match what the studio was going to bring to you sometime down the road.
- [06:29]
B
So it really suited the studio that Burton and Taylor were having an adulterous liaison.
- [06:37]
C
Well, it's not so much that accent. It didn't really suit the studio. It was more that they deliberately constructed a parallel between Elizabeth Taylor and Cleopatra, who won all the traditions about Cleopatra, to create the successive Taylor. And then when the affair started, the press absolutely jumped on that and the parallel got completely taken out of the hands of the studio and became something the press Used. Cause they thought it was absolutely fantastic that now they were seeing Taylor as a form of Cleopatra destroying the lovely Anthony Burton.
- [07:15]
B
So the studio, in a sense, overachieved with this. Life is mirroring history and history is mirroring life. Because in the end they failed to keep that under control.
- [07:28]
C
Yeah, absolutely. There's a wonderful story which some of the producers of the film wrote about afterwards to try and take back the affair and to use it again to publicize the film. But there's a story about how when Cleopatra arrives in Rome for a kind of triumphal entry, a hugely spectacular scene, just a few days before, the Vatican had declared that Elizabeth Taylor was an erotic vagrant. And I have always loved that phrase, you know, an erotic vagrant. And that she shouldn't be allowed to be in Italy. And so what the producers said afterwards was, was that when Cleopatra arrives in Rome, all the Italian extras, they weren't sure how they would respond to Taylor. And so when they cheered, they were cheering Taylor as an adulteress who they still nonetheless admired just as much as they were being Romans celebrating Cleopatra. So already, you know, already that's a story about mixing the film with real life.
- [08:43]
A
Maria watching it again. And I hadn't seen it since I was a child. I mean, this is an absolutely vast production, right? It's not only vast in timescale. I mean, this is a 4 hour, 11 minute film with an entre act, 2 parts. But it's also, I mean, you really can look at it and say they don't make them like that anymore in this, you know, when big movies are made with a lot of CGI effects, this is sort of real and it is thousands and thousands of extras. It is. You know, Claire Poucher's wearing a different. It's remarkable costume in every scene with her voluptuous breasts absolutely kind of front and center. I have to say I was really blown away by the sheer enormity of it. When she arrives in Rome to visit Julius Caesar, dear old Rex Harrison, she's on a kind of monumental size image of the sphinx riding atop it, this tiny little figure in gold riding atop this vast sphinx on a kind of trailer that is being pulled through the triumphal arch. I mean, it is, it's insane. Maria, this movie is absolutely insane. I mean, am I right in thinking, did it sort of kill off the whole notion of the swords and sandals film? Because it was just sort of the excessive. You know, it was so excessive that nothing could really kind of come after it?
- [10:13]
C
Well, it did in that it bankrupted the Fox studio. And only one more film about ancient Rome was made after that, the fall of the Roman Empire. And people said it was the fall of the epic film as well, largely because of the huge costs of this film. But one thing to bear in mind is that it was originally even bigger. I mean, the director had wanted it to be two three hours sections, one on Cleopatra and Caesar and the other on Cleopatra and Antony. And the studio came to its senses, at least in relation to that. But you also have to remember that people watched it on widescreen and we only see it now on computers or on mobile phones or even if it's revived in a cinema. But not many cinemas now have the capacity to show a film of that scale. So she really was absolutely huge. And she. Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor and the film. And part of the reason for that fantastic spectacle, the real material, 3D reconstructions, is because at the time, Hollywood was really trying to compete with television and the small screen and the staying at home in your domestic space and, you know, suburban life and washing your car. And so cinema had to. It had to be more colorful than your home TV screen. And so spectacle and using Roman history and using Cleopatra was a way of doing that. Because in her tradition, Cleopatra's always been known as a spectacle maker, as someone who manages to unravel herself from a rug to Julius Caesar or draw Antony into a luxurious barge when she's supposed to be arranging political negotiations with him or entertaining him in Alexander in Alexandria's extraordinary banquets. So she works really well as a way for Hollywood to. To put on a fantastic show.
- [12:22]
A
I think it would be worth seeing that lovely clip of her rolling out of her carpet. Yes.
- [12:27]
B
Yeah. Let's first,
- [12:33]
C
All hail Cleopatra, kindred of Horus and Ra, beloved of the moon and sun, daughter to Isis. When you do see that scene, you have to bear in mind that one of the things the studio was doing was very knowingly sort of revealing Taylor to the film audience just as much as they're revealing Cleopatra to Caesar.
- [12:53]
B
I think now the film is more talked about than watched. Right. I have seen it, but I haven't seen it for years. So what we remember is all that kind of stuff about the excess about life and art, et cetera, et cetera. And I. We've forgotten a bit about asking, what kind of Cleopatra is Elizabeth Taylor being made into? I mean, I think for a start, the fact that the film is called Cleopatra is not Anthony and Cleopatra is. Is giving us some kind of direction. But what are the kind of cultural politics what's going on with this particular version of Cleopatra?
- [13:44]
C
I mean, one thing that's really interesting about the film is that the director Mankiewicz really wanted, perhaps surprisingly to us now, to present a political Cleopatra, a Cleopatra who's a visionary. There are notes to show that he wanted her to be a kind of ancient President Kennedy. Taylor hardly, I think, performs that sort of role. And the idea was that he was going to present, you know, hugely ambitious Cleopatra who wanted to end confrontations between the west and the east and create a kind of United nations and world peace. And there are just one or two moments in the film that have survived that show that political ambition. So there's a scene where she's with Caesar at the tomb of Alexander, talking in the language of the United nations, you know, of the 1960s, about world peace. And also at the ending, when you see, surprisingly, when she dies, it's not at all erotic. You'd have thought the Cinema Fox would, that the studio would love to see a snake at the breast of Taylor, but in fact, you see it slithering away and the camera looks over her body, lying in her full regalia. So she's not a neurotic object at the end, but in all the rest of the film, she absolutely is.
- [15:05]
B
So when it was cut, when the time ambitions of this vast epic were cut down, by and large, what was cut out was Cleopatra as the head of the ancient United nations, the political element. And what was focused on was Cleopatra the temptress with, you know, in her bath and in her bed and looking all the world like a femme fatale.
- [15:34]
C
Yes, but what you can understand now, looking back at it, is the way in which the film really focuses on adultery and on what you could see as the social panics of that period, the early 1960s, over adultery, particularly the sort of sexual activity of women. So it's about women's adultery, not about men's adultery. You know, it's. We've seen at this point in the early 60s, the emergence of feminist literature, like Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, the arrival of the contraceptive pill. And some years earlier, a Kinsey report indicated that women in their lovely domestic spaces, were actually committing quite a lot of adultery. And that American, sort of in a normal domestic life wasn't quite as people thought. So you can see, for example, in the film, that there's a scene where Anthony's at Rome with his wife, sitting at a long table. They're not talking to each other. It is so painful at separate ends, and it's immediately followed by Antony in Egypt in bed with Cleopatra, which looks incredibly more enticing. So the film's sort of exploring adultery and saves itself from seeming to suggest immorality because the adulteress is punished by death at the end. But Cleopatra is the figure of adultery. Taylor was already known at this point as a serial adulterer. So the storyline in Antiquity, the current Affair, all the debates about it and the parallels between the two were just. There were ways of exploring adultery because cinema is extremely well known for engaging with issues, social concerns, replaying them back or challenging them.
- [17:35]
A
Maria, I want to ask you also about the politics, the sort of big politics from the Roman perspective. So, you know, is this a case of Cleopatra drawing these big, strong, effective Roman traps down to their ruin by her kind of misplaced politics and sexual wiles, or is it more complicated than that?
- [18:00]
C
I think it's earlier in the traditions of filmmaking about Cleopatra that she's really a sort of man killer and extremely destructive. That's not quite how this film works at this point in cinema. Female stars and their Persona and the kind of characters they play are often constructed to be figures for identification, not for you to be repelled by them. And so the Cleopatra in this film is in many respects very attractive in all sorts of ways. So she's not really. So she's presented as drawing in the Romans and seducing them, but in ways that might be actually quite appealing, particularly to female audiences.
- [18:49]
B
So it's a real classic case of the ancient figure being a place onto which we can project all kinds of modern up to the miniature contemporary concerns, and we can rewrite her for us. And for now, I mean, I think there is a sort of funny sequel to this, though, isn't there? Because here we are in 1963, we've got this absolute bankrupting blockbuster with all those kind of things that you've been talking about written into it. But the sequel goes down market a bit, doesn't it, when we. When we get to a Carry On Cleo that's connected with the Taylor Burton Cleopatra, all kinds of interesting and sometimes practical ways, yes.
- [19:39]
C
I mean, the film was quite clever in all sorts of ways in that I mentioned that the 63 film had been partly filmed in the UK, so they actually reused some of the sets. And so it's rather more luxurious in some scenes than. Than Carry on films usually are. And it clearly parodies the Hollywood genre. And it has, for example, Caesar, played by Kenneth Williams in a very camp manner, looking at a vision of Cleopatra in The bath and being rolled out of a rug and then seeing his own assassination. And the vision is discussed between him and the others who see it as a kind of program on a terrible. On a temperamental television. So the film's quite knowing about the ways that it's playing with the Hollywood genre.
- [20:31]
A
The rolling out of the carpet scene is such a direct quotation from the Taylor Burton Cleopatra that, I mean, I just found that hilarious when I was watching the little clips. I haven't watched Carry On Cleo all the way through for a long time. But that scene is just. Is really, really funny. And of course, you know, casting Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar is just utterly hilarious. And it does, yeah, it does give rise to the best line in ridiculous comedy cinema in for Me. Infamy.
- [21:06]
B
They've all got it in for me.
- [21:09]
A
Oh, Sid James is the kind of Latin lovely. The sort of Burton, Richard Burton character is also rather splendid.
- [21:18]
C
If you wanted to interrogate the film, you could see it was also a kind of social satire, a satire about the dominance of American culture in Europe after the war and also as a kind of critique of British social norms. So the film is in a way much more interested in the men and in masculinity and inversions of masculinity that are playing with British social class. And Caesar is very camp and completely unlike our image of the ancient world quite deliberately. But he spouts a lot of Shakespeare because that's the way audiences in Britain were used to their history.
- [22:00]
B
I'm afraid the serious minded conclusion here maybe missing out some of the fun, the serious minded conclusion is that you'll get a huge amount more out of Carry On Cleo. If you watch it alongside or after you've watched the Taylor Burton Cleopatra version, you'll be able to see those connections and see what you know. Our Carry on team, you know, nobly headed by Sidon, is doing with that Hollywood tradition and in a sense then not just the Hollywood tradition, but actually playing with the Roman tradition and Cleopatra and so on. Turning Cleopatra into a Carry on girl.
- [22:42]
C
Yes, exactly.
- [22:50]
B
Hello lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics book club, well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Oddysee.
- [23:10]
A
We would love you to join our book club, which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early Booking access to our live events.
- [23:29]
B
All details are on our website, Instant Classics Podcast. I'm afraid it's now. Bye bye. Carry on, Cleo. But you've mentioned, you just mentioned in passing, Maria, the kind of the sense that there's quite a long tradition in film of focusing on Cleopatra and it doesn't just come from nowhere in 1963. And you could, if you like, go back a little way to the Vivien Leigh. Caesar and Cleopatra film was also, I think, another huge loss maker for the studios. But I think it's interesting to go back even further than that and to look at, you know, what we might now see as the hinterland to the famous Cleopatra film and to find films doing really, really, absolutely different things. With the story of Cleopatra and its modern resonance, it's modern critiques. And the one that I think I land on first, as we move back a bit, is the Cecil Bieder Mill Paramount Pictures of 1934 starring Claudette Colbert that has a very different version of Cleopatra, not just a different actress, but there's a kind of sort of new American woman style to this, isn't there?
- [25:10]
C
No, absolutely. It's a really interesting film. And as we're starting to see, our Cleopatras in cinema are very much shaped according to the timing of their production. For example, there's a really interesting scene when Anthony is invited aboard the barge of Cleopatra, as he said, played by Cordette Colbert. And it's made very clear that he essentially loses his masculinity as he enters into this woman's world. So her ship is like a woman's world that he's going into. She lures him in with banquet and with spectacles in which you see women being dominated. So she's sort of playing on an expectation of Anthony that he will be able to dominate her. It's a kind of double bluff. He arrives with some virile dogs and partway through they run off because they've obviously understood the deception going on. And at the end of the scene, she winks at the captain of the ship, the curtains around her and Anthony close, and you hear a really strong and rhythmic score at the same time as the oars of the ship are plying the water.
- [26:39]
A
You mean the orgasmic plying of the water, Maria. Just to. Just to, you know.
- [26:44]
C
Yes. So the whole point is this is DeMille's way of saying they are having sex and she has trapped Anthony into her world, her body, and dominated him. But what's very interesting about the way it's constructed, that scene is that we're invited to take Cleopatra's perspective. We're as knowledgeable as she is that she is setting this up in order to entice him into her world. So we are offered the opportunity to identify first with the Cleopatra on screen and secondarily with the star who's playing her, who was incidentally the most well paid star in Hollywood, male or female, at the time, very much in control of the way her films were made.
- [27:36]
A
Trivial point when you say Cleopatra winks in this very marked way at the sea captain. There's an extraordinary moment in the Burton Taylor Cleopatra where Cleopatra winks at, at Rex Harrison when she arrives in Rome. Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar. So I like the idea of the kind of, you know, she arrives in all this pomp and splendor and bows towards him in front of all the people of Rome and then she stands up and winks at him. This sort of knowing, this idea of the knowing Cleopatra winking.
- [28:08]
C
Look what I've done. Look how I've got everybody under my control. Going back to the Colbert and Colbert's wink, you can see the film as very much emerging again from a period of anxiety about women. Obviously this is the 1930s. There are different anxieties at stake here. Before the start of the Second World War, you've got increased independence of women, women entering into the public domain and paid labor. There's a real concern about the influx of a huge influx of immigrants into American cities. So Cleopatra is supposed in the film to kind of embody all those anxieties about independent women, women who are taking the stage in the public arena and destroying the position that men have always had. But what's interesting about the film is that we're very much on Cleopatra's side here. She's so much more interesting than men who are supposed to, you know, be restored to dominance at the end.
- [29:18]
B
But Anthony, I mean, if you watch this movie and you remain on Cleopatra's side, and she is so much more interesting and intriguing than Anthony and somehow power seems to have passed to woman. But in the end, even though Anthony died, somehow the kind of quote, proper gender hierarchy is restored because towards the end, Anthony becomes the active male blokish guy.
- [29:52]
C
But Mary, no, no, no, no, forget all that. Okay, so the plotline has her say, in this really awful way, she kneels and she looks up to him and says, I am no longer a queen, I'm a woman. And when we get to the end of the film, sure, she's punished, she dies. But again, it's interesting because it's not at all erotic. On her throne in her regalia. The camera pulls back and shows her in all her majesty. So she has sort of escaped punishment, in a sense. And the reason why that might happen is because at the time DeMille was making these sorts of films. There's a really close association between cinema and the retail industry, which might seem like an odd sideline, but Cleopatra's designed the film as a kind of shop window to put products on sale. And Colbert and her costumes. Her costumes were put on sale. More sort of wearable versions were put on sale. And you could go to the cinema, watch the film, and then go out and buy a version of her hairstyle, a version of her outfit. So it's inviting women in the audience as a kind of ideal of female beauty. So the whole film is not about Cleopatra's political power, it's about her sexual power. And you can go out of the cinema and go buy it.
- [31:19]
B
So you can become. You can watch and then you can become a slightly cheaper version of Cleopatra. Yes, definitely cheaper. And I don't have to worry too much about my sense that Iski's made. It looks as if male patriarchal order has been restored. Sort of. It has, but that's not what's important about.
- [31:42]
C
Exactly. And in fact, there's some really interesting studies by scholars on women going to the cinema in a slightly later period where they talk about the way that actually, when you spoke to women after screenings, they often forgot the ending of films where there was a femme fatale who got killed off or punished or put into prison. And what they were interested in is what she did before the ending. And you could imagine that being the case here as well.
- [32:09]
B
Yeah. So I'm going to stop being too much of an academic about this
- [32:14]
C
academic and understand how women used to watch cinema.
- [32:18]
B
What is really surprising, though, to me, and I think I hadn't realized it's really, until I, you know, read you on all this, that there is a kind of historical, pedagogical learning, teaching side to this film, which the studio kind of invests in. And so you can compete if you're at college or you're a high school and the film comes out, you can compete for a Cleopatra scholarship by writing essays on themes connected with the movie. And there's kind of wonderful ones which say things like, you know, here's an essay question that you might have to do. And then you've got a study manual to go with the movie. Would it be fair to describe DeMille's Cleopatra as an extraordinarily vivid presentment in American terms of events and characters of the ancient world. Justify your answer. So there are people writing three essays and competing for a lot of money, $500, for what is then a Cleopatra scholarship. Now, is that normal in big movies in the 1930s?
- [33:36]
C
Absolutely. It's a way, particularly with historical filmmaking, of trying to advertise the film to schools so that you could get them to send their students to come and watch the film. And you can tell from the kind of question that's being asked is that obviously the question is constructed to offer what seems a very moralising film. You know, it's a film about the past that shows you the damage that women can do and that they will be punished for it. And that's what you write your essay about and that's how you get the school kids in. But it's not how mature women were watching the film and then going to buy the Cleopatra lipstick.
- [34:17]
A
Is it a sort of legitimizing process in any sense that, you know, this is serious and we can use it as a kind of teaching material in the way that Cleopatra makes a great deal in its opening titles of. This film is based on Plutarch, Appian and other ancient sources, as well as Cian Francero, Carlo Maria Francero, who wrote a book about Cleopatra.
- [34:43]
C
De Mille often used to say, both about this and his other historical films, that in the process of putting the film together, they had done huge amounts of research, read all the books, gone to the museum, created volumes of material which they had donated to American University Library.
- [35:01]
B
It makes me think that Gladiator has missed a trick here. You know, there ought to have been a series of Gladiator scholarships, the kids writing essays on. How far do you think the depiction of gladiatorial combat by Russell Crowe was plausible? You know, justify your example. Justify your answer with examples. Now, it seems very weird. I had no idea that it was relatively normal. It ties in these movies to the study of the ancient world, you know, in a quite different way. Even if it is, you know, a useful commercial device, it's a useful way of saying this is safe for your high school kids to go and see, etc. Etc. They'll get a lot out of it and it's getting bigger box office. Yes, but at the same time it's saying, you can't forget the ancient world. Here we are going to whatever the. However fast and loose we might be playing with it. We are really talking to antiquity here. Don't Forget that.
- [36:05]
C
Yes, but it's a rhetoric. It's a rhetoric to sell the film. But obviously there has to be some credible ancient world that has been created for that to be an effective type of publicity.
- [36:20]
B
Yeah. And it's quite a lot of money. And let's imagine that there will have been American high school teachers will have been getting the class down to do this and to write the essays off the back of the film. I mean, it's not what, you know, not the first aim of the studio, but it's one of the kind of unexpected ways for me that it filters down.
- [36:42]
C
It's not an uncommon practice in the past for schools to take. Take school groups to the cinema if they thought that there was some pedagogic value in the film. I think what's. I mean, that has very much changed now because a lot of filmmaking, even historical films, is more directed to the video gaming market. And few school teachers would think to take their kids to Gladiator 2. But in the case of this film, obviously there is an element of reconstructing the past in a credible way and trying to sell it to teachers.
- [37:16]
B
Can we move on now to the vamp? You know, because in The Cecil B. DeMille, I mean, Cleopatra isn't really a vamp. There's all kinds of. You know, she has all kinds of dangers associated with her, but she's also quite a kind of sparky human character. The film that I am so sorry that we have lost, by and large. Lost is a silent movie of Cleopatra released in 1917, about which we know quite a lot, but we don't have. We don't any longer have it, but we have the posters which have stuck in my mind forever because it is the star of this 1917 Cleopatra is a woman known by the name of Tada Barra, which was not her art, her given name at birth. It's a wonderful anagram of, as people pointed out of the phrase Arab death. Tata Baron. And she was. The actress herself was this kind of fantastic Orientalist construction because she was actually the daughter of a tailor from Cincinnati. She.
- [38:33]
A
Theodosia Goodman.
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B
That's right.
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A
Not Theda Barra.
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B
At Allah. Now, how do we get. And where does that Cleopatra the vamp come from? Exactly. But how do we go about reconstructing this movie when we don't actually have it, which was clearly quite a prominent movie in 1917.
- [38:59]
C
Sure. Well, there's actually a lot of material in the archives. I mean, it's a tragedy. It's the great lost film in the United States. And everyone still hopes that one day it'll be discovered in tins in someone's garage. But that hasn't happened yet. A brief piece of footage was rediscovered on eBay in 2023, so you never know. And there was a tiny piece of it that had already survived from the past, but nothing more. So far, however, the American archives contain multiple versions of the script. There are huge numbers of publicity photographs, and in fact, there are so many photographs of the film that a reconstruction of the film has been made through simply the photographs and music added to it. So you can sort of watch the film through a cycle of still images. So it gives you a bit of a sense of the film. We've also, the vna, some years ago, had an exhibition on film divas or film stars, and thedev pearly breastplate was on show there because the costumes were just absolutely extraordinary.
- [40:16]
B
And she was. Am I right to say she was an absolutely classic man destroyer, you know.
- [40:24]
C
Oh, absolutely. So Theodosia Goodman had appeared in a number of earlier films, including a film in which she played a vamp or vampire or man killer. They're sometimes called homebreakers, torpedoes of domesticity, that kind of thing. And you said that people commented on Theda Barra being an anagram of Arab death, but that was designed by the studio. The whole construction of the star was designed to tell audiences, you've seen her in one film about vamps, come and see her in this one. And then what they did that was very clever is they. So that the actress was already constructed as a kind of vamp figure, and then they use elements of the story of Cleopatra to enrich and enforce that image. So the actress is supposed to have been born in an Egyptian oasis under the shadow of a sphinx. She's supposed to be nurtured on snake venom. She's a dabbler in the occult. When she did interviews about her films, she was told to fake a foreign accent, dress exotically, and the best bit, I thought, was stroke a snake. And she was also supposed to declare that she thought herself a reincarnation of
- [41:50]
B
Cleopatra, when in fact she's a girl from Cincinnati.
- [41:55]
C
Yes. So that's the level of intensity about how the studio reconstructed her Persona. And if you look at the plotline of the film, you can see it actually borrows from a 19th century novel by Henry Rider Haggard, where Cleopatra isn't just the destroyer of Caesar and the destroyer of Antony, but in between, she's destroyer of another person who's an Egyptian pretender to the throne who's trying to remove her as A Greek and put the pharaonic version of Egyptian government back on the throne. So here Cleopatra is a triple.
- [42:36]
B
Yeah, but it's nice because it looks like a prequel for our desire to make life and art mirror each other. We want the actress who plays Cleopatra in the modern movie to. The actress ought to have been born in an Egyptian oasis. We want to put actress together with the role she's playing.
- [43:01]
C
Well, yes, but it's also quite interesting. These films about Cleopatra are often rather ambiguous in their consumption. And there was a lot of writing about her interviews with the actress in fan magazines which had emerged now in the American film industry and where the actress would do her interviews. But in a lot of the magazines, academics have discovered that readers, when they wrote in letters or responded to what was said there, really appreciated that this was a completely. That the actress was playing at being a vamp and that the image of Cleopatra on screen was a total fiction. So for example, the actress in one magazine I saw tells readers about how she's received letters from male admirers who were clearly duped by her role in the horror. And that's, that's speaking to the female readers of the magazine. It's like haha, here again, you know, men have completely misunderstood what's going on.
- [44:16]
B
It's much, much more knowing than it, than it. Than it looks at first sight. I think that's right.
- [44:21]
A
So these are sort of kind of rescued from the potential fate of being of someone like me just going this is just so appallingly sexist and racist. But the sense that actually in some, in some, in some way it's a bit more knowing than that. It's a bit more speaking to its female audience in a slightly more sophisticated way than a kind of very basic description would imply. Am I right, Maria? Help me, help me not hate this film.
- [44:50]
C
The film, I would say is racist and it hasn't lost that. And we have no studies or material that suggests anyone stood back and saw that as a, as manufactured and in fact in the press books for the film, interestingly it says that Mexicans were cast as Egyptians. They have slaves who are not in blackface, which was often common at the time, but who are actually black. And they say fair haired Americans played the Romans. And Cleopatra here is clearly constructed as not exactly Anglo Saxon, shall we say. And so in that respect the film is completely engaging in quite an unpleasant way with, you know, anxieties in the 1930s about immigration into the United States and about fears for our fair haired Romans from this exotic other that might Corrupt them. So in that respect, the film is hateable. I suppose you could say.
- [45:56]
B
Can we just finish by going just a few years earlier than that lost silent Cleopatra to a silent film, hugely successful, which does survive, came out in 1913. It's by Enrico Guazoni and it's called Marc Antonio. It's originally Italian. Marc Antonio, a Cleopatra. Now, that is doing something very different from any of the films about Cleopatra that we've looked at, isn't it? It's got a different focus.
- [46:32]
C
Yes, it is. Despite its sort of Shakespearean title, which was, again, just, I suppose you could say, a publicity mechanism for sending the film outside Italy into other countries. Because you expect Cleopatra to be with Antony if you know you're Shakespeare. But what makes this film so different from the others is its clear political dimension. And in that respect, it does kind of hark back to the original Augustan propaganda about Cleopatra. So what's important about this film, understanding this film, is that it was released a year after Libya was named the first Italian colony in Africa. The film uses the Roman conquest of Egypt and Octavian Augustus's conquest of Cleopatra as a way to celebrate in the past the ambitions of Italy now for empire in Africa. And it means that in Italy, audiences are being invited to think when they see this Roman arrive to take over Egypt, to see that Italy is now coming home to the territory it owned once before. Because cinema in those days in Italy was seen as an incredibly powerful vehicle for political persuasion and even to incite home audiences to aspire to empire and to war. So in that respect, it's utterly different from all the others. And the way you see that played out in the film is that a lot of the film shows Roman soldiers disembarking on the shores of Africa. First you see Antony arriving to conquer Egypt, but he's orientalized by Cleopatra. We soon see him swapping his togas for Egyptian headdress and robes. Then we see Octavian arrive, who is strong enough to resist this Cleopatra and who is shown at the end in Roman Rome celebrating his victory over this foreign country. So again, Cleopatra here is a feminine and exotic Egypt that must be conquered by the masculine West. And that's absolutely the structures of Augustan propaganda.
- [48:47]
B
Yes, it's nice, isn't it, that here is the movie industry consciously or unconsciously taking up that absolutely central.
- [48:58]
C
Yeah. And there is a twist. Have I got time to tell you the twist?
- [49:00]
B
Yeah, don't tell us the twist. Yes, tell us the twist.
- [49:02]
A
Definitely want to know the twist.
- [49:04]
B
We're hoping For a twist, we really
- [49:06]
C
are hoping this film is utterly imperialist. That was how it was designed. However, there's just this moment towards the end of the film when Cleopatra stares into the camera and in an unusual fantasy scene imagines vividly her presence in the triumph at Rome, her humiliation, what it is if she had been in the triumph. And so when we see the triumph of Octavian at the end of the film in Rome, we are very much aware she isn't there because she has escaped. And what's nice about that is that the actress who played her called Gianna Terribili Gonzalez, which sounds like a very Cleopatra name, was the most well known Italian star at the time. She advertised the film, she went around, did interviews and she said that she identified with Cleopatra as a sadly tragic woman. Now that goes completely against the whole imperial rhetoric of the film. And you can see how cinema can be split and work in these different directions at the same time so that
- [50:16]
A
she becomes known humilis mulier. As Horace said, she's not humbled as a woman by being paraded through Rome.
- [50:25]
B
Maria, that has been. Been absolutely fascinating and I hope everyone will try and get a sight of this Guatzani movie from 1913 because it's got some very extraordinary subplots in it too, with crocodiles and things like that. I think we've got to be careful though, just as we draw this to a close, that we don't want to give the impression that the Tailor Book Burton movie was the last occasion that Cleopatra has been put on film. I mean, you have, I'm sure, right to say that it marked the end of that particular strand of great big Roman movies. It exploded the genre in some ways. But the idea of recreating Cleopatra didn't finish with in the 1960s. And you know, there have been some, there've been some attempts, there have been some failed attempts. I mean, a few years ago there was supposed to be and we still don't know if it's really coming. Quite controversial movie with Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress controversially cast as Cleopatra. I found what I thought was a trailer to this movie by searching online and clever Charlotte Point pointed out to me that it was almost certainly an AI mock up and nothing to do with this film at all.
- [51:57]
A
I think it was created by fans.
- [51:58]
B
Created by fans.
- [51:59]
A
Not an official, not an official thing.
- [52:01]
B
Mary. I thought, oh, I've got it. What are the kind of, you know, where has representation of Cleopatra gone? Have there been any ones that you. That you remember? Even if in a very different format from the Great Bus.
- [52:17]
C
Oh, that's an interesting question. I'm not sure I do. I mean, obviously there've been interesting documentaries about Cleopatra. And the documentaries work very differently from the films, as you can imagine, in trying to restore the political dimension of Cleopatra in ways that the films, unless you're Guzzoni, are just not interested in. So, you know, in the documentaries there's much more time spent on some of the things that you would have talked about in previous podcast about her intelligence and her interest in ensuring that as a dependent of Rome, that Egypt could still survive as relatively capable of having its own agency. And so she had to work on this really sort of fine line of how to be subservient to Rome and yet still have one's own authority and her ambitions for the success of Egypt in the Mediterranean. And a lot of the documentaries do, do try and work with that. And they try and work with some of the, you know, evidence of that Cleopatra herself created. Because obviously if you look at the original materials, you see that we do have these precious items that show us that Cleopatra had certain ideas of how to represent herself, including, you know, as a mother, which never or almost never features in any of the films because they're not interested in her as a mother. But for her being a mother was actually a way of presenting her authority privately and publicly. And that doesn't occur very often in cinema.
- [53:58]
A
There was the Netflix docudrama in which Cleopatra appeared under the series, the sort of catch all title of African Queens, which Jada Pinkett Smith was behind. Maria, what did you make of that?
- [54:14]
C
Well, I think it's very interesting to cast a black actress as Cleopatra. I think there are ways of understanding the force, the power of taking over Cleopatra and presenting her as black. Because in everything that we've seen in the podcast, we see that Cleopatra is attempting to resist Rome, she's attempting to resist the West. She's attempting to find an authority for peoples who are seen as marginal. Now, all that is a way of making her a hugely sympathetic figure and very useful, not least because, you know, she's based in Africa, so that gives her. So there's an authority and a reason for why you might want to use a black Cleopatra. And incidentally that often now is how Cleopatra is cast on the stage when Shakespeare's Mark Antony and Cleopatra's stage. And there's a resonance to that. I mean, sometimes you could call it blind casting, but in other ways that resonance will always be there and makes her a more powerful figure in some
- [55:22]
B
senses the message is, I suppose that if in some ways the Taylor Burton film marked the end of a certain strand of the Cleopatra tradition in modern representations, it has continued in different forms, forms in documentaries rather than perhaps in terms of great sort of big blockbusters. And in its way also, I think it's worth noting that it's continued digitally and I should say, and this is really only for listeners in the uk, but currently on the Excel Exhibition Centre in London, there is a Cleopatra digitally immersive exhibition on until July, which unless Maria's been to it, none of us have been to it. But it advertises itself as a place where you can go and digitally immerse yourself in the palace and the life of Cleopatra. So it might be in some ways as extraordinary as the Taylor Burton extravaganza. If you go do write into Instant Classics with your reactions to the immersive Cleopatra exhibition at the XL Exhibition Centre in London.
- [56:54]
A
But for now, Maria, thank you so much for being with us because you have created a really fantastic, I think culmination and finale of our series on Cleopatra is which where you've helped us draw together so many threads and also have so much fun. Speaking personally, I really had an amazing time watching Cleopatra, the 1963 Cleopatra. Again, it is just a profoundly ridiculous, over the top, wonderfully elaborate and gorgeously acted film actually and, you know, so unfashionable that it's so kind of magnificent. So it was wonderful to have that excuse and to think about all the innumerable ways in which poor old Cleopatra has been instrumentalized, turned into a murderous woman, a politically scheming woman, a sexual object. She's kind of everything you want her to be.
- [57:51]
B
Poor old Cleopatra, she wouldn't like you saying. Poor old Cleopatra
- [57:59]
C
definitely wouldn't end with Her Majesty, you know, the way that
- [58:03]
A
she dies, which is all about.
- [58:04]
B
Exactly
- [58:08]
A
as ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions and so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social media at Instant Classics Part bye.