DVD/150: CLEOPATRA (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1963)

CLEOPATRA started life in Pinewood with director Rouben Mamoulian and co-stars Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd at a budget of £5 million; Elizabeth Taylor's pneumonia moved filming to the warmer Rome, jettisoning Mamoulian, Finch and Boyd as well.

It resumed with Taylor's choice of director Joseph L Mankiewicz both filming and rewrititng the script at the same time.  20th Century Fox kept throwing money at the production, it's budget totalled $44 million.

This budget meant that despite being the highest grossing film of the year, it only broke even through television sales.

With the publicity surrounding Taylor and Burton's off-screen love affair, oddly enough their on-screen relationship doesn't set the film on fire.

While Taylor gives a pure film-star performance, Burton is mostly pure prosciutto.

Luckily CLEOPATRA has two excellent performances balancing the story's two halves: Rex Harrison's urbane Julius Caesar and Roddy McDowall's slippery Octavian.

Shelf or charity shop?  Pure shelf, it's what Sunday afternoons were made for. Mankiewicz's script strains itself leaning as far away from Camp as it's can so at times it is deliberately verbose, which is fine when you have Rex Harrison's Caesar saying the lines but the Antony and Cleopatra section is a glum affair with Burton declaiming his lines like he is playing to the Old Vic balcony.  But you should just stand back - or better lie on a couch - and just let the stunning Academy Award-winning cinematography, art direction and costumes parade in front of you, marvelling at the visual splendour with hundreds of extras as far as the eye can see, and the thrilling Alex North score. With so much source material being used, Mankiewicz really should have worked Shakespeare's "I am fire and air" speech into the scene of Cleopatra's impending death; it needs to be elevated to greatness but sadly no such luck.  For all it's failings, it is still one of my favourites.

DVD/150: ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS (Charles Jarrott, 1969)

Here is the one to blame as ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS made me a junior film buff.

I came out of the Kensington Odeon obsessed: Photoplay and Film Review magazines were bought, the souvenir brochure was pored over and the novelization was read continuously..and is still on my bookshelf.

You can never tell what film will set you off into buffdom, but when it happens it has you for life.

Charles Jarrott's film is 1960s historical drama at it's height and I still swoon at Margaret Furse's glorious Academy Award-winning costumes.

The script betrays it's stage origins and seems over-awed by it's characters but it's a world I can happily re-visit.

But it's the performances that I adored then and now: Richard Burton at his most charismatic as Henry VIII and the blazing intellegence and steely resolve of the magnificent Genevieve Bujold as Anne Boleyn.

Shelf or charity shop?  Reigning on the shelf as befits such a special film to me personally.  I would certainly like to mention the cello-like sorrow of Irene Papas as Queen Katherine and Anthony Quayle's over-reaching Cardinal Wolsey, along with a cast of dependable actors like John Colicos as the truly evil Cromwell, Michael Hordern, Peter Jeffrey, William Squire, and Nicola Pagett in a blink-and-you-miss-it role as Princess Mary.

 

Dvd/150: The NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (John Huston, 1964)

Three years after it's Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA was filmed by John Huston with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon, aged only 18 and in her first film since LOLITA.

Shannon is a former priest working as a tour guide in Mexico following a sexual transgression.  When teenager Charlotte in his tour group seduces him, he faces the vengeance of her domineering aunt.

He Shanghais his group at the hilltop hotel owned by his recently widowed friend Maxine and together they attempt to stop the aunt reporting him to his boss.

Also in residence is the painter Hannah Jelkes with her ailing poet grandfather.  Shannon and Hannah befriend each other, to Maxine's jealousy, but during a stormy night, they all understand the key to life is endurance.

Huston's uneven pace leaves Burton's mannered broodiness failing against stronger performances from Kerr and Gardner.

Shelf or charity shop?  Bound for DVD limbo, in a paper sleeve kept in a plastic storage box...

Earlier this week Owen and I made a return to our London theatregoing when we went to the Vaudeville - again! - to see Richard Eyre's production of Noel Coward's PRIVATE LIVES.

From it's original production in 1930, the play has become one the most beloved comedies - by both audiences and actors! This time Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen are playing Amanda and Elyot, the lovers who can't live with each other - or without each other.Coward wrote the roles with himself and Gertrude Lawrence in mind and a flavour of these two individual performers haunt the teasing, darting repartee, the illusion being of a soapy bubble being kept floating in midair by the most delicate of touches.

Like THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST the reason for the play's longevity is that it just works - the effortless wit and frothy air hides the play's solid foundation within the classic three-act structure, no line superfluous, no action out of place. Remarkable then that when it first opened that it received mixed reviews at best from the London critics.

The glittering wit and sharp-as-knives barbs also conceal a fascinating central story of two people who are constantly aware that while they are ideally suited, yet they can't stop the arguments that regularly erupt between them. Life imitated art in the 1972 London revival when Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens' marriage crumbled away during the run and in a 1983 New York revival this love you-hate you aspect was more than played up with the casting of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, seven years after their second divorce. It was a box office hit even though as Frank Rich said in The New York Times "it had all the gaiety of a tax audit".Luckily you are in safe hands at the Vaudeville.

Richard Eyre brought his usual clarity of vision to the play - the first act slowly but surely gathering momentum until we too were swept up in the giddy excitement of Amanda and Elyot eloping to Paris. The second act is again paced carefully as we ride the rollercoaster that is the couple's determined efforts to stay in love and not fight until all Hell finally breaks loose.
His handling of the third act was interesting, not playing up the slapstick elements but again leading effortlessly up to the final famous image - Amanda and Elyot slipping away together again as Victor and Sibyl have a stand-up fight. Eyre makes sure that the bittersweet regret at the heart of the play is never far from the surface froth.

Eyre also has elicited interesting non-Coward performances from his two leads. Matthew Macfadyen still strikes me as an odd choice - he initially seems far too sturdy, too proletarian for Elyot and his understated performance sometimes throws the play's inner motor off but he does suggest the core of doubt under the witty banter and he made the fight scenes quite believable - this Elyot certainly makes you believe that he would "strike certain women, like gongs".
Kim Cattrall - who luckily did not receive the round of applause on her delayed entrance that I was dreading - also is hardly the brittle, angular and waspish Amanda of tradition. She possessed a worldly air that made you believe her distrust of convention and 'the done thing'. Her Amanda fully makes you understand how both Elyot and Victor would want this maddening, erratic woman as their own. I enjoyed her performance very much.

The hapless Sibyl and Victor - who by Coward's own admission are only there as skittles to be knocked down and put back up again are played by Lisa Dillon and Simon Paisley Day.

If Lisa Dillon didn't totally convince as Sibyl it's maybe because she is too intelligent a performer to fully convince as a prattling ninny. Simon Paisley Day followed up his scene-stealing role as brother Ed in last year's ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE with a delightful turn as the hopelessly out-of-his-league Victor. While hitting all the obviously comic moments with aplomb - the things he can do with a vowel sound - he also managed to suggest the sadness behind the buffoonery when he haltingly suggested that he would let Amanda divorce him to save any scandal - as if Amanda would mind!Rob Howell's designs were suitably lavish for Amanda's Paris flat and how the triple
-sphere upright goldfish tank stays in one place is beyond me.

I cannot recommend this production enough. It has the wit and panache one would hope but also the sadness behind the frivolity which can make a line like “Let’s be superficial and pity the poor philosophers, let’s blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic school-children” quite heartbreaking.