DVD/150: CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA (Gabriel Pascal, 1945)

The most expensive British film flopped badly at the box office, and no more Shaw adaptations were filmed during his lifetime.

Yet there are pleasures: John Bryan's sets, Oliver Messel's costumes and the cinematography of Freddie Young, Robert Krasker, Jack Hildyard and Jack Cardiff.

Stewart Granger is a dashing Apollodorus, and the cast includes Basil Sydney, Cecil Parker, Frances L Sullivan, Ernest Thesiger and Flora Robson, going over the top as Cleopatra's murderous nurse Ftatateeta and looking like Scary Spice...

Milling around are Stanley Holloway, Leo Genn, Michael Rennie, John Laurie, and 16 year-old Jean Simmons - unseen are Roger Moore, Renée Asherson and Kay Kendall. 

Claude Rains has the right avuncular air as Caesar but his wry performance gets somewhat lost among the columns.

Vivien Leigh is gloriously kittenish as young Cleopatra and grows into an imperious Queen, but filming proved tragic as she miscarried after falling on-set.

Shelf or charity shop?  Shelf for Vivien.  It is a bit of an acquired taste - and the Shavian dialogue is an uneasy fit with several action scenes - but it is such a curio it is worth the climb. Poor Vivie, the miscarriage heralded the first of her bi-polar depressions which dogged her career and life from this moment.  But showing the courage that also marked her life, she and Olivier appeared on stage in 1951 with their own repertory company playing both CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA on alternative days in London and New York - a Herculean feat for the fittest performer.

 

DVD/150: GREAT EXPECTATIONS (David Lean, 1946)

There had already been two films of Dickens' novel but David Lean's version has reigned supreme ever since, despite two more screen adaptations and six TV versions.

Lean had only seen a 1939 stage version, written by Alec Guinness who also played Herbert Pockett.  Seven years later, Lean cast him in the same role; he also cast that production's Miss Haversham, the wonderful Martita Hunt.

Lean wrote the film script with his producers Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan, other writers included Cecil McGivern and Lean's actress wife Kay Walsh who wrote the final scene.  It's a text-book adaptation.

Academy Awards deservedly went to Guy Green's cinematography and John Bryan's art direction; they deliver a believable world with a wonderful sense of place, the desolate Kent marshes of Pip's unhappy childhood, the bustling Chancery Lane of his life as a 'gentleman', the gothic decepitude of Miss Haversham's crumbling mansion.

Shelf or charity shop?  A definite keeper - it's a classic for a reason.  Lean's subtle direction works wonders with his wonderous cast: Guinness (in his first major screen role) is delicious as Herbert Pockett while John Forrest is perfect as teenage Herbert, Martita Hunt's magnificent ruin of Miss Haversham, Finlay Currie's scary but dignified Magwitch, Francis L Sullivan's Jaggers, the conceited spite of Jean Simmons' young Estella and Anthony Wager's sad young Pip.  Valerie Hobson is well cast as the brittle older Estella while John Mills - although too old for the role - is a personable Pip.