Cleopatra

The title materializes on a half-silhouetted nude, Cecil B. DeMille's name is stamped next to a sphinx in profile. A bit of propulsion prepares the tableaux, the camera dissolves from the ransacked royal chamber to wheels zipping across the desert and tilts up to reveal the kidnapped Cleopatra (Claudette Colbert) aboard the chariot. The rendezvous with Caesar (Warren William) is not to be missed, she's unfurled out of a Persian rug at his feet, he's more engrossed by miniature catapults. Politics and romance are a bad mix ("If you'd bring true the dreams of empire that fill your pretty head, leave love alone"), she punctuates the seduction by spearing the assassin hiding behind the curtains. "Look at the Roman eagle with half the world in his claws, tamed by a woman," complains Marc Antony (Henry Wilcoxon) before seeing the wily heroine posed like Manet's Olympia in her barge-boudoir. (DeMille's sense of vaginal pageantry offers slave maidens whipped in leopard skins and crawling out of nets with jewels in shells, "clams from the sea.") Vamps and conquerors and gods made flesh or possibly vice-versa, the bonkers exaltation of Tinseltown luxuriance. Gossipy orgies, showers of petals, layered imagery pulled together into Colbert's smile of private amusement. "I'm very much afraid it's the Queen of Egypt who's hiccupping." "Oh, but doesn't that seem a little absurd?" Octavian (Ian Keith) forces harsh history into the couple's amorous illusion, "no more shining words, but shining steel!" The Battle of Actium rolls with appropriately Eisensteinian fervor but the real warfare has feminine will among priapic forms, a tragic sublimity at the close between the battering ram at the gates and the poisonous asp on the throne. Kinky Shakespeare becomes elephantine Shaw in Mankiewicz's remake. Cinematography by Victor Milner. With Joseph Schildkraut, C. Aubrey Smith, Irving Pichel, Arthur Hohl, Edwin Maxwell, Ian Maclaren, Eleanor Phelps, Leonard Mudie, Grace Durkin, and Claudia Dell. In black and white.