Embracing the Melodrama Part II #26: Cleopatra (dir by Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

While watching the 1963 best picture nominee, Cleopatra, I had many thoughts. The film lasts over 4 hours so I had a lot of time to think.

For instance, I often found myself impressed by the sheer size of the production. I marveled at the recreation of ancient Greece and Rome. I loved looking at the ornate costumes. I loved feeling as if I was taking a look back at what Rome may have actually looked like at the height of the Roman Empire. Making it all the more impressive was that this film was made in the days before CGI. When the film’s Romans walked through the streets of Rome, they weren’t just actors standing in front of a green screen. They were walking down real streets and surrounded by real buildings. It reminded me of the awe and wonder that I felt when I was in Italy and I was visiting the ruins of ancient Rome.

(I don’t know if any of the cast accidentally flashed everyone like I did when I visited during Pompeii on a windy day but considering how short some of the skirts on the men were, it wouldn’t surprise me if they did!)

And, as I marveled at the recreation of Rome, I also thought to myself, “How long is this freaking movie?” Because, seriously, Cleopatra is an amazingly long movie. It’s not just the film is over four hours long. It’s that the film feels even longer. Gone With The Wind, The Godfathers Part One and Part Two, Once Upon A Time In America; these are all long films but, because they’re so great, you never find yourself checking the time while watching. Cleopatra is the opposite of that. Cleopatra is a film that, at its slowest, will make you very much aware of how many seconds are in a minute.

I found myself marveling at the lack of chemistry between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. If anything, this is the most shocking thing about Cleopatra. If Cleopatra is famous for anything, it’s famous for being the film where Elizabeth Taylor (cast in the role of Cleopatra) first met Richard Burton (who was playing Mark Antony). Their affair dominated the gossip headlines. (If TMZ and YouTube had been around back then, there would be daily videos of Richard Burton punching out paparazzi.) Cleopatra was the first of many big-budgeted, overproduced films that Taylor and Burton co-starred in.

(Then again, they also starred in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a film that is almost the exact opposite of Cleopatra.)

In the role of Mark Antony, Burton spends most of the film looking absolutely miserable. Elizabeth Taylor, meanwhile, seems to be having a lot more fun. It’s almost as if she understood what Cleopatra was going to become so she went out of her way to give the type of over-the-top performance that the film deserved. The same can also be said about Rex Harrison, who plays Julius Caesar and who, perhaps because he appears to have shared her attitude, actually does have some chemistry with Taylor.

Actually, if anyone gives a truly great performance in Cleopatra, it’s Roddy McDowall. McDowall plays the future Emperor Augustus with a mesmerizing intensity. Again, McDowall’s performance is not exactly subtle but Cleopatra is not a film that demands subtlety.

As the film finally neared its end, I found myself wondering how Joseph L. Mankiewicz went from directing two close to perfect films, A Letter To Three Wives and All About Eve, to directing this. Even more amazing, Mankiewicz had previously directed one of the best Roman Empire films ever, 1953’s Julius Caesar. (When compared to Cleopatra, the low-key and thoughtful Julius Caesar appears to have been filmed on an entirely different planet.) Well, in Mankiewicz’s defense, he was not the original director. He was brought in to replace Rouben Mamoulian, who had previously attempted to make the film with Joan Collins, Ben-Hur‘s Stephen Boyd, and Peter Finch. When Mankiewicz was brought in, the cast was replaced with Taylor, Burton, and Harrison. Between the expensive stars, the troubled production, and all of the offscreen romantic melodrama, Mankiewicz probably did the best that he could.

Today, Cleopatra is mostly interesting as an example of a film from the “Only Gigantic Productions Will Save Us From Television!” era of Hollywood filmmaking. Cleopatra started out as a $2,000,000 production and ended up costing $31,000,000. It was the number one film at the 1963 box office and it still nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox. While the film does have some kitsch appeal, the critics hated it and it’s easy to see why.

And yes, it was nominated for best picture of the year, a tribute to the size of the production and the determination of 20th Century Fox to get something — anything — in return for their money.

Cleopatra is a bit of a chore to sit through but it can be fun if you’re in a snarky mood. It’ll do until the inevitable Angelina Jolie remake comes along.

Embracing The Melodrama #12: Giant (dir by George Stevens)

Posted on July 2, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Let’s continue to embrace the melodrama by taking a look at the 1956 best picture nominee, Giant.

Giant is a film about my home state of Texas. Texas rancher Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson) goes to Maryland to buy a horse and ends up returning to Texas with a bride, socialite Lesley Lynnton (Elizabeth Taylor). At first, Lesley struggles to adapt to the harsh and hot Texas landscape. Bick’s sister, Luz (Mercedes McCambridge) takes an instant dislike to Lesley and Bick is annoyed by Lesley’s concern over the living conditions of the Mexicans that work on Bick’s ranch. It sometimes seems like the only person who appreciates Lesley is Jett Rink (James Dean), an ambitious ranch hand who secretly loves her and who is planning on becoming a rich man. That’s exactly what happens when oil is found on the land around Bick’s ranch. While Bick stubbornly clings to the past, oilman Jett represents both the future of Texas and the nation. Meanwhile, Bick and Lesley’s son (played by a very young Dennis Hopper) challenges his father’s casual bigotry when he falls in love with a Mexican girl.

Giant is appropriately named because it is a huge film. Clocking in at 201 minutes, Giant tells a story that spans several decades and features a big cast that is full of familiar faces, all struggling for their chance to somehow stand out from everyone else around them. Even the film’s wonderful panoramic shots of the empty Texas landscape only serve to remind us of how big the entire film is. To a certain extent, the size of Giant‘s production is to be understood. In the 1950s, Hollywood was having to compete with television and they did this by trying to make every film into a major event. You watch a movie like Giant and you practically hear the old Hollywood moguls shouting at America, “See!? You can’t get that on your precious TV, can you!?”

For those of us watching Giant today, the length is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a curse because the movie really is too damn long. The opening scenes drag and many of them really do feel superfluous. It’s hard not to feel that the real story doesn’t really start until about 90 minutes into the movie. And once the story really does get started, there’s still way too much of it for it all to be crammed into one sitting. Oddly enough, you end up feeling as if this extremely long film is still not telling you everything that you need to know. If Giant were made today, it would probably be a two-part movie on either HBO or Lifetime and it would definitely feature a lot more sex.

However, to be honest, one of the reasons that I did enjoy Giant was because it was as big as it was. I mean, the film is about Texas so of course it should be a little excessive! Everything’s bigger in Texas and that includes our movies. Add to that, Giant may be too long but it uses that length to deals with issues that are still relevant today — oil, immigration, and racial prejudice. Rock Hudson may not have been a great actor but he is at least convincing as he transitions from bigotry to tolerance.

But really, when it comes to Giant, most people are only interested in James Dean. And they definitely should be because Dean gives a great and compelling performance here. Dean brings all of the emotional intensity of the method to material that one would not naturally associate with method acting and the end result is amazing to watch. Giant was released after Dean had been killed in that infamous car wreck. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be sitting in a theater in 1956 and to see this compelling and charismatic actor towering above the world on the big screen while aware, all the time, that his life had already been cut short and he would never been seen in another film.

Even better, Dean’s new style of acting clashes perfectly with Hudson’s old style of acting, making the conflict between Bick and Jett feel all the more real and intense. Much as Bick represents old Texas and Jett represents the new Texas, Hudon and Dean represented the two sides of Hollywood: the celebrity and the artist. Needless to say, Dean wins the battle but, surprisingly, Hudson occasionally manages to hold his own.

I can’t necessarily say that Giant is an essential film. A lot of people are going to be bored by the excessive length. But if you’re a fan of James Dean or if you’re from Texas, Giant is a film that you need to see at least once.

44 Days of Paranoia #3: Winter Kills (dir by William Richert)

Posted on November 20, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Yesterday, I took a look at Executive Action, a 1973 docudrama about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Today, I want to take a look at another film inspired by the Kennedys, the 1979 satire Winter Kills.

As the film opens, it’s been 16 years since a popular and dynamic President named Tim Kegan was assassinated in Philadelphia. Despite constant rumors of conspiracy, the official story is that Kegan was killed by a lone gunman and that gunman was subsequently killed by another lone assassin. The President’s half-brother, Nick (played by Jeff Bridges, who looks so impossibly young and handsome in this film), has disappointed his father (John Huston) by declining to follow his brother into politics. Instead, he spends most of his time sailing on corporate oil tankers and dating fashion editor Yvette (Belinda Bauer). This all changes when a dying man named Fletcher (and played, underneath a lot of bandages, by Joe Spinell) asks for a chance to speak to Nick. Fletcher reveals that he was the 2nd gunman and that he was hired by to kill President Kegan. Before dying, Fletcher tells Nick where he can find the rifle that was used to kill the President.

Following Fletcher’s directions, Nick finds both the rifle and proof that his brother’s death was the result of a conspiracy. Determined to find out who was truly behind the conspiracy, Nick goes to see his father, the flamboyant tycoon Pa Kegan (John Huston) who, we discover, is only alive because he frequently gets blood transfusions from young women. With Pa’s encouragement, Nick is sent on an increasingly bizarre odyssey into the darkest shadows of America, a world that is populated by militaristic businessmen, sinister gangsters, and an unemotional man named John Cerutti (Anthony Perkins) who very well may be the most powerful man in the world.

The martyred President might be named Tim Kegan, his accused assassin might be named Willie Abbott, and the man who shot Abbott might be named Joe Diamond (and might be played by Eli Wallach) but make no mistake about it — Winter Kills is a thinly disguised look at both the Kennedy assassination and the Kennedy family. Based on a novel by Richard Condon (who also wrote the conspiracy classic, The Manchurian Candidate), Winter Kills takes all of the various Kennedy conspiracy theories and intentionally pushes them to their most ludicrous extremes. The end result is a film that tries (and occasionally manages) to be both absurd and sincere, a portrait of a world where paranoia is the only logical reaction.

As I discovered from listening to director William Richert’s commentary on the Anchor Bay DVD, Winter Kills had a long and complicated production history. The film was produced by two marijuana dealers, one of whom was murdered by the Mafia shortly after the film premiered while the other would later be sentenced to 40 years in prison on federal drug charges. The production actually went bankrupt more than a few times, which led to Richert, Bridges, and Bauer making and releasing another film specifically so they could raise the money to finish Winter Kills.

When Winter Kills was finally released, it got a good deal of attention because of its spectacular cast. Along with Bridges, Huston, Perkins, and Wallach, the film also features cameo appearances by Tomas Milian, Elizabeth Taylor, Ralph Meeker, Richard Boone, Sterling Hayden, Dorothy Malone, Toshiro Mifune, and a host of other actors who will be familiar to those of us who enjoy watching old movies on TCM. And yet, according to Richert, the film itself was barely released in to theaters, the implication being that Winter Kills was a film about conspiracies that fell victim to a conspiracy itself.

Given the film’s history and the subject matter, I was really hoping that Winter Kills would turn out to be a great movie. Unfortunately, it really doesn’t work. The film struggles to maintain a balance between suspense and satire and, as a result, the suspense is never convincing and the satire is ultimately so obvious that it ends up being more annoying than thought-provoking. The cast may be impressive but they’re used in such a way that film ultimately feels like it’s just a collection of showy celebrity cameos as opposed to being an actual story.

That said, Winter Kills remains an interesting misfire. Jeff Bridges is a likable and compelling lead (and he gives the film much-needed focus) and, playing a role that has a lot in common with his better known work in Chinatown, John Huston is a always watchable if not necessaily likable. Best of all is Anthony Perkins, who plays a role that, in light of what we now know about the NSA, seems oddly prophetic.

Finally, best of all, Winter Kills remains an interesting time capsule. If nothing else, it reminds us that mistrust and paranoia are not unique to this century.

Elizabeth Taylor, R.I.P.

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I was at work this afternoon when my boss — who had just gotten to the office after spending the day in court — approached my desk and said, “Lisa, you like old movies, don’t you?”

“Kinda sorta,” I replied and I tried to say that with just a hint of a coy little smile to let him know that I absolutely love movies — new and old — but I’m not sure if he noticed.

“Did you know Elizabeth Taylor died today?” he asked. I guess I didn’t answer quickly enough because he then added, “She was a movie star, might have been a little bit before your time.”

Well, just for the record, I do know who Elizabeth Taylor was. And even though she pretty much retired from acting before I was even born, she was hardly before my time because — whether it was by appearing in classic films like A Place in the Sun and Giant or films like Cleopatra and Reflections in a Golden Eye that were so bad that they somehow became good — she became one of those timeless icons.

I think there’s probably a tendency to be dismissive of Elizabeth Taylor as an actress because her private life, in so many ways, seemed to epitomize every cliché of old school Hollywood scandal and glamorous excess. However, you only have to watch her films from the 50s to see that Elizabeth Taylor actually was a very talented actress who, even more importantly, had the type of charisma that could dominate the screen.

I think that’s why it was so strange to hear that Elizabeth Taylor had died. It was a reminder that, as opposed to just being an image stored on DVDs that can be viewed as often or as little as one might choose, she was actually a human being just like the rest of us.

Lisa Marie Finds A Place In The Sun (dir. by George Stevens)

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Lisa Marie Bowman

As part of my mission to see every film ever nominated for best picture, I watched George Stevens’ A Place In The Sun this weekend. A Place in the Sun was released in 1951. It was a front-runner for best picture but in an upset, it lost to An American In Paris. (Another best picture loser that year: A Streetcar Named Desire.)

Montgomery Clift plays George Eastman, a poor man with a religious fanatic mother and a wealthy uncle. Looking to make his fortune (i.e., to find his “place in the sun), George gets a job working in his uncle’s factory and quickly starts a romance with one of his co-workers, the shy and insecure Alice (Shelley Winters). However, even as he and Alice settle down to a life of dreary romantic bliss, George discovers that the Eastman name also allows him to mingle with (if never truly belong to) high society. He meets the rich (and shallow) Angela Vickers (played by Elizabeth Taylor) and soon, he’s also romancing her. Neither Angela or Alice is aware of the other’s existence and for a while, George has the best of both the world he desires and the world in which he actually belongs. Eventually, George decides that he wants to marry Angela and become a part of her world. However, there’s a problem. Alice is pregnant and demanding that George marry her or else. The increasingly desperate George quickly decides that there’s only one way to get Alice out of his life…

A Place in the Sun was based very loosely on Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel, An American Tragedy. While the movie remains (more or less) faithful to the novel’s plot, director Stevens jettisons most of Dreiser’s heavy-handed Marxism and instead concentrates on the more melodramatic elements of the story. The end result is a glorious soap opera that is occasionally a bit tacky and heavy-handed but always watchable and entertaining.

Stevens is helped by the three lead performances. As Angela, a stunningly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor manages to be both calculating and clueless, seductive and innocent. As her counterpart, Shelley Winters gives a really brave performance as Alice. The film is structured that its impossible not to feel sorry for Alice. The genius of Winters performance is that she (and director Stevens) allowed Alice to become a real, flawed human being as opposed to just a symbol of victimization. However, the film is truly dominated by Montgomery Clift. Clift is in just about every scene and his own rather fragile persona translates wonderfully in the role of George. Was Montgomery Clift ever as handsome as he was in A Place In The Sun? He gives a perfect performance as the type of guy that every girl has known, the guy that we fell in love with not because of who he was but who we thought he could be. These are the guys who always end up breaking our hearts, they’re the ones who we still can’t help but think about years later, always wondering “why?”

Unlike a lot of older films, A Place in the Sun remains remarkably watchable and relevent today. Perhaps its most famous scene involves a capsized rowboat and oh my God, that scene freaked me out so much. Admittedly, a lot of that had to do with the fact that I have this morbid fear of drowning (and, like one of the characters in this film, I can’t swim) but director Stevens also does a great job building up the scene’s suspense. He makes brilliant use of sound especially, in much the same way that Francis Ford Coppola would later use that roaring train in The Godfather. Seriously, I watched that scene with my hands literally over my eyes, just taking an occasional peek until it was all over.

One last note — there’s an actor in this film who plays a detective. You’ll see him if you play the trailer at the top of the post. His big line is “You’re under arrest.” I have no idea who this actor was but he had one of the most authentic and memorable faces that I’ve ever seen in a movie, regardless of when the movie was made. He had the type of presence that reminded me why I love character actors.