MonsterHunter

Holy crap, that was long! Such was my reaction after finishing this one about two days after I started it. Lumbering, plodding, crawling, rumbling, stumbling, and finally bumbling into the endzone after an eternity, this movie (and really, that’s probably too charitable a term for something more akin to second job) will sorely test the patience of even the hardiest of historical epic fans.

To put this in some kind of perspective (a word rarely used anywhere near Cleopatra, I’d wager), you might recall the monumental dullness that was Hawaii . Casting aside the fact that there probably isn’t any epic other than Cleopatra that actually attempted to shoot without a script, all you need to know is that it is a full hour longer than Hawaii !

You get the idea from watching the expensive flop that Twentieth Century Fox must have been commanded by the late queen of Egypt herself to keep the cameras and the cash rolling in spite of nasty little details like Liz Taylor trying to die, tearing up all the sets in England and rebuilding everything in Italy so Liz could be in warmer weather, and firing one director and replacing him with another who decided to rewrite the script from scratch, even as he was shooting the picture.

I don’t think you’d be surprised if I mentioned that after everything was shot and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz showed Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck his five hour and twenty minute cut (Cut? What did you cut? The bathroom breaks?), Zanuck got rid of him. Cleopatra being the movie equivalent of the Alamo, Hindenberg, and Titanic all rolled into one, it goes without saying that Zanuck rehired him later.

The DVD release of this movie is probably structured in such a way that may come as close to Mankiewicz’s vision of the project as we’ll ever likely see. Well, except the third disc in the three-disc set that contains the fascinating two-hour long documentary about what a debacle his movie is, that is. The other two discs though pretty much play like two separate movies.

Two separate, boring movies filled with stilted, unbelievable performances (I love Rex Harrison as much as anyone - he is the definitive white Dr. Doolittle, but his “daddy Caesar” routine that he played out with Cleopatra borders on the icky) and a disjointed story that takes forever to develop, yet seems to leave out chunks of important narrative, giving viewers the feeling that they’re coming in at the middle of a conversation.

Mankiewicz’s plan was to release two different three hour movies from this morass of history, fancy sets, and guys with British accents playing Romans. The first movie would be about Cleopatra and Julius Caesar and the second movie would be about Cleopatra and Antony.

Zanuck objected and basically said, “who wants to see Doolittle and Liz Taylor in a movie when you’ve got Richard Burton sailing up her Nile?” I couldn’t agree more, but you are still left with the first half of this movie where the inane bickering of Cleopatra and Doolittle somehow tries to bring to mind one of those Tracy and Hepburn comedies, but only manages to bring to mind how old Rex is.

The first two hours of the movie were pretty forgettable. Burton doesn’t make an appearance as Marc Antony until near the end and is only in about five minutes of the first disc. Caesar wasn’t that interesting and I don’t recall much about what he was up to during this time except for the fact that he had epilepsy. Once I saw him flopping around on the floor of some Egyptian palace, it didn’t take a genius to see that I was going to be calling him Julius Seizure for the rest of the movie (as I’m sure guys like Flavius did).

The gigantic sequence where Cleopatra makes her gaudy arrival in Rome after hooking up with Caesar is just as spectacular behind the scenes as it was on screen. The documentary said that they were all ready to shoot this, but the cinematographer (who is described as “crabby”) didn’t like the way the sunlight was filling the set, so they had to wait six months before they could shoot all the stuff again with the proper lighting. You also get an adorable story about an extra who fell off an elephant and lost all the skin off of her ass because she scraped against the elephant’s hide on the way down. Great story! It ranks up there with how Burton’s first day on the set was marked by him having such a bad hangover that he had the shakes and Liz had to hold the cup of coffee to his lips for him!

After the Caesar’s exit, things get a little more entertaining, but not necessarily any better. Antony promises Cleopatra that he’ll do what he can to get her kid put on the throne and somehow ends up as her lover. This transition from “guy who was on screen for five minutes” to “guy who becomes Cleopatra’s other great love, but is filled with self-doubts due to the long shadow cast by Caesar” is handled very poorly and never explained, but if leaving all of that character development out kept this movie under the five hour mark, then I won’t argue too vehemently for its inclusion.

Of course having that in would have helped to explain everything that Antony did in the rest of the movie, such as deferring to Cleopatra’s dubious military strategy of attacking the Roman forces of Octavian from the sea, even though Antony is the world champion of land battles and has a few hundred thousand crack land troops and several competent generals that would go to hell and back for him.

The movie tells us that the only person in the world who thought it was a good idea to go in by sea was Cleopatra and that Antony knew he was screwed by doing it, but did it anyway. All you guys in a relationship will surely understand this, but you wouldn’t have expected this sort of wimp behavior from Antony. After all, he was the kind of guy to mope around about how Alexander the Great had already conquered the world when he was Antony’s age and dang it, Antony was falling behind!

By far, the greatest moment in the movie occurs when Antony is getting his ass whipped by the Romans and has been tricked by Octavian and Antony looks out across the sea, only to notice that Cleopatra’s ship has turned tailed and is sailing back to Egypt! This movie is so true to life! Later, Cleopatra tries to justify her traitorous ways by saying “but I thought you were dead, baby!” That’s classic chick talk!

Antony spends most of the rest of the movie pouting since he basically humiliated himself by bailing out on his warriors and took off in a lifeboat to chase after that Egyptian booty that got him into this jam in the first place, instead of going down with the ship and dying an honorable death. Antony babbles about how he’s already dead and periodically moans about Julius Caesar and how she probably liked him better and stuff.

All the while Octavian and his army are heading straight to Alexandria. Antony refuses to rouse himself for battle until he gets some big pep talk from Cleopatra. Naturally after he goes off to battle, Cleopatra admits to someone that Antony is screwed since no one will fight for him anymore, but at least she got him to change out of his pajamas and leave the house.

All of this leads to the climatic battle scene where Antony rides off against Octavian’s army of several thousand by himself! Wading into the enemy troops (the Romans who used to idolize him) he repeatedly tries to whack them with his sword, but everyone refuses to engage him in battle. “Is there no one that will grant me an honorable death?” he shouts at the them. Uh, no. But why don’t you go on back to Cleopatra’s house, drink a bunch of whiskey, crank up the Ozzy real loud and take the easy way out? Done, done and done!

This is followed up by Cleopatra’s close encounter with an asp and all that’s left is Roddy McDowell as Octavian fuming over being cheated out of humiliating both Antony and Cleopatra. You how they say that anything written well can be compelling? Well, the inverse is true in this case. A spectacular waste of talent and resources (though I think we could have found someone a bit more convincing as Cleopatra than Liz Taylor, even though she acted like a queen on the set by all accounts), the documentary that accompanies the movie expertly dissects the witch’s brew of circumstances that coalesced around it to doom this film to failure.

Keep in mind that this was the movie that was supposed to save Twentieth Century Fox from going under and that they kept pouring money into it, first because they thought the more they spent, the bigger return they would get, then because it was simply too costly to shut down, and finally because it was the only movie they were making and they had nowhere else to put their money. What’s up on the screen manages to be the most expensive sword and sandal movie ever made, complete with the migraine-inducing dialogue and questionable performances you would expect from any movie of its ilk, only all dressed up with honest-to-gosh movie stars and sets that would probably make the real Cleopatra envious. As is usually the case, it’s the story behind the film that’s the stuff of legend and it’s the documentary, Cleopatra: The Film That Changed Hollywood, that makes this DVD set worth owning. Just consider the movie itself to be a necessary evil to maximize enjoyment of the documentary.

© 2008 MonsterHunter