Cleo & Alex revisited

I always enjoy settling down to watch CLEOPATRA again - particularly if recording it from widescreen HD television, so one can zip past an occasional dull bit. Ditto Robert Rossen's 1956 ALEXANDER THE GREAT - a more turgid telling of the Alexander story than Oliver Stone's 2004 dazzling magnum opus which I like a lot - check posts on ALEXANDER at Colin Farrell label.

CLEOPATRA got a bad press at the time and was considered a turkey for a long time, but its a fascinating movie -- the first half at any rate as Rex Harrison is a dynamic Caesar and there are impressive set pieces - that great panning shot over Alexandra as Caesar arrives (Stone must have hommaged this in his ALEXANDER as he also shows us Alexandra where the aged Ptolomy is dictating his memoirs), and all those early scenes with Taylor and Harrison and of course that entry into Rome! 20th Century Fox certainly lavished care and attention and money on the sets and costumes and crowd scenes - all those people were really there. Taylor is impressive with that make-up and all those costume changes (a great wardrobe by Irene Sharaff, like that contrasting blue and red she wears when seeing Caesar's assassination in the flames, with high priestess Pamela Brown) and I love the score by Alex North - my best friend had the soundtrack album so we used to play it a lot. Leon Shamroy's cinematography captures the opulence of the sets.
I like that closing scene to the first half too as Cleo sails away and the music swells up. Her barge entering Tarsus in the second half is a wow too .... but here Burton rants and Taylor gets shrill ("I asked it of Julius Caesar, I DEMAND it of you"..), then the final scenes in the tomb are marvellous. I first saw this on its general release, maybe in '64 or '65, and those close-ups of Taylor on the big screen as the asp bites are someone one remembers .... Legend has it that Mankiewiz was writing the script by night and shooting during the day, after the film relocated to Italy and the famous scandal erupted. The dvd and blu-ray packages are good too, packed with all those features and documentaries including footage of Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd, initially cast, and Joan Collins' screen test as Cleo ...... it would not have been the same. 
CLEOPATRA remains impressive and a lot of fun, without the cachet of  Kubrick's SPARTACUS or Mann's EL CID or FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, or those other great epics of the time like Lean's LAWRENCE OF ARABIA or Visconti's THE LEOPARD. 

ALEXANDER THE GREAT, 1956, is another movie I remember fondly, first seeing it as a kid at a Sunday matinee, some great images linger: Danielle Darrieux as Alexander's mother Olympias on the battlements as the troops depart, and that great moment with the dying Darius (Harry Andrews) abandoned after the battle. A blond Burton does his best, and again there is a good cast including Claire Bloom, Peter Cushing, Andrews and Stanley Baker. Here are a cache of lobby cards:  

From that era, we also like Robert Wise's HELEN OF TROY, Fleischer's THE VIKINGS , Cecil's THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, LeRoy's QUO VADIS and of course Wyler's BEN HUR, and I will add in SOLOMON AND SHEBA too ! Then there' those Steve Reeves movies ..... 

Cannes 2015

An email from the BFI on the Cannes Prize winners. 

French director Jacques Audiard has won this year’s Palme d’Or for his drama Dheepan, the story of a Tamil refugee trying to make a new life in France. A Cannes veteran, Audiard previously competed for the top prize with his 2012 film Rust and Bone and won the Grand Prix for A Prophet in 2010.

This year’s Grand Prix was awarded to the Holocaust drama Son of Saul, the acclaimed debut film by Hungarian director László Nemes, while the festival’s Jury Prize went to The Lobster, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and backed by the BFI Film Fund (above: John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw and a nicely maturing Colin Farrell in THE LOBSTER).  

Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien took best director for his venture into the martial arts genre with The Assassin, with best screenplay going to Mexican writer-director Michel Franco for the emotional Chronic, starring Tim Roth.

Many people’s favourite for the best actor prize, Roth lost out to Vincent Lindon for The Measure of a Man (La Loi du marche). The best actress award was shared between Rooney Mara for Todd Haynes’s much-heralded Patricia Highsmith adaptation, Carol, and Emmanuelle Bercot for Maïwenn’s Mon roi.

Left: Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in Justin Kurzel's pared down MACBETH - marvellojus reports on this, we cannot wait to see it, seems its up there with the Polanski and Welles versions. HAMLET may be my most-seen Shakespeare (6 films and 6 stage productions to write about..) but I have always loved the wild poetry and imagery of 'The Scottish Play; ...(I also have the Nicol Williamson and Ian McKellen filmed theatre versions to report on). 

French new wave veteran Agnès Varda, director of classics such as Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), was honoured with a special lifetime achievement Palme.

It is the first time the coveted award goes to a woman and has only been given out three times before -- to Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Bernardo Bertolucci. It recognises "renowned directors whose works have achieved a global impact but who have nevertheless never won the Palme d’Or".
We have liked Varda, now 86  - right, ever since her CLEO 5 TO 7 and LE BONHEUR and her film about her husband Jacques Demy JACQUOT DE NANTES, and her later BEACHES OF AGNES. She has also been honoured this year at Brighton where she has had an exhibition. 

Cannes remains a byword for fashion and glamour, its been amusing seeing people with no movie to promote still posing on the red carpet as though they are important ... 

Cannes as usual as highlighted some fascinating films coming our way, even if, as in the case of CAROL (see Highsmith label) we will have to wait till end of the year to see them, during the next Award Season buildup .... Then there is THE LOBSTER and that new Deneuve STANDING TALL, and again, MACBETH ...

The New World, 2005

After Ken Russell (below), another visionary director, though a less prolific one: Terrence Malick. We liked BADLANDS and DAYS OF HEAVEN back in the '70s. Today we are looking at his 2005 THE NEW WORLD, another polarising movie it seems - some love it, others find it unutterably tedious and boring! I have had the dvd for years (and also his more recent THE TREE OF LIFE), but have only got to it just now. 

Captain Smith is spared his mutinous hanging sentence after captain Newport's ship arrives in 1607 to found Jamestown, an English colony in Virginia. The initially friendly natives, who have no personal property concept, turn hostile after a 'theft' is 'punished' violently on the spot. During an armed exploration, Smith is captured, but spared when the chief's favorite daughter Pocahontas pleads for the stranger who soon becomes her lover and learns to love their naive 'savage' way of harmonious life. Ultimately he returns to the grim fort, which would starve hadn't she arranged for Indian generosity. Alas, each side soon brands their own lover a traitor, so she is banished and he flogged as introduction to slavish toiling. Changes turn again, leading Smith to accept a northern-more mission and anglicized Pocahontas, believing him dead, becoming the mother of aristocratic new lover John Rolfe's son. They'll meet again for a finale in England.

This slow-paced film full of astonishing images of nature and the life of the Native Americans draws one in slowly as we see what life was really like for those voyagers to the new world as we see the cultures of both the English and the Natives. We have grown to like Colin Farrell in recent years, he was a terrific ALEXANDER (see label), but does not seem to be doing much here.  Q'orianka Kilcher is a very expressive Pocahontas, at one with nature. The film is perhaps self-indulgent and takes it time to take us on this journey. It is not standard Hollywood fare to say the least! but this is a real film-maker, like Antonioni or Fellini, creating a special universe where we stop and take in the flowing waters and the towering forest and the people who live there, it is certainly epic in scope. 

The ending is more complex, as we move from the Virginia settlement to London as Pocahontas is now married to John Rolfe (Christian Bale) and history tells us she died and was buried in London, a long way for her ideal forests and wildlife. 

Babylon revisited

I was fascinated to see details of a German Blu-ray of Oliver Stone's 2004 opus ALEXANDER. There were several versions released - with the 'gay stuff' taken out, or ramped up - depending on what one heard, including a Director's Cut, but this promised to be something else: ALEXANDER - REVISITED (The Final Cut), and indeed it is. Having recently acquired Blu-rays of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, THE LEOPARD, GANDHI, CLEOPATRA, 55 DAYS AT PEKING etc. I simply had to add an Alexander blu-ray to the collection.

Was it really ten years ago that Oliver Stone delivered his magnum opus? - a visionary director giving us his view of the great ancient conqueror, and the howls of derision and incomprehension with which it was received (there are over 1,300 conflicting opinions on it over at IMDB). A lot of the critics panned it too, so I knew it would not be around for long, but caught it on a giant screen and got the later dvd. As an Alexander and ancient world and epic/peplum fan from way back, there were lots in it that I loved. I had no problem with Colin Farrell who looked the part, and the CGI reconstructions of Babylon and Old Ptolemy's Alexandria were terrific. 

Richard Burton though in his 1956 rather turgid ALEXANDER THE GREAT had Fredric March and Danielle Darrieux as his warring parents Philip of Macedon and Olympias, here Val Kilmer and Angelina Jolie are not quite in the same league, but it all looks stunning, and the likes of Brian Blessed and Christopher Plummer also pop up, and Jared Leto is an interesting Hephaistion. 
America though it seems was not ready for a gay or at least bisexual hero - but hey things were different in the ancient world, and Stone was not going to give them another Superhero comic strip. This is a movie made with passion, and a feel for the ancient world (respected historian and Alexander expert and author Robin Lane Fox was advisor, his biography of Alexander remains the best for me), as I have detailed in my previous reports on the film - Alexander label. Right: Darrieux and Burton in the 1956 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 

Looking at it again now, it is fascinating to see the changes. It is no longer a linear narrative as the giant battle of Gaugamela comes right at the start, after Ptolemy's introduction at Alexandria, before the flashbacks to Alexander's youth in Macedonia, and we go backwards and forwards from Alexander's childhood to events in the Hindu Kush and India, with that other mesmerising battle. 

As Old Ptolemy begins the narration: "Our world is gone now. Smashed by the wars. Now I am the keeper of his body, embalmed here in the Egyptian ways. I followed him as Pharaoh, and have now ruled 40 years. I am the victor. But what does it all mean when there is not one left to remember - the great cavalry charge at Gaugamela, or the mountains of the Hindu Kush when we crossed a 100,000-man army into India? He was a god, Cadmos. Or as close as anything I've ever seen". 

Vangelis's score is still terrific - there is even an intermission with music, the battles are amazing and more visceral, the scenes in Babylon and in far off India amaze too. Its a film of astonishing riches, which one can return to .....