Lists: those American dramas ...

Final List of the season - we are all listed out! After covering British, French and Italian favourites its now a return look at those great American dramas from the Golden Age of the 1950s and 1960s - the heyday of Kazan and Kramer,  Wyler and Wilder, Huston, Mankiewicz, Cukor, Minnelli, Nick Ray, Preminger, Brooks, Ritt, etc. and when American drama was ruled by the likes of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, William Inge etc. We have covered them in detail here before, so this is a quick roundup. Lots more at labels - particularly Tennessee Williams ,,, (below: NIGHT OF THE IGUANA)

We have to begin of course with those early Kazans; 

• A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
• ON THE WATERFRONT
  
• EAST OF EDEN
• A FACE IN THE CROWD
• Nicholas Ray's THE LUSTY MEN in 1952, a strong rodeo drama bringing out the best in Mitchum and Susan Hayward.(right) 
• More baroque Ray with his 1954 JOHNNY GUITAR - the first film I saw, aged 8. 
• Ray's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE of course, and Stevens' GIANT to complete the Dean hat-trick. 
• Cukor's 1954 A STAR IS BORN, the best musical drama ever
• THE BIG COUNTRY in 1958 is really a William Wyler drama which just happens to be set in the west. 
• CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
• SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER
• BONJOUR TRISTESSE
• SEPARATE TABLES
• THE NUN'S STORY
• ON THE BEACH.

Those 20th Century Fox literarary adaptations came thick and fast:

• THE LONG HOT SUMMER - Faulkner, 1958
• THE SOUND AND THE FURY in 1959 - Faulkner, Good cast: Brynner, Woodward, Leighton
• THE WAYWARD BUS - a long unseen Steinbeck from 1957, Jayne Mansfield and Joan Collins! Its a fascinating mess or Trash Classic
• SONS AND LOVERS - D H Lawrence gets the Fox treatment in 1960 ...
• SANCTUARY - another Faulkner misfire, from Tony Richardson in 1961 - Lee Remick and Yves Montand make the oddest team, but Lee shines ...
• HEMINGWAY'S ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG MAN - 1962, as per recent review. 

The 1960s upped the ranks with those new directors like John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, Robert Mulligan, while John Huston went on and on ....

• THE MISFITS
• ONE EYED JACKS - Brando's brooding western, 1961
• ALL FALL DOWN - a perennial favourite
• THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
• SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS
• THE MIRACLE WORKER
• TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
• DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
• LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
• THE DARK AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS
  
• TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN 
• THE STRIPPER
• NIGHT OF THE IGUANA 
• WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
• REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE
• SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH
• SUMMER AND SMOKE
• THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED
• INSIDE DAISY CLOVER
• THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS STONE 
• MIDNIGHT COWBOY.
  

Back to 1957 with ....

When I was 11 in 1957, a favourite movie magazine - one of the American fan ones - was maybe called "Screen Stories", featuring stories and photos from the current movies. This particular issue featured RAINTREE COUNTY, THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL, TAMMY AND THE BACHELOR, LOVING YOU, FUNNY FACE and others -- I can still visualise it. This week two of these re-surfaced, the Marilyn and the Elizabeth saga. Of the two I think Marilyn came out the winner.

Both had been working hard throughout the early Fifties, Liz having four movies out in 1954, but once GIANT catapulted her into the  major league, she slowed down to one prestige film a year .... as did Marilyn, who had formed her own production company with Milton H Greene, after moving to New York and was seeking more important projects, than the fluff 20th Century Fox saw her in. Terence Rattigan's play, THE SLEEPING PRINCE, seemed the ideal choice, with Laurence Olivier directing and co-starring, and a good British cast, filmed in England in 1956. We have covered that in detail before here, particularly when the film MY WEEK WITH MARILYN came out. Looking at it again now it is utter delight.

It is a totally different Marilyn from her Fox movies, ace cameraman Jack Cardiff photographs her lovingly, she had never looked better and proves herself a delightful comedienne, holding her own with Olivier, whose sly portrayal is a joy too. Marilyn in that skintight white dress, with the white choker necklace, and the nice period detail. 
Good to see Richard Wattis in a good role for once, and Marilyn with Jean Kent, Maxine Audley, Gladys Henson, Vera Day and with that forgotten actor Jeremy Spenser as the young prince,  (All covered at labels). Of course the production was notoriously difficult with Marilyn's delays and insecurities, but none of it shows on the screen. Its a pleasure to sink into any time. 

RAINTREE COUNTY on the other hand is now a colossal bore and did Taylor no favours. Her damaged southern belle is no Scarlett O'Hara, and the film is a plod through the usual Civil War dramatics. 
Eva Marie Saint is wasted, but we get lots of the young Lee Marvin, Rod Taylor, Nigel Patrick. Montgomery Clift seems to stumble through it, We wonder which scenes were before and after his car accident. He and Taylor though did look great in Bob Willoughby's photos from the set, and seemed to be enjoying themselves, The film was never given the full dvd release initially, as though MGM did not want to bother with it. At least Liz had those Tennessee Williams roles lined up next: CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF and SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, while Marilyn went back to Billy Wilder and the immortal SOME LIKE IT HOT. Liz may have been the dramatic actress, but Marilyn could sing, do comedy and musicals, as well as dramatics, and seems to have endured better.

Monroe and Taylor would be in contention again five years later in 1962 when CLEOPATRA and MM's SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE where making the headlines .... 

Star power

Interesting news that Warren Beatty. 79, and Faye Dunaway, 76, will present the Best Film Award at the upcoming Oscars, 50 years after BONNIE AND CLYDE. I was 21 when Faye and Warren bowled us over in Penn's extraordindary film back in that glorious year 1967 - are we all 50 years older? 

Here's another example of star power: Paul Newman, 67, and Elizabeth Taylor, 60, presenting the Best Film Award in 1992, decades after their CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. 

Summer re-views: married folk

Two contrasting studies of tempestuous marriages and infidelity. The very serious THE PUMPKIN EATER from 1964 - not seen that since then; and the 1972 Trashfest that is ZEE & CO, (or X, Y, & ZEE) - ditto.

Upper middle-class life in the black and white early sixties is nicely dissected in Jack Clayton's THE PUMPKIN EATER, from a novel by Penelope Mortimer, scripted by Harold Pinter (so we are in THE SERVANT and ACCIDENT territory). 
Anne Bancroft, after her Oscar win (for THE MIRACLE WORKER, and before she essayed Mrs Robinson in THE GRADUATE), has one of her key roles as the very intense mother of eight children, as she wonders if her current husband, writer Peter Finch, is being unfaithful. He is of course, and with the annoying Philpot (a noteworthy early small role by Maggie Smith). He has also been having an affair with the wife of jealous friend James Mason, who plots his revenge. Jo (Bancroft) has a harrowing breakdown in Harrods store, and is later menaced at the hairdressers by a woman (Yootha Joyce) jealous of Jo's lavish lifestyle and good fortune. 

Her father is Cedric Hardwicke (his final role) and the cast also includes Alan Webb, Richard Johnson as Jo's previous husband,  Eric Porter and more familiar faces.

It is a fascinating drama, often teetering on the brink of pretentiousness and unintentional hilarity, but the cast is the thing here. (A similar movie is the same era's PSYCHE '59, by Alexander Singer, another look at posh London life, here the wife is Patricia Neal, who is blind until she realises what is going on between her husband Curt Jurgens and sexpot Samantha Eggar). 
ZEE & CO is a garish cartoon by comparison ...

Zee and Robert Blakeley are members of swinging London's upper crust whose unique love-hate marriage heads towards destruction when Robert falls in love with a beautiful young widow named Stella, and Zee goes through a series of scheming adventures to break Robert and Stella up.

Thats the plot in a nutshell, but it can hardly do justice to the Trash classic that is ZEE & CO, (or X, Y, AND ZEE) - an unlikely title for action director Brian G Hutton (but he had just directed Burton in WHERE EAGLES DARE) - this time, he puts a wild Elizabeth Tayor and dull Michael Caine through their paces, and a wan Susannah York, plus Margaret Leighton as a kind of aged hippie, and John Standing as the catty gay best friend, and young Michael Cashman (ex-EASTENDERS gay Colin) as the "poncy little fag" shop assistant.

The farrago was scripted by Edna O'Brien - hope she got paid a lot - and the whole thing gets wilder and wilder and funnier and funnier as Liz scheeches and brays as she plots to seduce Susannah herself, to get her away from husband Caine ..... Taylor seems to have a ball letting rip as the over-dressed vulgarian wife of stuffy architect Caine, but really her movie goddess days were coming to an end here in 1972; without a Zeffirelli, Losey or Mike Nichols to direct her she seems to have been encouraged to go way over the top here. This is a Trash Classic up there with the best of the worst - one to relish with THE LOVE MACHINE or THE OSCAR or even HARLOW .... 

Young Toscanini, 1988

I never imagined in my wildest dreams I would enjoy seeing Elizabeth Taylor in blackface as an opera diva singing (or miming to) an aria from AIDA, but that is just one of the treats in Franco Zeffirelli's 1988 YOUNG TOSCANINI, so thanks Jerry for that. 

Of course Zeffirelli (now 93) knows how to stage an opera and how to showcase a diva, we get both in spades here. His later films (this one never even played in London) may be inconsequential but are marvellously staged, costumed and cast. TEA WITH MUSSOLINI was fun with that cast, and Fanny Ardant is terrific as Maria Callas (whom Zeffi knew well) in CALLAS FOREVER in 2002. His huge hits in the 1960s were of course THE TAMING OF THE SHREW with the Burtons, and ROMEO AND JULIET in 1968. I particularly like his hippie St Francis film BROTHER SUN, SISTER MOON in 1973, where again he creates spell-binding moments. His long apprenticeship with Visconti certainly paid dividend. 

YOUNG TOSCANINI is an oddity. The blurb says:

In Rio de Janeiro in 1886, eighteen-year-old conductor Arturo Toscanini, in Brazil on an orchestra tour, is torn between an aging soprano attempting a comeback and a mistress his own age. Opera diva Nadina Bulichoff has interrupted her stage career for Dom Pedro II the emperor of Brazil. When Toscanini begins to coach his childhood idol for a return to the stage in "Aida," Nadina has fallen into deep depression. The conductor is instrumental in her transformation as her performance proves an ultimate triumph and she is back the top of her art.

Taylor is terrific here as Nadina, its a leading role and maybe her last significant cinema one. She certainly looks and emotes better than she did in that terrible A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC a decade earlier. I did not know C. Thomas Howell's work, but he has certainly been busy and still working now. Cast also includes Sophie Ward, Franco Nero, Philippe Noiret. Certainly worth seeing if one can catch it. 

I will now finally be moving on to Zeffirelli's 1990 HAMLET this week - again, a stunnng cast, and should be an interesting take on the play. I will be also tackling his 1996 JANE EYRE which may arrive today; there are so many JANEs around, it will be interesting to see how Franco stages it, and again has a great British supporting cast (Joan Plowright, Billie Whitelaw, Sam West, Richard Warwick, with William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsburg in the leads).  . 

Cleopatra out-takes ...

Elizabeth Taylor and veteran actor Finlay Currie on the set of CLEOPATRA. But Finlay wasn't in CLEOPATRA you say - quite right, his part was surgically removed when they were cutting the 6 hour epic down to a more manageable 4 .... pity Finlay didn't make the cut here, he was in so many other epics, from QUO VADIS? to BEN HUR. 

FILMS IN REVIEW is a fascinating little magazine I missed at the time, its good discovering them now, like that 1988 one with a terrific interview with Lee Remick looking back over her career, and this recent acquisition I found on ebay, dated January 1988 with a good feature on CLEOPATRA, going through the original Mankiewicz screenplay for his proposed six hour version, which would be shown in two parts. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox soon put paid to that and the 4-hour version that exists now is as much as we are going to get. 
I don't think there will be any A STAR IS BORN-type restoration here! 

Other deletions, apart from Finlay, included background material on those other characters like Ruffio, Sosigenes, Apollodorus, Octavian, etc. 

I like this particular scene closing the first half, as Cleo sails away, its perfectly written, acted, and scored with that great Alex North score.

Among the supporting players we also like Richard OSullivan (the little boy in DANGEROUS EXILE) as the petulant young Pharoah, Gregoire Alsan as the scheming Pothinus, and Pamela Brown's all-seeing high priestess, and of course we love the opulent sets and costumes, as discussed before, and that great panning shot over the bay of Alexandria as Caesar arrives ....  There is still a lot to enjoy in CLEOPATRA not least Rex as Caesar and as befits a Mankiewicz film, the dialogue is to savour.

Showpeople: The Burtons and Sophia ...

Not seen this one before: Liz Taylor visiting Richard and co-star Sophia Loren on the set of their THE VOYAGE, Vittorio De Sica's last film, filmed in 1973 and not released until much later ....

Only 3 years earlier I had seen, as mentioned before, The Burtons with director Joseph Losey and veteran film critic Dilys Powell at the CINEMA CITY exhibition at The Roundhouse in London ..... 

Burtons go Boom!

More Tennessee Williams mayhem, sorry - arthouse classic, or if you want, a Trash Masterpiece .... whatever, its certainly a cult movie now. (see THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS STONE - below).

It must have seemed a good idea at the time for arty culty director Joseph Losey to team up with The Burtons in 1968, after the relative failure of his 1966 Bond spoof MODESTY BLAISE (perhaps MY cult movie...) and then ACCIDENT in '67 - the last of his with frequent players Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker.

BOOM! is now regarded as a camp Trash Classic in some quarters, and maybe it started that era of Burton and Taylor's decline at the box office - after their mid-60s artistic hits WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? and THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, after those popular items like THE VIPS. THE SANDPIPER IS a Trash Classic even if Minnelli gave it some surface style and gloss and Taylor looked marvellous, if a little dumpy. They must have thought they were being artistic doing another Tennessee Williams (but "What were they thinking?" - even though they were drinking a lot at the time...) - even if it was a failed play of his "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore" which the ageing Tallulah Bankhead had done on stage with Tab Hunter as her younger Angel of Death - that would have been something to see! 

Here are some choice comments from various websites on this fascinating misfire ..... 

As serious art, BOOM! is a bomb. Yet, as a testimony, a very camp testimony, to the lives of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Noel Coward, and Tennessee Williams, it is literally hysterical in its preoccupation with the emptiness of wealth, sex, and luxury.

 It is the incredible Miss Taylor who grounds this late 60's arthouse flop, and manages to transcend it's failing qualities, to make it a screen orgy of bad taste and over the top drama!

Taylor's role (like Vivien Leigh’s MRS STONE) is really that of an aging rich gay man who is trying to hang on to youth and the beauties that money attract. Burton's role is that of the hustler who is all that is left for the old queen to attract. But as with so many Williams works it all must be encrypted and coded so that the America of the late 50's and early 60's could handle his true intentions. 

Taylor plays ageing hedonist Flora “Sissy” Goforth, the much-married, drug-addicted, richest (and it’s been argued, the most irritating) woman in the world. From the windswept high solitude of her all-white villa on the edge of a cliff in Sardinia, the terminally ill Goforth is in denial about her imminent death, distracting herself by dictating her memoirs into a tape recorder, as she coughs up blood, and directing her diva’s wrath at her long-suffering servants in fractured Italian. She is visited by the enigmatic Christopher Flanders (played by Burton), a failed poet turned gigolo notorious on the international jet set as an ambiguous and parasitic Angel of Death who materialises whenever a wealthy woman is about to die. 
Burton is too old for the role that was written for a man in his twenties and Taylor is too young and too healthy looking to be the dying Sissy. As an elite high society gigolo Flanders surely should be a bronzed adonis, someone like Terence Stamp in Pasolini's TEOREMA, also 1968. Clad throughout in a samurai warrior's robe (complete with ceremonal sword) Burton look haggard and faded. It's he who looks like he is dying, instead of Taylor.

In theory BOOM! initially may have seemed promising. Taylor and Burton were show business royalty and the public was still entranced by their glitzy soap opera lifestyle. Taylor had triumphed in earlier film adaptations of Tennessee Williams plays like CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958) and SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959). Joseph Losey was a hip, art-y director of the moment, critically acclaimed for films like THE SERVANT (1963).

Taylor plays in full-throttle imperious, overripe, scenery-chewing diva mode, and shrieking like a harridan, Her Sissy Goforth is self-parodic, unhinged and drag queeny - maybe that was the only way to play it - no wonder John Waters says Taylor’s appearance and abrasive performance in this film were a beloved source of inspiration for Divine.

BOOM! is incredibly beautiful to look at, weirdly enjoyable and frequently mesmerising in a way only a truly trashy bad movie can be. Losey’s prowling camera and elegantly composed shots ensure it’s never dull to watch - especially when Noel Coward arrives as The Witch of Capri ! and Taylor wears that kabuki outfit with that spectacular head-dress ...

Like in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER or NIGHT OF THE IGUANA or SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH that weird Williams poetry comes through the bizarre situations. The set must have been expensive too. Taylor and Losey went on the equally bizarre and culty SECRET CEREMONY, also filmed in 1968 in London. This too  was a notorious flop at the time - and this is where I  come in, as I saw Burton and Taylor with Losey and "The Sunday Times" esteemed film critic Dilys Powell discussing the film on stage at the 1970 CINEMA CITY exhibition at The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm in London. SECRET CEREMONY had been badly received, cut, and sold to television and they were outraged at its treatment. I can still picture Elizabeth, looking great in a patchwork gypsy-style dress and flashing that diamond ring. Burton and Losey seemed hangdog about it all ... 
Our affection for Elizabeth grew in her later years: all those diamonds, perfumes, her AIDS charity work, her varying weight and looks ... for me though her great era was that decade from 1954 (THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS, GIANT, RAINTREE COUNTY, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER and, yes, CLEOPATRA) when she and Marilyn were the twin deities of the era, as Sophia and Brigitte came to the fore.

The Burton era though was passing, were the public getting tired of their ritzy lifestyle and antics as they were forced to make more and worse films to maintain their lifestyle? - people were just not going to see them, together or separately, any more - and who could blame them with items like HAMMERSMITH IS OUT, BLUEBEARD, THE DRIVER'S SEAT, ASH WEDNESDAY .... ZEE & CO though was another genuine Trash Classic we will have to re-visit it soon.
Losey had another success, artistic and popular, with THE GO-BETWEEN in 1971 and was then mainly filming in Europe. He directed Burton again in his 1972 THE ASSASSINATION OF TROTSKY, which a lot of people, including me, didn't bother with at the time - despite it also featuring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider - or maybe it did not hang around long enough for us to see it. It was though deadly dull when I finally got the dvd a while back. 

Bad Movies We Love

Here is a Trash Classic indeed. Rebello and Marguilies' 1995 tome on those bad movies we love, with a foreword by Sharon Stone, who gets a whole chapter to herself. The usual suspects though are here in force: Lana, Susan, Joan (Crawford), Bette and all those delirious movies of theirs.

Browsing it again makes one want to dig out QUEEN BEE (Joan - ["wearing the kind of gown a female impersonator would choose"]: "Any man's my man if I want it that way" or: "You look sweet - even in those tacky old clothes"); or Lana's PORTRAIT IN BLACK or LOVE HAS MANY FACES - perennial favourites of ours. Others like THE CHAPMAN REPORT, THE  BEST OF EVERYTHING, SERENADE, PARRISH and those Troy Donahue spectaculars get their due (I will have to look out for PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND, which sounds a hoot).

Pity they did not include Suzanne Pleshette's opus A RAGE TO LIVE, or THE SUBTERRANEANS or THE SOUND AND THE FURY or Lee Remick's SANCTUARY or Jean Simmons' HILDA CRANE or Jane Russell's THE REVOLT OF MAMIE STOVER or Shelley's A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME or Debbie's THE SINGING NUN.... maybe in a new edition, and with a foreword by Joan Collins please? At least JOHNNY GUITAR gets it due - a delicious piece on its gay subtext, as does TORCH SONG, AUTUMN LEAVES, FEMALE ON THE BEACH, Bette's THE STAR and DEAD RINGER and Lucille's MAME, plus the pure trash of THE OSCAR and THE LOVE MACHINE and ... those 'disasters' get trashed again too: those AIRPORTs, THE CASSANDRA CROSSING, EARTHQUAKE etc. too easy to make fun of those! 

Lets' savour a few comments on the usually-respected THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (the 1968 one, natch): "Its not the money" business tycoon Steve McQueen drawls soulfully "Its me and the System" - that 60s phrase explains why the ineffably cool McQueen - who plays polo, drives a Rolls, pilots his own glider plane and dune buggy, and lives in a killer Boston mansion - masterminds multi-million dollar bank robberies on the side.... Everything's so terribly, laughably with-it in Norman Jewison's chi-chi epic - that you could bliss out with glee from all the faux hip dialogue, multiple-screen images ... Dunaway, all teeth and legs, and blissfully unaware of how disasterously dated she is going to look in those Theodora Van Runkle costumes, sets a trap to catch a thief, McQueen, whom she just knows is the mastermind".

Lots more here too on bad girls we love like Gina Lollobrigida in GO NAKED IN THE WORLD, Taylor and Burton get roasted for THE SANDPIPER and THE VIPs and Liz' THE DRIVER'S SEAT and X, Y AND ZEE (one I have been meaning to return to...). Carroll Baker gets her due (SYLVIA, THE CARPETBAGGERS, HARLOW) as does Natalie Wood (MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR), Ann-Margret ("THE SWINGER might just be the all-time tackeiest major studio  movie") and so many more .... its well worth seeking out for Trash devotees.   

Above: Bette, Susan and director Edward Dmytryk who after his early successes (THE YOUNG LIONS, RAINTREE COUNTY) hit the Trash trail with a vengance: WHERE LOVE HAS GONE, THE CARPETBAGGERS, BLUEBEARD ...

Bette goes beyond the forest ...

Is BEYOND THE FOREST a camp stinker, a Trash Classic or an undervalued late Forties melodrama proving Bette Davis with one of her great roles, in her last film at Warner Bros? Its hard to decide....

Rosa Moline is bored with life in a small town. She loves Chicago industrialist Neil Latimer who has a hunting lodge nearby. Rosa squeezes her husband's patients to pay their bills so she can visit Chicago; her husband's patience is also tried: he tells her to go and never come back. Once there, Neil tells her he doesn't want her. Back home and pregnant, Neil shows up and now wants her. The caretaker at Neil's lodge threatens to reveal her pregnancy... 

Legend has it that Bette at 40 was all washed up in the late '40s, her Warner Bros contract was running out, her films were under-performing ... King Vidor's meller certainly finished her off in style.

Bette plays Rosa Moline, a small town strumpet ("a 12 o'clock girl in a 9 o'clock town") who wants more than her hick doctor hubby can provide. Sporting a Dracula-like black wig and pounds of lipstick, quivering with impatience at being stuck in a coal-mining town as the wife of a dull doctor, she's Madame Bovary in a major key, spitting out her lines with gusto (yes,"What a dump" as spoofed by Elizabeth Taylor, below) as everyone else cowers around her. Our other favourite Ruth Roman barely gets a look in ...

Bette's explosive performance is among the best of her career (and that's saying something!). Her character has to be among the most evil in 1940s movies. What is remarkable is that Bette compels us to care about and, even root for this greedy and self centered woman. 

As the opening title, in keeping with Forties morality, puts it:

This is the story of evil. Evil is headstrong - is puffed up. For our souls sake, it is salutory for us to view it in all it's ugly nakedness once in a while. Thus may we know how those who deliver themselves over to it end up like the scorpion, in a mad frenzy stinging themselves to eternal death. 

Bette seems to have a whale of a time sashaying around, snarling at everyone, including her saintly doctor husband Joseph Cotten. What though does the visiting millionaire see in her? Surely there are more attractive and younger cuties around? As my very-knowing friend melvelvit puts it: "How could a past-her-prime, dimestore siren like that keep Joseph Cotten and David Brian in such thrall? Why, sex of course. Rosa no doubt did things in bed they couldn't get enough of ... , its the most extreme portrayal of a malignant bitch of the forties."

Bette was in luck though, as ALL ABOUT EVE fell into her lap next year, giving her perhaps her most iconic role, and she continued throughout the Fifties in lesser roles (THE STAR, THE VIRGIN QUEEN, THE CATERED AFFAIR) ending the '50s doing two cameos in 1959: coming on as Catherine The Great for the last five minutes of the otherwise dull JOHN PAUL JONES, and a few scenes with Alec Guinness in THE SCAPEGOAT; (Joan was also cameo-ing that year, "as Amanda Farrow" in THE BEST OF EVERYTHING, a Fox Trash Classic) - they both rose again in 1962 .... BEYOND THE FOREST though remains a Trash Classic.

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 .....