There are many important questions to ask oneself in life, and "should I watch Cleopatra (1963) with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, or Antony and Cleopatra (1972) with Charlton Heston and Hildegard Neil on Amazon Instant Video?" is not one of them. Yet, I have a soft spot for the Shakespeare tragedy, since it is the first Shakespeare play I ever saw, and on top of it I saw it in 2009 at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, which has ended up playing an important part in my life, and it was also the first play I ever saw at PSF, I think. (I suppose American schoolchildren get to see Shakespeare plays in school shows, but I only came to the US when I was 22, and that was for graduate school in engineering, so I've had some catching-up to do.) The other reason is that there are few good roles for women past the age to play ingenues, and few good (leading) roles of queens. So, for the benefit of universal knowledge, I've watched both movies so that you don't have to.
The Charlton Heston movie is a faithful adaptation of Shakespeare's text and lasts about 2 1/2 hours. You can get the text of the play and follow along, most of the time. Because Cleopatra has become a theatre role for mature women, I was surprised to see her played by a much younger woman than Antony/Heston. I enjoyed the sets, the costumes and the supporting actors, especially Jane Lapotaire who played Charmian and has had a distinguished career in the theater. This was still the time where Hollywood productions could be lavish, and the movie will give students a good idea of what the play is about. Yet, it felt to me like a vanity project for Heston, who also directed the movie, following the well-publicized commercial failure of Cleopatra a decade earlier.
As for Cleopatra, maybe I love kitsch too much but I loved, loved, loved that movie, although the Amazon Instant Video version is about 4 1/4 hours along, and that's supposedly after the director made cuts. Everything about that movie is outsized - you can understand why the studio ran into financial difficulties when you see Cleopatra's palace or her barge or the statue on which she is perched - and it truly is a treat to watch. The version in the movie theaters was drastically cut, so it should not come as much of a surprise that the movie has much better reviews on Amazon than it had in its days. That movie fills in the blanks in the scenes that we're only told about in Antony and Cleopatra, and also starts the action much earlier, at the meeting between Caesar and Cleopatra. It takes a long time for Antony/Richard Burton to appear in the movie, but even the part that comes before that, with Cleopatra bearing Caesar's son and coming to Rome and then Caesar being assassinated, was very much spellbinding. There again, the actors playing the supporting roles were excellent, especially Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar and Martin Landau as Rufio. And then of course there is the Burton/Taylor couple, as charismatic on screen that they were off, and both remarkable actors. They are more famous now for their movie of Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Cleopatra is obviously a very different kind of entertainment, but it was a lot of fun to watch.
Here is the first scene of Antony and Cleopatra (it's ok if that's the only thing you watch of that movie).
And here is the trailer to Cleopatra. (Watch it! Watch it! Don't let the 4 1/4 h running time scare you! I wish Hollywood still did movies like that today.)
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