Antony and Cleopatra (1972)

Charlton Heston is my hero, and always will be. But this version of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA does not belong in his highlights reel, even if he directed and saw it as the highpoint of his career.There are some bright touches. Jane Lapotaire as Charmian is absolutely irresistible -- with her energy, wit, and sense of fun, she steal the picture right out from under the vacant beauty posing as Cleopatra. It's no accident that Jane got to play Cleopatra herself a few years later, and she was sensational! (Colin Blakely was a better Antony, too, much more passionate and emotional than Chuck Heston.) Freddie Jones is funny and poignant as the broken down has-been, Pompey. Historically, Sextus Pompey's father was the supreme ruler in Rome, long before Caesar, Octavian, or Antony. But by now the last of the Pompey dynasty has been reduced to scavenging on the fringes of the empire, running a "navy" that is really a ragtag fleet of pirate ships. Decaying, drunken, and falling to pieces before your eyes, Pompey is the saddest character in the play. Freddie Jones gets that, but still makes the man funny and even noble when it really counts. Great job!Warren "Dim" Clarke will forever be remembered as Malcolm MacDowell's right hand droog in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. It's a singular pleasure to see him shine in a brief appearance as Scarus, the bravest and most loyal of Antony's soldiers. Watch him emerge from the surf bawling curses at the cowardly Cleopatra, after her ill-timed flight has cost the forces of Antony everything. He projects all the energy, masculinity, and military valor that is missing from the rest of the film. Go Dim Go!Now I love Charlton Heston. When he plays cold, aloof, cynical authority figures, he's the best in the world. But Antony is so many things that Charlton Heston doesn't understand and can't project on the screen. You never see the drunken Antony, the good-time guy who loves getting down and dirty with the soldiers, with the slaves, with whoever is around. You never see the vast appetites of the man, for food or drink or sex or laughter or anything else. You just see this dignified guy who suddenly loses everything in a murky battle scene. And when says the lines, "you knew, Egypt, you knew too well my heart was tied to your rudder," you think, yeah, but we didn't know. You didn't show us that, Chuck. Antony is a brave soldier, but he's also warm, impulsive, sensual, and charming, and those are things you just don't do well on screen.Even the death scene suffers from Chuck's determination to stay in control. Shakespeare chose to show Antony bungle his suicide, so that in his final agony he could be helpless in Cleopatra's arms. But Chuck downgrades the agony to an absurd degree. Antony has been stabbed in the stomach but he just trots over to the monument to say hello! The death scene in THE OMEGA MAN was a lot closer to the mark.

This is Shakespeare lite in the sense that the play has been cut to fit a movie, not a play. It has been done quite well and the balance between movie and classic play is well proportioned.Where the movie excels is in the locations, the epic battles and the camera work. It is a very strong production in the Hollywood way. It serves as a fine introduction should anyone wish to experience the original text.The actors are all in good form and make the lines serve their character. The conditional here is Chuck Heston. He is of the Olivier 'ham' school of acting. Each line is painfully rendered, the jaw clenches, the syllables come as if Heston may then expire. There are some parts where he is just fine: the battles, especially but he seems ill at ease compared to the other actors.

This movie does a better than average job of turning a Shakespeare play into a movie, but it doesn't succeed well as a movie. I thought the stage props, although minimalist, worked. The camera work was fine. With the exception of Heston, who seemed to be spend the first third of the movie smiling at some joke that rest of the cast weren't in on, I thought the acting was good. The characters were believable and their previous work on British TV served them well. The script was faithful to the play - actually too faithful - and this is why this was a so-so movie. Shakespeare was first and foremost an entertainer. He didn't write to please scholars, he wrote to amuse and tell a story to the masses. To do this he tried to use action sequences and clever plot devices, but most of all he tried to be a clever wordsmith. The problem with those that stay too faithful to the play is today's audiences don't speak as Elizabethans and the power of the words are lost. If Shakespeare was alive today he would update his script to reflect current English. This movie could easily have been edited down by 45 minutes and gained much by the editing. If Cleopatra makes hungry where she most satisfies, this film satisfies if we had been left hungry for more.

An ego production is still an ego production even when the names are big and the intentions honorable.One has to respect Charlton Heston all the more, whatever his politics (which one need not respect at all) for wanting to prove himself as a real actor in the worst way even after all his success in overblown performances in various Hollywood epics. I hear you saying "that's exactly the way he did prove it," but no, as limited as this film proved with Heston using Shakespeare and other famous plays to get his own production company going in anticipation of the fast approaching days when real roles wouldn't be forthcoming, it isn't the disaster it might have been (how frustrating, though, that a genuinely great American Shakespearean like Orson Welles had to struggle for years to finance his Shakespeare while financiers lined up for "Moses" with relative alacrity). If one had not seen better versions of the story (even the 20th Century Fox fiscal fiasco with Rex Harrison and Richard Burton), it might have seemed more respectable. In this case don't blame Shakespeare, 'though it's not one of the best in his canon, but Heston's adaptation and the limited budget he had to work with.One could *almost* forgive the obvious miniatures for the sea battles and the toy pyramid (Cleopatra's tomb - whose doll house proportions are emphasized by an idiotic pull back shot from the air at the end!) for the generally solid performances of the no-name cast, SOME of whom went on to solid stage careers. Best of the lot, John Castle as Octavian Caesar, is very good indeed. Heston himself, adapter, director and star, is certainly no worse an Antony than Marlon Brando's miscast attempt in 1953's JULIUS CAESAR (or might not have been if he had had a decent director to reign him in), but we realize we're in Heston-ego-silliness before the credits are even over and the overblown score is all but trumpeting (french horning?) "WE'RE SERIOUS" as a herald's horse barges through market sellers' tables and immediately after when Heston does the first of several literal "bodice ripping" scenes chewing scenery and scattering the pearls he's wearing just because news has arrived from Rome. Scarcely 12 minutes in, our star is stripping down to a mini g-string to show his still adequate body on the pretext of changing clothes to go to work. Shakespeare didn't need the help.Still, Shakespeare IS there at the core, and even self centered direction and poverty row costumes can't ultimately undercut the excellent story. It plays out with all the political intrigue and personal passion the original author loaded it with. Even in an amateur (or at least underfunded) film, production values from people - cinematographers and editors - who have made big professional films can disguise many a self indulgent actor's flaws and give an overall production look larger than it is (the "Making of" documentary narration from Heston's son on the DVD - bending over backwards to honor his father - is both illustrative and amusing in this regard).When not overacting, Heston has skills which better directors had been able to make the most of and are occasionally allowed to glow here with a far more effective quiet fire. If Heston, the director, can't quite make sense of "The Battle of Actium" sequence, he comes closer than many directors and serious historians have before him. The Cleopatra Heston found he could afford, Hildegarde Neil, is more hampered by a passing resemblance halfway between Elizabeth Taylor and Sally Kellerman than any actual failings of her own or her director.If the viewer is willing to indulge the excesses of a star just starting to show serious age and unaware how silly the film mannerisms picked up in a career as "star" could look as he tried to segue into a seniority as a serious actor, this ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA can be worth its two and a half hours screen time. Heston only played on Broadway four times in his career - appearances ranging from 1947 to 1960 - but the only time the show he graced managed to run longer than a single week (a fate which must have wounded) was his first appearance, in a Katherine Cornell production of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, in which Heston played the tiny role of Proculeius, one of Caesar's (Octavian's) soldiers who has two fine brief scenes with Cleopatra near the end of the play, for a very respectable 126 performances under Guthrie McClintic's direction. It was an experience which clearly stayed with him for the rest of his life (and he did well by the actor in his role in this film). It's his and our loss that McClintic wasn't around to direct the star for this film as well.Certainly worth having, but don't expect Olivier.