Word: cleopatras
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...DeMille picture without a battle scene would be as deficient as one without a bathtub. In Cleopatra, the bath in which Roman senators are shown scraping their elbows with strigils while plotting to kill Caesar is the biggest that has ever appeared in a DeMille picture, but the battle scene fails to set any record. This is because Antony's officers have deserted him and he has nothing left but a few re- painted chariots and a regiment or two of Egyptians. When these have been hacked, speared and ground to death under an enormous spiked wheel, Antony is left...
Marc Antony (Henry Wilcoxon) is a dog fancier. He arrives in Egypt with two hungry Great Danes which sniff contemptuously around Director DeMille's lavish furnishings. With Antony, Cleopatra's technique is less subtle than with Caesar. She inveigles him aboard what the newspaper advertisements of this picture titillatingly refer to as her LOVE BARGE, gives him fancy hors d'oeuvres, wine in silver cups and clamshells full of pearls, served by classic chorus girls emerging from a fishing net as naked as Censor Joseph Breen will allow. During dinner, there is entertainment, with dancers dressed up like leopards...
When Cecil DeMille decided to address himself to Cleopatra, the first thing he ordered was a French military survey of Egypt in 16 volumes. That work set the style for the production. When he learned that Romans cooled their banquet wines in snow, he refused to have marble dust, the usual studio equivalent, called for frost scraped from the studio refrigerator pipes. For Cleopatra to nibble, Paramount ordered ten crates of real grapes. When they went bad, after the California grape season, ten more crates were shipped from Argentina...
...Cleopatra is fairly faithful to history. But it has one appalling drawback. It lacks the emotion of a religious theme. Most DeMille pictures have to do with such pious subjects as The Ten Commandments (1923), The King of Kings (1927), The Sign of the Cross (1932). "A religious picture never failed," says the man who was decorated with the Order of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1928. With the Bible to inspire him, he is able to conjure up breath-taking scenes of sadism, warfare and mass debauchery on the part of ancients who did not believe...
...handsome, well-written but misguided expedition into a realm which properly belongs to Shakespeare, Shaw and history, Cleopatra is important for two reasons. One of the most expensive pictures of the year, it will probably clear all expenses. It is the 60th work of the only director in Hollywood who managed to walk the tight rope from silent to sound films without losing his megaphone or his mannerisms...