Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1934

The Contenders:

The Barretts of Wimpole Street
Cleopatra
Flirtation Walk
The Gay Divorcee
Here Comes the Navy
The House of Rothschild
Imitation of Life
It Happened One Night (winner)
One Night of Love
The Thin Man
Viva Villa!
The White Parade

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1963

The Contenders:

Rex Harrison: Cleopatra
Paul Newman: Hud
Sidney Poitier: Lilies of the Field (winner)
Richard Harris: This Sporting Life
Albert Finney: Tom Jones

War Like an Egyptian

Film: Cleopatra (1934)
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

Who was Hollywood’s greatest Cleopatra? The role is almost always associated initially with Elizabeth Taylor thanks to the massive 1963 epic film. In some respects, the association of Taylor with the role has as much to do with the massive production and incredible amount of money spent as it does with the movie itself. The question I had for the 1934 version of Cleopatra is whether or not Claudette Colbert could do anything to make me forget Taylor playing the Queen of the Nile. I’ve always been a bigger fan of Taylor than Colbert for starters. Colbert was a good actress, but was often put in roles where she had to be all that is woman, something that I don’t think she was built for. And really, Cleopatra is that sort of a role.

Much like the later epic, Cleopatra in this earlier version is a combination of two of Shakespeare’s plays: Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Where the later epic essentially does both plays in all of their glory (and thus runs somewhat over four hours), this version is highly truncated, giving us the meeting between Cleo and Caesar, the assassination of Caesar, and the romance between Antony and Cleopatra in a relatively spare 101 minutes.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1963

The Contenders:

America, America
Cleopatra
How the West Was Won
Lilies of the Field
Tom Jones (winner)

Two Shakespeare Plays in One

Film: Cleopatra (1963)
Format: DVDs from NetFlix on laptop.

I’m on a short vacation, and am spending the next few days doing a lot of cleaning around my house. Fun, right? It makes sense to me, though, that as I get these breaks between quarters, that I should attempt to knock out some of the longest films I have left on my Oscar lists. The biggest of those Kahunas is Cleopatra from 1963, the only remaining film I had that crossed the four-hour mark. So, while I degrease my kitchen, I’ve spent far too long watching the only movie to both top its year’s box office receipts and still lose money.

It’s a stretch to say that this is really two complete plays of Shakespeare, but it touches on Julius Caesar in the first half of the film and then pretty much runs through the entire plot of Antony and Cleopatra. As such, Cleopatra is very much a film of two halves. The first half deals with Julius Caesar’s (Rex Harrison) battles with Pompey and his encounter with Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor). It follows through to the death of Caesar at the hands of the Roman Senate. It touches on a bit of the chaos afterwards, but essentially puts the last couple of acts of Shakespeare’s play into a 60-second voiceover. The second half of the film, which starts with that speed through of the revenge for Caesar’s death, concerns the romance between Cleopatra and Mark Antony (Richard Burton). This section, slightly longer than the first (although the film is pretty neatly divided in halves), follows Shakespeare’s play pretty closely.