Caesar and Cleopatra (J. Arthur Rank-United Artists) cost the British $3 to $5 million (by pressagent accounting), and will be peddled in the U.S. as a spectacle. As spectacle, this Gabriel Pascal production does itself proud—from stupendous Technicolor replicas of Ptolemaic Egypt down to intimate studies of the young Queen's décolletage. But all the munificent movie art does not conceal art of a rarer, riper kind: the dialogue for this superspectacle was written by a great master of prose and of wit, George Bernard Shaw. By & large, the playing is worthy of the dialogue.
In historical fact, Caesar and Cleopatra lived together in the most literal sense of the phrase. Cleopatra bore him a son, Caesarion, who was promising enough to be assassinated eventually by order of Octavian. In Shaw's charming fiction, they warily skirt the quagmires of passion while the aging political genius, with rueful avuncular irony, helps to convert the puppet Queen from a fierce child into a woman, ripe for Mark Antony's plucking.
It has become fashionable to think of Shaw as a little musty and more than a little talkative, but audiences are likely to wonder whether it is possible to get enough movie talk as good as this. Caesar and Cleopatra was written nearly 50 years ago, but as a comedy of youth and age it is an enduring delight; it is also a fascinating, vividly contemporary study of leadership. Shaw has examined the complexities of cynicism and benevolence, megalomania and selflessness, intuitiveness and hard reason, passive resistance and calm brutality, which combined to make the soldier-statesman. His portrait shows Caesar to be a man as far beyond mere knowledgeability as a Hitler or a Stalin—and considerably more civilized.
Shaw once wrote that "Caesar is greater off the battlefield than on it." Claude Rains's excellent performance makes that observation valid. As for Vivien Leigh, probably few actresses could have drawn as much fun, understanding and beauty out of Shaw's exquisite, violent, brilliant baby Queen. There are other excellent jobs: Flora Robson as Ftatateeta, Cleopatra's savage nurse; Anthony Harvey as her petulant, bewildered little brother; Francis L. Sullivan as the corrupt councilor, and Stewart Granger as Apollodorus.
Some of the experts whose job it is to hawk this film to U.S. moviegoers shook their heads mournfully after casing the well-set-up, well-exposed Granger torso. If Cleopatra, they decided, had only given Apollodorus the suggestion of a royal high sign for a command performance—no matter how far off-screen—it would have given the picture Sex. However that may be, and however well it makes out as spectacle, Caesar and Cleopatra is vintage Shaw: a wise and winning comedy, beautifully played.
Notorious (RKO Radio) is a top-drawer thriller, as might be expected with all the top-drawer talent involved; Alfred Hitchcock directed Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant through the Ben Hecht yarn.