A Few Words About A few words about...™ Cleopatra (1963) - U.S. Release -- in Blu-ray (2 Viewers)

[OliverK]

I too have to disagree, I don't think it looks so good, if fact I can't bring myself to look at it again. All the gold bling that Cleopatra wears, now looks like silver, & the entry into Rome, was it supposed to be set in January? Anyway, I've bored for England on this subject, so I'll shut up.

Indeed the disc has a bluish and overcast look with whites leaning more towards bluish-grey and all other colors being dragged down towards the more cold/bluish and murky parts of the color and brightness spectrum.

This is a strange inconsistency with Fox with Hello Dolly having a tendency to suffer from blown out whites and a yellowish tint and Cleopatra being the complete opposite.

Ironically the new 70mm prints of both movies that I had the pleasure to see leaned towards a look that was between those two extremes but with Cleopatra actually looking a bit more contrasty and warm.

 

[trajan007]

Are we talking about the UK or US release? I have the US release.

 

[OliverK]

Are we talking about the UK or US release? I have the US release.

I checked both and they looked the same to me. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of detail on display on this Blu-ray but the grading just gives this a rather dark and unpleasant look:

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Cleopatra-Blu-ray/30513/#Screenshots

The entry into Rome is a good example as this was more of a brightly lit and colorful spectacle in 70mm while now it looks like Cleopatra visited on an overcast day and indeed all the gold that she is wearing does lack the warmth that it had when I watched the 70mm print and the DVD for that matter.

 

[trajan007]

I know you can't go by screen shots but the images on my tv looked much brighter especially with the colors.I have a Samsung 65' 4 k HDR

 

[OliverK]

I know you can't go by screen shots but the images on my tv looked much brighter especially with the colors.I have a Samsung 65' 4 k HDR

On a calibrated display it looks relatively dim compared to other movies where actors actually squint because it is a sunny and very bright day..
Of course adjustments can be made to let this look warmer and much birghter but this should not have to be the case.

In any case I doubt that people would mind an even better looking version to put it another way

 

[RolandL]

I'm in the middle of cleaning up the house as we are selling it. I came across a copy of the movie program. I thought I would compare the colors to the Blu-ray. They look about the same. Not saying they are correct, just a comparison.

 

[rsmithjr]

Cleopatra exhibits the recent trend of Fox to color-time toward blue. Fortunately, Cleopatra is somewhat correctable by judicious use of the controls on my projector.

I have a list of these Fox Blu-rays together with the correction settings for each title.

The one that is completely beyond correction is The King and I.

I recommend that you use your own color judgment to do the best that you can with these and any other titles that you feel are wrong. Studios, production houses, and individual colorists, and even "experts" (myself included) are no substitute for the end-user's own sensibilities.

Remember: it's your money, your time, and your memories of what things looked and sounded like when you first saw them.

 

[Mistress9]

Though I like the movie more than you, I think you are correct about its faults. I remember reading Charlton Heston's comments about it in his journals (The Actor's Life). Heston would often comment on the movies he saw and Cleopatra was among them. Heston thought the film did not quite work either and said something to the effect that Mankiewicz tried too hard to write it in a Shakespearean style but came up short. I agree with this. I think some of the dialog is rather over-written and strives to be more pseudo-poetic than it needs to be. So you get lines like "My breasts are filled with love and life. My hips are rounded and well-apart. Such women, they say have sons".

That line occurs in the first part of the fillm; but most of the over-written parts occur in part two. Antony's speech to Cleopatra on the barge in which he complains that no matter what he does "Caesar's done it before and done it better" comes off to me as an attempt at a Shakespearian "actor-ish" speech. Likewise, Antony's speech when he descibes how he felt after deserting the fleet at Actium is another pseudo-Shakespearian moment. It's not really normal IMO to speechify that much in an epic film unless it's Shakespeare. I think much of the criticism of Burton's perfomrance (I think he's great in the part) is due to the fact that he has too many declamatory speeches.

I still think it's a pretty good film with some great spectacle, some great performances and a great music score.

what's wrong with pseudo shakespearean moments though?

 

[Mistress9]

Cleopatra exhibits the recent trend of Fox to color-time toward blue. Fortunately, Cleopatra is somewhat correctable by judicious use of the controls on my projector.

I have a list of these Fox Blu-rays together with the correction settings for each title.

The one that is completely beyond correction is The King and I.

I recommend that you use your own color judgment to do the best that you can with these and any other titles that you feel are wrong. Studios, production houses, and individual colorists, and even "experts" (myself included) are no substitute for the end-user's own sensibilities.

Remember: it's your money, your time, and your memories of what things looked and sounded like when you first saw them.

It is SHAMEFUL that film's color timing is fundamentally being changed, in Cleopatra's case, from a warm toned movie, to an excessively dark, Nolanized teal version. Shameful. Would people allow the Mona Lisa to be repainted and reprinted as a 3D object?? I assume they wouldn't, so why is this happening to our most beloved films?

 

[Allansfirebird]

Apologies for necro-posting this rather old discussion, but I've recently added a "smoking gun" document to my Cleopatra collection that made me think of this thread. I happened to discover an auction for a complete dialogue continuity for the original assembly cut, with markups for lines to be redubbed and the notes indicating what was cut for Mankiewicz's preferred version of the film from August and September 1962, prior to the Zanuck showing and the resulting firing/feud/rehiring. In the absence of any other sort of cutting continuities I've been able to find in JLM & Walter Wanger's collections, this is probably the closest I'll ever come to seeing what was originally intended!

I'm currently taking the time to annotate a copy of the shooting script, with color-coding for what was kept, what was shot but cut, and what was never shot. Just fascinating how much was eliminated, even at the earliest stages of cutting. It makes me wonder if it would be possible some day to do a reconstruction of Cleopatra in the same style as that semi-animated reconstruction of Welles' version of Ambersons.

 

[Jimbo.B]

This may be of interest to those interested in the restored Cleopatra.

Elizabeth Taylor - Restored Cleopatra Main Page

 

[trajan007]

This may be of interest to those interested in the restored Cleopatra.

Elizabeth Taylor - Restored Cleopatra Main Page

This film needs a 4k release.

 

[Jack P]

Apologies for necro-posting this rather old discussion, but I've recently added a "smoking gun" document to my Cleopatra collection that made me think of this thread. I happened to discover an auction for a complete dialogue continuity for the original assembly cut, with markups for lines to be redubbed and the notes indicating what was cut for Mankiewicz's preferred version of the film from August and September 1962, prior to the Zanuck showing and the resulting firing/feud/rehiring. In the absence of any other sort of cutting continuities I've been able to find in JLM & Walter Wanger's collections, this is probably the closest I'll ever come to seeing what was originally intended!

I'm currently taking the time to annotate a copy of the shooting script, with color-coding for what was kept, what was shot but cut, and what was never shot. Just fascinating how much was eliminated, even at the earliest stages of cutting. It makes me wonder if it would be possible some day to do a reconstruction of Cleopatra in the same style as that semi-animated reconstruction of Welles' version of Ambersons.

Sounds interesting! Would love to see the final results since the story of what was cut has fascinated me. After reading the shooting script and getting a handle on what else was filmed but cut I came away convinced that the "Antony" half had suffered the most in contrast to the "Caesar" half where the only jarring cut that impacted the narrative was the elimination of the "Titus the Moneylender" character played by Finlay Currie who is reduced to an appearance as a corpse and an out of left-field explanation of who he is when we never see him in the film.

 

[dpippel]

Apologies for necro-posting this rather old discussion, but I've recently added a "smoking gun" document to my Cleopatra collection that made me think of this thread.

Necro-posting... I learned something new today.

 

[Allansfirebird]

Sounds interesting! Would love to see the final results since the story of what was cut has fascinated me. After reading the shooting script and getting a handle on what else was filmed but cut I came away convinced that the "Antony" half had suffered the most in contrast to the "Caesar" half where the only jarring cut that impacted the narrative was the elimination of the "Titus the Moneylender" character played by Finlay Currie who is reduced to an appearance as a corpse and an out of left-field explanation of who he is when we never see him in the film.

Funny you mention Titus the Moneylender, because he was already omitted from this first cut. I even have a letter that Walter Wanger sent to Currie in September 62, apologizing that they had to cut his scenes in the film.

 

[Alan Tully]

This film needs a 4k release.

Yup, & a colour regrade, it should look lush again, the gold bling looking like gold again...but I can't see any of that happening.

 

[Jack P]

Funny you mention Titus the Moneylender, because he was already omitted from this first cut. I even have a letter that Walter Wanger sent to Currie in September 62, apologizing that they had to cut his scenes in the film.

That's interesting. Reading the script I can tell why his plotline was excised because it did complicate the narrative in terms of why the Senators hate Cleopatra (because many of them are in debt to Titus, and it was earlier established that Sosigenes was going to buy up those debts meaning the Senators were going to be in debt to Cleopatra) instead of the simpler reason that she's a non-Roman. Of course that also meant that we lost some further insight into the cunning nature of Cleopatra which in turn meant losing more nuance from Taylor's performance.

 

[Dick]

Yup, & a colour regrade, it should look lush again, the gold bling looking like gold again...but I can't see any of that happening.

Not from Disney, certainly.

 

[Dee Zee]

Gosh, a complete new cut of Cleopatra would be fascinating to say the least.

 

[Andrew Budgell]

Cleopatra has been a fixture on Disney+ since the streaming setvice lauched, so perhaps it will eventually get a new 4K remaster, if not a 4K UHD disc release.