The Last Asp

...Perhaps the one thing that can be said for Cleopatra is that it looks indubitably opulent...

...Miss Littlewood, unfortunately, allowed the minor characters and extras...

...The locale is Texas, but for no other reason than that it provides backgrounds closest to the bare stage of the morality play...

...The hero's unsuccessful love affair is not brought into clear focus: Neither his own problems nor those of the young widow he fives with are fully realized...

...The remaining performances are mostly undistinguished (when they are not, like those of Kenneth Haigh and Hume Cronyn, downright poor), though in some cases it may be the Draconic cutting of the film that cripples the characterizations...

...The sets and props are lovingly and munificently constructed: a mere tent could house the Roman Senate, and Cleopatra's barge could carry the Queen Elizabeth piggyback...

...An attempt was made to supply "American" subtitles, but the experiment, apparently, did not prove successful...

...Story and dialogue are unspectacular but adequate, Martin Ritt's direction is his best to date, James Wong Howe's photography is forceful and incisive...

...Taste of any kind is certainly not the strong point of the film, whether we consider the uninspired costuming, the trite and cheap choreography by Hermes Pan, the unmoving cinematography (imagine making the pedestrian Leon Shamroy director of photography while the brilliant Claude Renoir is relegated to second-unit work...

...I shall be speaking of the fourhour-and-three-minute egg, as previewed for the critics, though the same objections apply, I gather, even more strongly to the threehour-and-forty-minute one finally released...

...It is quite clear from Miss Littlewood's work for the stage that she is much more interested in society than in art...

...even if it has little to say and less that is new, it says it authentically and in adult terms, and the direction never fails to keep you at least interested if not involved...

...in these scenes acting, photography and direction blend into a meaningful whole...

...And the desperate device of casting only unattractive females in the other parts acts only as a further depressant...

...When it most approaches the documentary, or concentrates on local color, it is neatly executed and effective...

...It is surely not lines like, "It's over —Caesar and the dream that was murdered with him," or, in a more amorous vein, "Was it a century ago, or was it last night...

...ON SCREEN The Last Asp By John Simon Anon-daily reviewer inevitably finds it necessary to bypass discussion of certain films for the sake of others, but the film scene, no less inevitably, sooner or later gets becalmed, enabling him to profit of the doldrums for a little corrective retrospection...

...The acting of Paul Newman and Brandon de Wilde is only passable, but Melvyn Douglas is fine and Patricia Neal unsurpassable...

...A fairly good short-subject could have been made by showing us nothing but the sets and props in full detail unmolested by actors and action...

...on the screen, with its greater freedom, the lopsidedness becomes aggressively apparent...

...Here, too, we get a long-awaited directorial bow—it is Joan Littlewood's first film, and she has proved herself something of a genius in the theatre —here, too, the ambience is more absorbing than the story, and here, again, much cannot be understood, though the opacity is not in the writing but in the impenetrable Cockney spoken by most of the characters...

...The stage, imposing its somewhat greater artificiality, disguises the imbalance felicitously...

...As usual in these films, the performances are first-rate: Rachel Roberts' widow, Alan Badel's sinister president of a ball-club, and William Hartnell's pathetic old camp follower...

...For the rest of the time, barring moments of grand passion ("Do you want me to live with you...

...Hud may not be a major film, but it is a very useful signpost...

...This Sporting Life is the longawaited first feature film of Lindsay Anderson, who has made some excellent shorts and written some provocative film criticism in Sight and Sound...

...Nor does Richard Burton offer much more than craggy grimaces and rocky mouthings...

...or the complete disregard for accents, which has the Egyptians sounding indiscriminately British, French, Austrian and American...

...Would you want me to die with you...

...But the plot and characters refuse to work...

...Despite an unfocused and only sporadically compelling script, This Sporting Life offers some real though tangential rewards...

...I will...

...Whatever was interesting about it clearly ended up somewhere else: on the cutting-room floor, in various hotel rooms, in the newspaper columns...

...Another is the scrupulous avoidance of echoes from Shakespeare and Shaw, which, on the face of it, is exactly as it should be...

...The only character whose lines have any flavor, faisandé as it may be, is Caesar, and Rex Harrison duly gives one of the film's two satisfactory performances, the other being Martin Landau's valiant Rufio...

...Much the same can be said of Sparrows Can't Sing...

...This perhaps: that it manages to be a total disappointment...

...but if he lacks the charm Brando had at his best, he does have a genuinely beetling massiveness...

...It is regrettable that it should have seemed necessary to get Lionel Bart to garnish the beginning of the film with one of those American-style extraneous title songs...

...Or: "You and I will make of dying nothing more than one last embrace...

...But there is obvious trouble when the absences become more manifest than the presences...

...There are sets whose dimensions run a close second to infinity, and there are imposing edifices lavished on threeminute sequences...

...Only once does Cleopatra speak of Antony's having been as happy as a little boy, or of her wanting "One world, one nation, one people living in peace...

...What, at this late date, has not yet been said against Cleopatra...

...Of Miss Taylor's acting I can say only that it remains underdeveloped (her speech, moreover, is unpleasantly commonplace), while her looks have become rather overripe...

...Cleopatra, O!" But even that sounds more scrumptious the way James Thomson wrote it: "O, Sophonisba...

...We never get to understand what went wrong with the woman's marriage or why she cannot truly respond to her lover, or how the hero's career interferes with his emotional fulfillment...

...It is a simple—perhaps oversimplified—moral tale about a sensual opportunist who goes his more or less merry way, alienating everyone around him, until he ends up lonely but unbowed...

...Aside from the inappropriateness of it all, Bart, whose fame has ballooned on the slender achievement of his musical, Oliver!, can compose scarcely better than sparrows can sing...

...What is best about the film is the mood, the atmosphere it creates...

...One absolutely inexcusable performance, however, is that of Roddy McDowall, whose Octavian is a screaming, peroxided queen, every bit as bad history as it is bad taste...

...The range of the film extends from the expensively vulgar to the expensively ordinary...

...We actually have a scene, for example, of Burton and Taylor in bed, which for sheer excitement matches the juxtaposition of the two last remaining sardines in their tin...

...his gift, such as it is, is for brisk comedy, which is of small avail here, and for witty repartee, which will not be squeezed from stones like Elizabeth Taylor...

...it lacks not only the intelligent spectacle of a Lawrence of Arabia but even the spectacular unintelligence of a C. B. DeMille product...

...that are going to compete with anyone but Kathleen Winsor or Rona Jaffe...

...To make matters worse, there are two separate homosexual subplots hinted at but left cravenly unanalyzed and unresolved...

...I will...

...But the three gravest lacunas of the film can be labeled Grandeur, Passion and Sex...

...It is also worth seeing...

...to proliferate to the point where the principals were very nearly swallowed up by them, and the plot seemed to her just an excuse to explore the numerous layers of London's lower classes...

...Still another entry in the new British wave of social, and socialist, realism, it deals with the life and loves of a hulking professional footballer...

...Sophonisba, O!" Hud is an American movie of which we need not be ashamed, and that, nowadays, is saying a good deal...

...To sum up, I can merely seize upon the most notorious line of English blank verse and deflect it to another African queen: "O, Cleopatra...

...It is equally devoid of imagination and, at least, involuntary humor...

...the dialogue is as earnest, self-regarding and misguided as the Ptolemaic view of the world...

...Nevertheless, the film is well photographed and zestfully acted— especially by James Booth and Barbara Windsor as the comically sparring couple, and by Roy Kinnear as the hero's ludicrously bestial brother-in-law...

...Mankiewicz, as writer or director, has no genuine flair for the actioncrammed historic canvas...

...It has been noted quite properly that no single film can encompass in sufficient detail both Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra...

...Yet what is so wrong with the screenplay of Joseph Mankiewicz, Ranald MacDougall and Sidney Buchman is that it does not even manage to be consistently all that bad...

...The attempt of Jonah to swallow the whale is one initial difficulty here...

...the power which Brando could merely suggest—and that, for the most part, less than convincingly—is staggeringly real in Harris...

...And the love-death arouses only one emotional response in us—relief, for when death is here, can THE END be far behind...

...As the hero, Richard Harris would be perfect if he did not ape Marlon Brando so sedulously...

...All the same, she still has moments when she would look pretty if costumes, make-up and hairdos did not successfully conspire against her...