Asides from my making-of Caesar and Cleopatra book, I also have a lovely, if tattered volume entitled The film HAMLET, covering Olivier’s 1948 production. Various heads of department contribute short chapters about their work.
My late friend Lawrie Knight was only a 3rd AD on it, and only for a few days. His story doesn’t feature. Stop me if you’ve heard it before. Olivier, it seems, wanted the sound of a heartbeat to accompany the ghost’s appearance. In the end he used a drumbeat, but perhaps the story of Ruben Mamoulian recording his own heart after running up and down a flight of stairs, for the transformation scene in DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, was already well-known? Olivier, saving himself the strain, sent an assistant off to run around the studio, and then they pressed a mic to his ribcage.
“Nothing but indigestion!” reported Lawrie, with a chortle.
The book lacks that kind of engrossing detail. Olivier’s own piece is rather windy, and devotes a lot of time to justifying his choice to shoot in black and white, though he would later admit that he was having “a frightful row with Technicolor” which played a significant part in the decision. Still, it was a great choice.
Really lovely pic of Larry directing in costume and, it seems, in character.
Producer Anthony Bushell’s thoughts on the casting are more interesting. He starts by recounting an anecdote from his youth as an actor: he tried to secure a walk-on/spear-carrying role in John Barrymore’s London production of the play. Barrymore somehow misunderstood and thought he was angling for Laertes.
“Young man, it is your misfortune that the Hamlet in this production will never see fifty again. You cannot possibly play Laertes with me.”
(Barrymore wasn’t actually fifty yet, but maybe he felt it, or maybe he actually said forty.)
We learn that Stanley Holloway got the role of the gravedigger after “F.J. McCormick, the little Irishman who as the bowler-hatted Shell in ‘Odd Man Out’ enchanted thousands only to sadden them by his untimely death, was first to have played the role.’
My late friend Lawrie Knight’s stories usually check out.
His first film job was on CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA, an epic mess. “We shipped sand to Egypt!” he said, full of wonderment. “During wartime!”
Lawrie was shipped there too, manning a radio from a tent to try to coordinate the battle scenes. “We killed so many people!” he chortled. Years later, he met a man in a London street who greeted him as an old friend, revealed a missing ear, and asked “When are we going to make another film? I’ve still got one ear!”
Lawrie claimed, as I recall, that the local extras ate the sandals they were issued with to play Roman or Egyptian soldiers. Soft leather was indeed eaten on long sea voyages when the food ran out, so it can be done. But Marjorie Deans’ lovely making-of book, Meeting at the Sphinx, has a different version: according to her, the soldiers’ shields were made from papier mache, and it was these that ended up being devoured, three hundred of them. A more substantial meal for each poorly-paid extra. Tasty, too: Dean supplies the detail that the shields were varnished with a kind of fish-paste which made them mouth-wateringly delicious.
Deans’ story has more convincing detail, and was told nearer the time…
It’s possible that both stories are true, and only natural modesty prevented the background artists from consuming their entire wardrobe, denuding themselves. It’s not certain that Deans was on location, but she may have been closer to the action than Lawrie, in his tent, so her story may be more accurate. Or Lawrie may have muddled the story a bit in the ensuing decades. Or I may be misquoting him — maybe his story was about the shields, and he said something else about sandals in another context. It was a while ago.
At any rate, I feel that we can be sure that somebody ate something they shouldn’t have on the location shoot for this film.
Per the IMDb, the script of CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA (1945) is by George Bernard Shaw, George Bernard Shaw, George Bernard Shaw, and George Bernard Shaw, which seems about right: original play, scenario, script and dialogue. Those don’t normally warrant more than two credits, but maybe they should.
Marjorie Deans is credited as Script Editor, which was her role, and Script Supervisor, a job title which didn’t exist yet. The film had, in addition to four writers embodied in one person, seemingly four cinematographers and two continuity girls (which is the job title that eventually became script supervisor).
Deans also wrote the making-of book, which was a very uncommon thing at the time. This was an epic super-production so it warranted commemoration. In fact, it was kind of a disaster and it ended the British career of its producer/director, Gabriel Pascal, despite his being the only filmmaker with whom Shaw would work. The book doesn’t talk about that, but Deans, a screenwriter herself, devotes a lot of time to praising Shaw as a screenwriter, pointing out that his plays are full of striking imagery —
“They come down the corridor, Caesar peering keenly about at the strange architecture, and at the pillars’ shadows between which, as the passing torch makes them hurry noiselessly backwards, figures of men with wings and hawks’ heads, and vast black marble cats, seem to flit in and out of ambush.”
It’s questionable if any stage director ever managed to fully achieve this effect, but Pascal (at 14:55 in the movie above) barely suggests it either — he stages the scene outdoors, at the entrance to the palace, and though Claude Rains remembers to peer keenly, and Pascal remembers to move the camera, whichever great cinematographer* was on lighting duty that day doesn’t create any moving shadows (apart from Caesar’s, which shouldn’t appear since he’s the light source), just a moving glow which doesn’t illuminate anything that’s not already visible. And Pascal fails to provide a POV shot, which is what the play, for God’s sake, is clearly indicating.
*The cinematographers between them shot most of BLACK NARCISSUS, BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and THE THIRD MAN.
No script is director-proof — you can suggest what we should see, and a sensitive director will pick it up (and many times improve it) but a clod will drag everything down to his level.
It’s a really beautiful book. Sometimes the insights could be more meaningful (and of course it’s all a puff-piece). We’re told that composer Georges Auric is “a big, loosely-built, rather indolent-looking man” with a dangling cigarette, but we’re not told that he used the first electronic instrument ever employed for the screen (the fabulously-named ondes martinot) for this film. My late friend Lawrie Knight was in the crew and reported the excitement this caused, though how the crew ever got to see it I don’t know.
I was hoping the book would confirm one or two of Lawrie’s stories, but most of those were too unflattering to Pascal and the production, or too racy, to serve Deans’ purposes. BUT — Lawrie did own a framed picture of Gabbie Pascal, in Arab dress, leading a camel. And Deans supplies the backstory to this —
“There is a camel-driver, played by Gabriel Pascal himself, because only he understood and was understood by the camel, and could make it do what he wanted. And there is the camel, who bit Gabriel Pascal…”
Lawrie made much more of this story. They had a real camel-driver, who protested that a camel could not be made to stop on a precise mark. Pascal said this was rubbish, took on the costume, led the camel to its position in one perfect take, yelled “Cut!” and then had a bite taken out of him.
The crew clustered round, concerned/delighted. Pascal, in his broken English, insisted it was nothing. “But Gabbie, what about the danger of syphilis?” “What you say, I no have syphilis.” “No, it’s true, all camels are full of syphilis.” (I think this is probably untrue, and likely an offshoot from the joke about why camels are called ships of the desert…)
A doctor was sent for. He dressed the wound and pronounced it trivial.
“But doctor,” says a crewmember/provocateur, “What about the danger of syphilis being passed on?”
“Well, if you think it’s necessary, I can give the camel an injection.”
Now, this may well be a fictitious elaboration. It has the shape of a deliberate joke, not a real incident. But I’m pleased that at least part of Lawrie’s story is confirmed.
I don’t think Pascal and the camel made the cut — the set where they were to have appeared is at 22:48.
Deans has more to say that relates to the tales I was told twenty years ago, and I shall get another blog post (at least) out of those. And I shall scan more of the gorgeous images, though scanning is a pain.
shadowplay 