Cleopatra (Helen Gardner Picture Players, United States Film Company, Cleopatra Film Company, 1912)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Exorcist TCM’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” screened a truly fascinating and bizarre film from 1912, Cleopatra, produced by and starring actress Helen Gardner for her own company, Helen Gardner Picture Plays. Given that most of the films Charles and I had seen recently on “Silent Sunday Showcase” were from the mid- to late-1920’s, when silent movies had matured into an art form and developed the basic grammar of film – including shot-reverse shot cutting, close-ups and suspense editing – the 1912 Cleopatra had none of that. This version of Cleopatra began as a French play by Victorien Sardou, who’s known today (if at all) mainly as the author of the play Tosca on which Giacomo Puccini and his librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based their enduringly popular opera. Sardou is also famous for his quote that his formula for successful drama was, “Torture the women!” – a phrase Alfred Hitchcock was fond of quoting. Sardou’s play got turned into a film by Helen Gardner – who not only starred in and produced the film but also designed her own costumes – and her husband, Charles L. Gaskill, who wrote the screenplay and directed. Before we see any of the actual movie, Cleopatra begins with an elaborate disclaimer which reads, “Certain stage traditions originally founded in ignorance and preserved after they became traditions, have not been considered; the object of the Director has been to insure naturalness in an atmosphere of romance, the object of the Author to intimate the nobilities and grandeur of the woman who was devotedly loved by Julius Caesar. Perfect freedom has been exercised in the adaptation.” In other words, “Professors and history buffs, don’t write us snippy letters saying that we got our facts wrong.” It’s also ironic that the foreword mentions that Cleopatra “was devotedly loved by Julius Caesar” when Caesar doesn’t appear as a character and the story doesn’t begin until after he’s been killed.

In the opening scene Pharon (played by an actor billed only as “Mr. Howard” – for some reason the credits list the players by last names only, and while the film’s imdb.com page fills in some of the first names, a few remain unknown – a pity in “Mr. Howard”’s case since he’s easily the hottest and hunkiest guy in the film, at least by modern standards!), a slave to one of the local fishermen in Alexandria, is declaring his love unto death for Cleopatra. Iras (Pearl Sindelar), one of Cleopatra’s ladies in waiting, is trying to talk him out of his hopeless crush on Cleopatra because she’s interested in him herself, but eventually Cleopatra notices him and makes him an offer he literally can’t refuse. She’ll let him be her boy-toy for 10 days if he’ll kill himself at the end of it – though in the end he doesn’t die because Iras hides him out and keeps him from the Queen’s wrath. She also tries to get him to flee Egypt, but he doesn’t leave. Ultimately Cleopatra gets word that the Roman general Mark Antony (Charles Sindelar – presumably Pearl’s brother rather than her husband because Pearl was identified as “Miss Sindelar” in the credits) has summoned her to Tarsus to stand trial for opposing Rome – but, needless to say, Antony falls for Cleopatra at first glance and the two head back to Alexandria, where they spend several reels canoodling while Antony’s wife Flavia (whom we never see) is dying in Rome. Ultimately Antony is called back to Rome to do battle with Caesar’s nephew Octavius (Mr. Russ), who ultimately took the throne as the Emperor Augustus, though a Roman officer named Venditius (James R. Waite) arranges a deal to bring peace to Rome by having Antony marry Octavius’s sister Octavia (Miss Robson). Alas, Cleopatra has a jealous hissy-fit and manages to lure Antony back to Alexandria and to her bed, unraveling the peace treaty and setting up the big sea battle at Actium. Antony is counting on the support of Cleopatra’s battle fleet, but she bugs out on him and has her navy retreat because, as Gaskill’s intertitles say, she was worried that if Antony won the battle and reconquered Rome he’d no longer have any interest in her. Antony loses and returns in disgrace to Egypt, where his men falsely tell him that Cleopatra is dead. He accordingly stabs himself with his dagger and he expires just as word reaches him that Cleopatra isn’t dead after all – was Victorien Sardou ripping off the ending of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet here? – only she soon will be: she’s gone into a secret room in her palace where she has a date with a lethal serpent.

Cleopatra is a clunky film by any normal standard and yet it’s oddly haunting in its very staginess. This was one of the first feature-length films ever made in the U.S. – the 2000 Turner Classic Movies restoration runs nearly 90 minutes at a time when most films were limited to 20 to 25 minutes – and it was shown in a highly unusual fashion for the time. The film toured with specially trained projectionists who lectured either before or during the movie, and it played in legitimate stage theatres, opera houses and public meeting halls rather than the cheap nickelodeons where most films were screened then. It’s also an example of what a lot of misguided intellectuals of the period considered “quality” in film: the whole thing takes place on stagy sets, the camera never moves, pans or cuts during a scene, there are lots of intertitles (over 100 – they’re numbered in the movie to make sure they were placed in the right order, since generally in the silent era only one frame of each title was put into the original negative so titles in different languages could be inserted depending on where the film was going to be shown) and the acting is … well, let’s just say that the 1912 Cleopatra is a pretty good indication of what a “quality” stage show would have looked like at the time. Helen Gardner came to silent-film acting after having run a school to teach actors pantomime, which would seem to have been excellent training for pre-sound movie actors, but her performance, though hauntingly beautiful at times, is also pretty wooden and suffers from the stylized acting discipline of the time, particularly in all the scenes in which she puts her hand to her forehead and throws her head back to indicate anguish.

Also, TCM equipped the 1912 Cleopatra with one of the worst musical accompaniments ever slapped onto a silent film; they commissioned an “original” score by Chantal Kreviazuk and Raine Maida that combined the worst elements of minimalism and 1980’s synth-rock. While much of the score worked O.K. as mood-setting, Kreviazuk and Maida made the huge mistake of including vocal tracks – notably a really dreadful song that plays during the scene in which Cleopatra registered loneliness and frustration over Antony’s extended absence. One wishes (I wish, anyway) that someone would outfit this film with a musical score based on Massenet or one of the other major pre-Debussy French composers of the turn of the last century. Also one regrets (I do, anyway) that this film has survived while the potentially far more interesting 1917 Cleopatra with Theda Bara remains lost; an earlier Flicker Alley/TCM presentation called Fragments, containing the surviving bits of silent movies that are otherwise lost, included the few remaining seconds of the Theda Bara Cleopatra and whetted one’s appetite for the rest of it.