by Vanda Krefft
The movie wasn’t perfect. Albert Roscoe, who played Pharon, the hereditary king of Egypt, had visible tan lines indicating he’d been wearing a modern-cut bathing suit during the summer, prompting one reviewer to remark that “his tanned shoulders will make everybody think of the beach, losing entirely the atmosphere.” And Cleopatra’s death scene came across as “a decided anti-climax” because, as the same critic wrote, “the snake is hardly in evidence to the eye—at least, I couldn’t see him, and I looked pretty hard.” In shots of royal ships rowing along the waters, inadequately trained actors playing galley slaves whacked their oars clumsily against one another.
As for the studio’s alleged extensive museum research, it hadn’t precluded frequent factual liberties. In the movie, Cleopatra has an affair with Pharon, who had previously vowed to kill her—but there was no such person in history. The Fox team, forgetting about all those high school teachers they’d hoped to win over, had borrowed the character from H. Rider Haggard’s novel (where he was named “Harmachis”) to spice up what had apparently threatened to be a dull stretch of the plot. The movie also ignored the real Cleopatra’s four children, one by Caesar and three by Antony. The ending, too, was a liberal fiction. According to accepted historical accounts, Cleopatra and Antony weren’t star-crossed lovers, done in by inconsolable grief at the supposed loss of each other. Instead, Antony died first when he threw himself on his sword after being shamed in defeat at Actium, and far from lapsing into suicidal despondency, the real Cleopatra then tarted herself up and made tracks to try to seduce the conquering Octavius. But at thirty-nine, and the worse for wear after all her dissolute traipsing around the ancient world, she looked cheap and faded to thirty-three-year-old Octavius, who rejected her. That, apparently, was the final blow that drove Cleopatra into her fatal embrace with the asp.
Moreover, Cleopatra was never going to win over viewers who hadn’t liked Theda before. It was too much of Theda as Theda, “waving arms aloft with an eager showing of armpits,” indulging in “much rolling of eyes,” and “giving sticky kisses and flaunting her ‘shape’ at every possible opportunity.” The Brooklyn Eagle spoke for that contingent when it labeled Theda’s performance “repulsive” and commented that she “could never tempt a man to be late for dinner, much less to give up the throne of Rome.” A cattier critic, at the Boston Herald, zeroed in on the actress’s ample figure and noted its disparity from the supposedly lithe silhouette of the real Cleopatra: “Miss Bara . . . could not represent her physically, even if she should go into training, walk 10 miles a day in a rubber sweater and live on lemons and lettuce.”
Everybody was entitled to an opinion. The great majority of viewers, though, welcomed the film enthusiastically. After the New York City premiere at the Lyric Theatre, a New York Tribune reporter commented that although many in the audience had undoubtedly come to scoff at Fox’s grandiose venture, “with one accord they remained to praise. The picture is so big that one is completely overwhelmed . . . It seems as if someone must have said to someone else: ‘Here is a fortune; now buy up all the beautiful things there are in the world and make them into a picture.’ ” The New York Times also applauded: “thoroughly successful . . . the finest sort of film fare.” Several reviewers compared Cleopatra to The Birth of a Nation, and Edwards to D. W. Griffith. Even the frequently cantankerous trade paper Wid’s noted that although the editing of Cleopatra might have been tighter and its intertitles fewer, “This will undoubtedly make a mint of money.”
Indeed, during its first week at the Lyric, Cleopatra took in $10,200. After two weeks, fifty thousand tickets had been sold, and nightly, the box office turned away throngs of would-be patrons. To test the broader market, Fox sent the movie for limited engagements to three nearby cities chosen for the diversity of their audiences. In Washington, DC, at the fashionable Belasco Theatre, business started off unevenly but increased steadily, so that by the end of its one-week booking, Cleopatra was playing to full houses, with total earnings of $9,100. In Schenectady, New York, facing a mostly working-class population for its two-day run at the Van Curler Opera House, the movie sold out for all shows, earning $1,951. And at Buffalo’s Teck Theatre, a one-week run brought in $9,300. Although by now Herbert Brenon was nearly out of business as an independent producer, Fox couldn’t resist the chance to take another jab at him. In the four cities where it had played so far, he boasted, Cleopatra had outearned A Daughter of the Gods by 30 to 40 percent.
In late December 1917, repeating the strategy he’d used a year earlier with A Daughter of the Gods, Fox announced plans to send Cleopatra on the road with forty touring companies. However, later reports suggest that only half that many may have actually gone out. The rest of the country wasn’t New York, and elsewhere, theater owners were skittish about sales prospects. The previous September, Fox and other exhibitors had tried raising ticket prices at their theaters, but customers balked, and they soon had to retreat to the old price scale. Evidently because he couldn’t get the rental fees he wanted for Cleopatra, Fox broke with the industry’s usual practice of renting a movie for a fixed amount and made deals on a box-office percentage basis. To help exhibitors reel in customers, the studio provided a manager and an advance man to ensure that the movie was properly advertised and publicized.
As it turned out, the rest of the country really wasn’t New York. Nationwide, Cleopatra’s costumes provoked the same heated controversy over moral standards by which Fox movies had made their reputation and fortune during the previous two years. Fifty outfits Theda may have worn, but how little there was to each one. As a reviewer for the Idaho Statesman commented, the star’s entire wardrobe “would not provide adequate covering for any woman to wear if she wanted to walk down Boise’s Main street without causing a riot.” Many local censorship boards took action. In Indianapolis, after Church Federation representatives complained about indecency, the mayor ordered the manager of the Circle, the city’s best movie theater, to snip out many of Cleopatra’s love scenes with Pharon and Antony. Patronage fell off significantly.
The situation exploded in Chicago. That city had recently become a tinderbox for Fox Film, mainly because of the presence of the formidably named Major Metellus Lucullus Cicero Funkhouser, who as Second Deputy Superintendent of Police served as the local movie censor. An old-fashioned moralist, Funkhouser detested even the slightest public display of physicality. In April 1918, he would order the Chicago Art Institute to remove a nude bronze statue called The Sower from its front steps on the grounds that the lack of clothing made it unfit for public display.
With their reputation for sex and sensation, Fox movies had already alarmed Funkhouser. In the summer of 1917, several months before the release of Cleopatra, he denied exhibition permits to Theda’s The Tiger Woman, her Camille, and her Du Barry, the last two solely on the basis of their titles. Then he began taking an inordinately long time, sometimes as long as five weeks, to review Fox movies. Time lost was money lost.
In early December 1917, just weeks before Cleopatra’s rollout, the roiling tension between Funkhouser and Fox Film erupted. Funkhouser banned Theda’s The Rose of Blood, the Russian Revolution–themed movie Fox had made to thwart Herbert Brenon’s The Fall of the Romanoffs. Funkhouser alleged that The Rose of Blood constituted a public danger because by showing the use of bombs, firearms, and poison to overthrow a corrupt government, it advocated unlawful mob action. Fox immediately sent the movie to Washington, DC, where the War Department approved it without any cuts or changes. Then he sued Funkhouser for $25,000 in damages. Cleverly, Fox got a deposition from George Creel, chairman of the U.S. Committee on Public Information, the federal government’s wartime censorship agency, supporting The Rose of Blood and saying that because American newspapers had so thoroughly reported the violence in Russia, “it is stupid to try to keep it from the screen.” Those words humiliated Funkhouser, who had publicly claimed that Creel was on his side.
Into this martial atmosphere, a few weeks later,
Cleopatra arrived at Funkhouser’s office for review. Of course Funkhouser didn’t like the movie. Of course he demanded more than fifty cuts, involving hundreds of feet of film. Fox refused and filed two more lawsuits. The first asked for an injunction to restrain Funkhouser from interfering with the presentation of Cleopatra, while the other, filed on Theda’s behalf, asked for $100,000 in damages resulting from Funkhouser’s insulting remarks about her costumes. Echoing the language of pro-war propaganda and using his access to the press to hammer away at Funkhouser, Fox defined the issue as one of democratic principle. He would not, he insisted, stand by “without protest and contest” while one person dictated what a million others should or should not see.
It was a shrewd strategy. Fox’s lawsuits effectively transferred authority from Funkhouser to First Assistant Corporation counsel Chester E. Cleveland, who was responsible for the city of Chicago’s legal defense and who therefore had the right to settle the issue. Amid the noisy press coverage and at risk for substantial monetary damages, city officials abandoned Funkhouser. On April 10, 1918, they gave Cleopatra a white, or “general audience,” permit in exchange for Fox Film’s dropping all its lawsuits against the city. The following month, Funkhouser was suspended from duty for lack of cooperation and a replacement censor was appointed.*
Now Fox had to prove that he had been right in the first place, that Chicago audiences really did want to see Cleopatra. As usual, he relied on money. Booking the movie for four weeks beginning May 27 into the Colonial Theatre, a 1,724-seat Beaux Arts “temple of beauty” on W. Randolph Street, the studio unleashed a tornado of promotional material. Every day, large ads for Cleopatra ran in all Chicago’s newspapers, while some eight hundred billboards sprang up around the city, costing a total of about $5,000. A grand event, this was to be, with a twenty-five-piece orchestra playing at twice-daily performances. On display in the lobby was a large oil painting of Theda backed by an Oriental rug and illuminated by amber spotlights. Enhancing the gala aura, the Colonial hiked ticket prices from the usual fifteen to twenty-five cents to twenty-five cents to a dollar. During its first week at the Colonial, Cleopatra broke house records and took in $15,000; sellouts continued during the remaining three weeks.
By August 1918, Fox Film trumpeted, some 5.2 million people nationwide had seen the movie—about 200,000 more than the entire population of Egypt at the time of Cleopatra’s rule. With a U.S. population in 1918 of 103 million, that meant that one in about twenty people had seen the movie. Fox’s boast disguised the difficulty of getting a profit out of a movie that had been very expensive to make and that was very expensive to market. The trick was to understand just how long the enchantment would last in each city. As he learned, Cleopatra could easily overstay its welcome. In San Francisco, for example, he had agreed to a West Coast studio executive’s suggestion to extend the movie’s two-week run by an extra week: the third week lost $521.
Notwithstanding either such errors in judgment or Fox’s standard policy of exaggeration, there’s no question that Cleopatra was extraordinarily successful. In January 1919, fifteen months after its release to about four thousand U.S. theaters, Fox was still aggressively advertising the movie to exhibitors in trade magazines. At the time, the typical Fox Film movie had a life span of about nine months.
Fox now had the lasting monument to his name that he wanted. In its time, Cleopatra was understood the way he had intended—primarily as a demonstration of the producer’s art of orchestration. Summarizing the majority opinion, a reviewer for the Duluth News Tribune wrote, “From an artistic point of view, it might be said that the super-picture looks as though the servants of all arts had come to show their best offerings at one place and time.” For years, Cleopatra would remain a precious, jewel-like achievement, widely admired as one of Fox’s greatest commercial and artistic successes.
Today, presumed lost, Cleopatra is a tragic ghost of the silent era. The movie managed to survive for two decades, and in 1935, curator Iris Barry chose to include it in the inaugural collection of the film department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Sometime later, according to film historian James Card, Cleopatra was lost in “a carefully concealed series of fires in the museum’s vaults.” Fox Film’s own copy also went up in smoke, perishing in the studio’s disastrous 1937 Little Ferry, New Jersey, warehouse fire. Only a few feet of film, a few seconds’ worth that show Theda posing and dancing, are known to remain. Film historian Anthony Slide discovered those frames in 1974 while working as an archivist at the American Film Institute, and although he tried to donate the footage to the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York, it got diverted into a private collection. Hope remains. The American Film Institute has listed Cleopatra as one of its nine “Most Wanted Lost Films.”
In the absence of the movie itself, Cleopatra has become associated mainly with Theda Bara. Fox Film had blanketed the media with still photos of her in her opulent, risqué costumes, showing her in alluring poses amid magnificent sets. Despite all the advances of motion picture art ever since, the images are still stunning. Yet William Fox’s contribution hasn’t entirely disappeared. In the splendor of the details of those Cleopatra photos, one can glimpse his ambitious vision for the movies, his exuberant confidence in their future. From the fact that even after many decades of discards and losses, such a great profusion of publicity material still exists, it’s clear that he loved this movie and wanted the world to love it, too. Cleopatra was a piece of Fox’s dream made real.
Anna Fox had advised her son, “You cannot go backward.” That was difficult advice to take in the movie business, where financial risk was so high and the guidelines for success so few. It was tempting simply to repeat the whole formula of a proven hit as if it were a magic incantation that would dependably conjure audience bewitchment.
So, Fox made Salome (1918), with the same team of Theda and Edwards and much of the same supporting cast and crew. Production began in Los Angeles in early 1918, only about six months after Cleopatra had finished filming. Fox intended Salome to outdo Cleopatra and to become his new consummate achievement.
Salome, which has also been lost, might have been a great movie. The story had never been filmed before, and in recent years it had stirred up the sort of class-based moral controversy that the movies were particularly adept at capitalizing. In 1907, critics had assailed the opening performance of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, calling the work “abominable,” “blood curdling,” and redolent with “moral stench,” even though it had premiered to great acclaim in Germany more than a year before. No second performance took place because the wealthy owners of the Metropolitan Opera canceled the rest of the engagement in “the best interests” of the house. Two years later, Oscar Hammerstein tried to take a milder version of the Salome story, Jules Massenet’s 1878 opera Hérodiade, to Boston. The mayor banned it in advance.
As Fox well knew, film audiences were far less starchy about displays of flesh. He poured money into Salome. Although claims as high as $1.29 million were surely inflated, publicity photos and production stories testify to a monumental investment. At the Western Avenue studio in Los Angeles, where production would take six months, reportedly eight hundred artisans re-created ancient Jerusalem, complete with an “almost exact” replica of the Jaffa Gate, two hundred loads of sand hauled in from the beach, and a version of Herod’s palace that consisted of a one-hundred-fifty-foot-tall central tower flanked by two wings each stretching more than two hundred feet long. Inside, Herod’s throne room took up an entire stage and was furnished with twelve huge golden columns. Salome’s wardrobe also put a significant dent in the budget. Although her twenty-five costumes were only half as numerous as those of Cleopatra, they were equally magnificent and included twenty different headpieces and five pairs of handmade sandals. And, of course, a Fox super-picture wasn’t a Fox super-picture without teeming crowds—the cast allegedly numbered three thousand—and a riotous asso
rtment of animals. Salome’s menagerie included forty-four camels and dromedaries, twenty-five hundred horses, and assorted donkeys, elephants, goats, sheep, lambs, oxen, dogs, cats, parrots, cockatoos, doves, pigeons, and peacocks.
Several big scenes flaunted the studio’s growing expertise with special effects. After Herod challenges John to produce a sign from God, the prophet’s wooden cross lights up and a bolt of fire strikes a statue of Jove, crumbling it to dust. For the final scene, meant to depict the Almighty’s wrath at Salome’s immoral excesses, director Edwards staged a violent sandstorm by activating ten airplane propellers mounted on stationary pillars. Balls of fire exploded on the palace roof, while various electrical devices placed around the set simulated stabs of lightning against the night sky. Hundreds of costumed extras fled Herod’s banquet hall in terror and, assailing her with spiked shields, Roman guards sent Salome to her death.
By the end of filming, Fox had lost interest. He never said why, but he didn’t champion Salome the way he had Cleopatra. Although he supervised the movie’s editing, sloppy errors marred intertitle cards and advertising material. Salome was presented as Herod’s cousin, even though she was actually his stepdaughter; Herod’s wife was called Marian even though she was Herodias in the Bible, and the story allegedly took place in 40 BC, even though it couldn’t have, as John the Baptist was so named because he baptized Christ. (According to general wisdom, John was born around 5 BC and beheaded by Herod in AD 30 or 31.)
