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Review: A Queen for Caesar - 1962: About six months after the release of this relatively modest Italian production telling the story of how Cleopatra (Pascale Petit) ended up in a rug rolled out at the feet of Caesar (Gordon Scott), the 1963 Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor appeared. Often cited as the most expensive film ever made (after adjustments for inflation and paying attention to a ratio of how production costs differ), the Taylor Cleopatra is famous for both the cost and gossip surrounding its production. That film came out in a flurry of publicity that had been building for years over which the film had reached a status of fame where it was famous for being famous. Not the case here.

A Queen for Caesar seems to anticipate a lot of the Taylor film by running through some of the same storyline (such as the rug rolling scene) but then each film is borrowing from DeMille's 1934 Cleopatra with Claudette Colbert. The main difference compared to the two American films is that this Italian Cleopatra is played by Pascale Petit (who is French) and features her as a quite young woman (this film makes sure to mention to us several times she is only 18 years old) who is both somehow ruthless and full of heart and good intentions.

The script by Fulvio Gicca Palli and Arrigo Montanari isn't like the Joseph Mankiewicz script which makes efforts at historical accuracy (and tries to make sure we know it) and to showcase Mankiewicz's intelligently written dialogue while having his Cleopatra maneuver men and nations to war, theoretically in the pursuit of stopping war, which is where Mankeiwicz film starts trying to have its cake and eat it, too. In this 1962 A Queen for Caesar, the writers Palli and Montanari want us to have a good time seeing our heroine getting out of one scrape after another and having a paladin-like protector in the form of an Egyptian soldier (George Ardisson as Achillas).

When Cleopatra is jailed secretly in an Egyptian dungeon (by her brother who is temporarily King) and then guarded by Achillas, my first thought was "hey, that guard ought to just spring her out of there," and then Cleopatra starts trying to woo the soldier in that same direction. He appears to be immune to every angle of seduction and pleading that Cleopatra throws at him. When the soldier is finally commanded to deliver Cleopatra bound-and-gagged to the quarters of a powerful Egyptian advisor to the King (who intends to have her slain not too long into the future), Achillas delivers her but then turns on his boss and cuts him down with a sword. We learn this loyal Egyptian soldier has been plotting Cleopatra's escape all along and getting her to his boss's digs was the place he needed to make for their secretive flight out of Egypt.

Where's Caesar in all of this? He's somewhere over the horizon preparing to engage against Akim Tamiroff as Pompey the Great, who we meet when Achillas and Cleopatra flee to Syria to evade the wrath of her petulant and half-crazy brother Ptolemy (Corrado Pani). The Elizabeth Taylor film covers a little bit of the same ground with the brother, but has Pompey in the rear view mirror in the story, and we hear about the great admiration (or fear) the Romans had for this general. In A Queen for Caesar we have a somewhat humorous Tamiroff playing a genius who can't get it together and plan an attack, always putting it off until tomorrow, no matter how perfect the moment is. And then he meets Cleopatra and now all he can really concentrate on is her. That seems to be a contagion that effects everyone in this film, and isn't much different from those other Cleopatra movies. Yet A Queen for Caesar goes to the effort to make sure we understand her vulnerability isn't just political and as a woman among the powerful and famous, because this movie dumps her into spots where she's just a pretty girl at the mercy of untrustworthy soldiers and circumstances (though there is a highly satisfying scene where the Roman soldiers refuse to assist a particularly corrupt leader who now has to sword fight against Achillas. In what has a certain funny aspect to it, the soldiers cite a technicality on why they can't step in to aid this fellow Roman. We don't like that guy, and neither do they.

There's no crowd scenes in this 90 minute runtime that are anything like the gargantuan scale of the Taylor movie, but we do get decent sized crowds of horses stomping over the screen with hard-riding Roman soldiers, and the set design is respectable and adequate, and as a Peplum film, this is a first class production. Pascale Petit's Cleopatra is the center of the movie and she's got a lot of youthful energy. At times the character comes across as a pretty sharp planner of intrigue, but there's a sense to her effort that this Cleopatra might burst into laughter at any moment from the sheer fun she's having.

"Film buff finds lost 1968 vampire TV movie that was rumored to be so scary it was ordered destroyed"

Story at MSN New York Post

On the occasion of her 100th birthday "Behind the myth" of Marilyn Monroe – Irish Times

The problem with writing about Marilyn Monroe to mark her centenary is that everything to be said about her has already been said, and almost all of it has been mediated through an event that took place 64 years ago: her fatal barbiturate overdose at the age of 36..."

Review: The Admirable Crichton - 1957: There was a slew of "island" movies post-World War II and through the 1950's. The Blue Lagoon (1949) and Island of Desire (1952), both British productions, built on the already existing genre of beachcomber stories in which someone (willingly or unwillingly) is isolated onto an island and has to either contend with weather, food sourcing, or simply a foreign environment of people and culture (for example the 1938 Beachcomber with Charles Laughton). With Blue Lagoon and Island of Desire, the situation is an echo of Adam and Eve, but 1957's The Admirable Crighton (aka Paradise Lagoon) pushes this into an almost (but not quite) farcical extreme with four couples marooned on an island. On top of this simple mathematical balance is an evaluation of the English class system run through a very unusual situation where tradition and genius have to come to terms with each other.

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Review: Zarak, 1956: Zarak Khan (Victor Mature) and dancer Salma (Anita Ekberg) are having a tough time making their mutual affection viable. It is the 1800's and the British Empire is cracking down on Afghan bandits like Zarak, and then there's the problem that Salma is one of Zarak's father's various wifes. A Technicolor/CinemaScope adventure shot on location in India, Morocco, and Myanmar.

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Review: Superman, 2025: This is, unfortunately, kind of a stupid movie. The special effects are often spectacular, though not always, and there are performances from the cast that are really quite good, but, again, not always. But, in the end the film is doomed by its script. Superhero films are not exactly renowned for adherence to reality, but even with the acceptance of the extraordinary physical powers of Superman, something easy enough to do after many decades of superhero movies (a cycle kicked off by the 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeves), it is the actions of the human cast that bogs down this movie into a Saturday morning cartoon level of storytelling. More about Superman, 2025

Review: Cat-Women of the Moon, 1953: Marie Windsor is having serious problems keeping her mind on her job as navigator on a rocketship traveling toward the moon. She keeps feeling compelling thoughts demanding she land the craft at a certain spot on the far side of the familiar space orb. Once landed, they disembark and Windsor deftly maneuvers the male crew (the ship's two leaders are both in love with her) toward a secret ruined city below the surface. There they discover a race of "cat-women" who run around in black leotard tights and who exercise a kind of mind-control skill that is at its most powerful when projected onto the female brain, that is, Windsor's. Meanwhile, the men are delighted to meet these beautiful denizens of an ancient space-empire, not suspecting the Cat-Woman have a master plan to swipe the rocketship and head to earth on a mission to conquor and repopulate their almost vanished species.

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The line-up of May releases from Warner Archive, quite a few titles with excellent new 4K scans from quality film elements.

Fast Review: The Return of Swamp Thing - 1989: This film doesn't have much ambition other than to play sequel to the original film of 1982 and to try to underline every character and story element with an alternative meaning that is pure camp humor. Louis Jourdan plays a villain that seems somehow bored no matter how much mayhem is happening in his immediate surroundings, and our main star, a young and pretty Heather Locklear, seems to happily grin bigger and bigger as the preposterousness of the story builds. The special effects, writing and side-characters are much better than a straight-to-VHS-tape movie of the 1980s, but somehow The Return of Swamp Thing seems like it was truly made to reside on the shelf of some eternal Blockbuster Video store where it is always ten-minutes before closing on a Friday night and you've already seen all the other "better" titles.

Fast Review: The Divorce of Lady X, 1938: Laurence Olivier is an attorney in London who is a jaded veteran of divorce trials. One evening he is forced by circumstances of weather to stay overnight at a hotel teeming with women who are also stuck there after an event at the hotel's dance hall. Mercilessly disregarding the plea of the hotel management to "double-up" on lodgings since there's not enough room for everyone, Olivier ends up being outsmarted by a clever Merle Oberon who practically steals his bed out from under him, an action that leaves him sleaping uncomfortably in an outer room and also quite smitten.

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Review: The Leech Woman, 1960: Colleen Gray spends part of this film under heavy age makeup, caught in a twisted variation on the “fountain of youth” story. In this case, a venal scientist (her husband!) is determined to make millions from an African tribe’s secret youth-restoring medicine. He pretends his efforts are meant to restore his much older wife’s health and beauty, but we can easily see this is merely a ploy to gain access to her wealth. When success comes, though, there's a price, one that catches the mendacious husband completely by surprise.

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The Marion Davies' film It's A Wise Child, 1931, Warner Archive Blu Ray, release coming May 26, 2026.

HD master from a new 4K scan of best preservation elements!" "...a witty portrait of small-town morality turned upside down – and a reminder of why she ranked among Hollywood’s most engaging stars. Out of general distribution for decades and never shown on television..."

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