Cleopatra Articles

Alla Nazimova, Salome (top); Greta Garbo, Ramon Novarro, Mata Hari (bottom) Alla Nazimova's Salome, Claudette Colbert's Cleopatra, Hedy Lamarr's Delilah, and Greta Garbo's Mata Hari are the four temptresses featured in the "Ornament and the Enchantress" film series presented by Los Angeles' J. Paul Getty Museum. Charles Bryant's Salome (1923); Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra (1934), co-starring Warren William and Henry Wilcoxon; DeMille's Samson and Delilah [...]

Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington in Avatar (top) Fox says James Cameron's Avatar is its most expensive production ever. That's quite something, coming from the studio behind Cameron's own Leviathanesque Titanic in the late 1990s, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Galleonesque Cleopatra in the early 1960s, and Richard Fleischer's brontosauresque Doctor Dolittle later that decade. Both Titanic and Cleopatra went on to make a fortune at the box [...]

Joseph L. Mankiewicz Centennial – Part I And if Guys and Dolls (1955) was a bore — just about everyone in this film musical is miscast, from Brando to Mankiewicz himself — the director recovered his touch with the adult (and bizarre) Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), a psychotic psychological drama adapted by Gore Vidal and (officially) Tennessee Williams from Williams's own play. (Williams later said [...]