Alex North: Cleopatra

conducted by the composer

VARESE SARABANDE 302 066 224 2

Playing Time: double CD -- 76:12 and 74:49

David Aspinall

It is an interesting irony that, in the year which gave title to the most notorious aborted soundtrack in film music history, Alex North's original score for Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the most significant film music event should be the first official CD release of a score even older.

2001 also marks the 50th anniversary of Alex North's arrival in Hollywood. And, with North's arrival, the beginning of the modern era of film music composition. For it was with North's lacerating music for A Streetcar Named Desire, and his chamber minimalism for Death of a Salesman (both 1951) that Hollywood music left the 19th century for good. Without those reference points half a century ago, Goldsmith and Williams, Horner and Goldenthal, even Morricone and Portman and Elfman, would be unthinkable.

Well, why did it take nearly 40 years for North's magnum opus, the 150+ minutes of Cleopatra, to achieve commercial release? The original soundtrack was released on 20th Century Fox, which also made the epic, and which nearly sank under the $40 million plus budget. Fox gambled all, including an unprecedented $1 million salary to the star, on togas and titillation. (The studio was saved, ironically, by the very unsexy Julie Andrews' Sound of Music, which broke all box office records 2 years later.) So then Cleopatra was by far the most expensive film yet made, and still the champ when inflation is factored in. But the lavish gatefold album, with wonderfully literate notes by the film's director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, contained less than a third of the new CD. One gets the distinct impression that the LP served more as another promotional piece for the film than as a musical artifact of intrinsic worth. Which, of course, was conventional Hollywood thinking in the '60s -- and still is.

While representative of the film, like North's previous epic score for Spartacus (1960, which STILL has no complete soundtrack!), the soundtrack LP does scant justice to the wealth of North's contribution to its film (although it sat on The Absolute Sound super disc list for years). For Cleopatra challenges the conventional film score much more than its brilliant predecessor. While Spartacus is a heroic and majestic accomplishment, for a film in which life appears in far more clearcut moral terms than Cleopatra, the latter score is much more complex, in tune with the neurotic twist given the story by its script and cast.

The score is also, for the most part, far more modern in its musical approach. Orchestration is dominated by percussion and brass, as much of Spartacus also was, but this time the effect is far less dynamic and ennobling, much more disturbing and chaotic. Then there's those snaky winds and slithering strings. One element missing from the Spartacus music was eroticism -- unless you count the bathhouse tinklings for the scenes between Lawrence Olivier and Tony Curtis! Cleopatra, by contrast, derives a good deal of its scintillating effect from North's serpentine inspirations. And, ultimately, like the Gordian Knot, the film's erotic and neurotic elements are impossible to untangle. For with that redoubtable symbol of 20th century glamour, Liz Taylor, plopped in the title role, any attempt to evoke the mysterious appeal of the (admittedly) un-beautiful Egyptian queen is impossible. Taylor is certainly voluptuous. She may be a beauty, at least in still photographs. But as soon as she opens her mouth, any illusion of the exotic evaporates. The much less conventionally beautiful Claudette Colbert, in DeMille's 1934 Cleopatra, had the very qualities Liz lacks. In sum, sexiness. In spades.

So with la Taylor at the centre, North had a problem right off. He had another in the person of Richard Burton, playing Mark Antony. Whereas Rex Harrison brought a sardonic intelligence to the role of Julius Caesar (and garnered an Oscar nomination), he's gone by the film's second half (his assassins including Carroll O'Connor, another inadvertent casting coup which the film will never live down.) And instead of Caesar/Harrison, whose combination of moral iron and wry humour we can well believe will communicate an electric charge to even the Queen of Egypt, we are left with the limp and humourless Antony of Burton. Who, it is reported, could summon some eloquence to Shakespeare's tragic heroes on stage. But here, and usually elsewhere on screen, is merely a decorative Roman rug on which Taylor's Cleo can trample. If Burton is to play a doormat, let him do it in a dingy modern setting, such as Virginia Woolf, which is infinitely more suited to the castrated creatures which are his specialty. Just as Taylor herself is much more temperamentally suited to the ballbreaking harridan of that same film than to Egypt's eternal symbol of the temptress. (At the risk of offending hairdressers and costume designers everywhere, the very fact that ET has come to represent female allure in our generation is a sign of the decadence of our culture. She represents perfectly the skin deep superficiality of modern sexuality.)

It is therefore no surprise that Cleopatra's weakest musical element is the romantic material. North's revolutionary approach offers endless rewards in the complexities of the dramatic narrative, the tensions between ambition and lust (both reel and real, in the recently inaugurated Taylor-Burton romance), and the very size and strangeness of the backdrop. But his love themes, especially the Antony-Cleo variations, resolutely resist transporting us from Tennessee Williams territory, or William Faulkner's front porches, where North's neurotic violins seemed so at home in the '50s. Somehow those existentially tortured strings seem more at home in New Orleans. Definitely Mississippi mud, not Nile. The contrast with another film depicting love in the same period (The Robe, with the same actor, Burton), could not be more marked. Alfred Newman's theme for Diana, by contrast with North's lustful lucubrations here, seems at once both ancient and eternal. And somehow spiritual, not erotic. One cannot help suspecting that Newman had more help: Jean Simmons was a much more inspiring subject than Liz.

Nevertheless, when not chained to the divan, North achieves some of the most magnificent musical moments ever to electrify an image. The brief but awe-inducing first scenes in Alexandria; Cleopatra's entry into Rome, a truly unforgettable set-piece (helped immeasurably by the fact that Taylor's mouth is closed for the entire 7 minutes); the scenes building to and during Caesar's assassination, even more effective because they are foreseen through the eyes of the terrified Queen rather than as objective reality; the final humiliation and isolation of Antony, raging alone against the overwhelming forces of Octavian (Augustus Caesar, played with appropriate iciness by Roddy McDowall); and finally, the eerie ascent of North's violins into harmonic heaven after Cleo succumbs to the asp. (Miraculously, the snake survived the close encounter with Liz. 7 husbands didn't.) At the end, with Cleo dead on the finely polished floor, the camera pulls back, North ascends into the empyrean above. The lone survivor of both the story and the Cleopatra debacle. Finally we find mystery. But it's the ultimate tribute to North that the eternal mystery that is woman is ALL in the music. Not in the script, certainly not in the unlamented lump on the marble.

Kudos to producers Robert Townson, Nick Redman and Lukas Kendall. I know they are all disappointed at the commercial lack of interest in this project. While Star Wars clones continue to sell in staggering figures, Cleopatra will be a success even if it breaks even. But Williams owes to North, not vice versa. 40 years hasn't made North one whit more saleable. In fact, there's even less hope for this level of excellence in 2002 than there was in 1963. For Alex, who died a decade ago, the reward was in the doing. Likewise with Cleopatra's dedicated musical archaeologists.