Monday, December 1, 2008

A Change of Pace: Fatty Arbuckle as Cleopatra

The Cook. Dir. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Perf. Buster Keaton and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. 1918. DVD. The Cook and Other Treasures. Image Entertainment, 2003.
This film derivitive of Anthony and Cleopatra won't be found in any of the scholarly textbooks, though I can't imagine why it isn't. It's clearly a re-enactment of the death scene of Shakespeare's (and not just history's) Cleopatra!

N.B.: Notice the clever use of sausages-as-asp:

Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest