NOTES

Thus, although Beatty’s producing and directorial efforts aspire to portray their male lead as mythic overachiever, we should keep in mind André Bazin’s advice: “Myths are ageless; but films can only appear to be myths. Instead they are thoroughly cultural and historical phenomena, even when what they express repudiates culture and history” (quoted in Andrew 1993:130). In 1972 Charlton Heston directed himself in a very low-budget, independent version of Antony and Cleopatra that to date remains the one wide-screen film based entirely on Shakespeare’s script. Though in most ways dreadful, this Antony and Cleopatra engages with great clarity precisely the questions that Beatty’s displacement of Shakespeare raises and then attempts to fob off. Although the film’s visuals insistently recall Heston’s Ben Hur salad days of Roman galleys and bare male torsos, at the same time Heston lets his slightly softening muscles and increasingly immobilized expression dominate the scene, as if daring us to see him as he is, while we remember him as he was. Warren Beatty is not so revealing. He is still ageless, unwrinkled deep in time, at least insofar as the shadow of a Dick Tracy fedora or the soft focus of a romantic remake will allow him to be. No wonder, then, that when Beatty remakes Antony and Cleopatra it is as an elegy not to Cleopatra, but to himself.