Runtime: 81 minutes
Directed by: William Castle
Starring: Rhonda Fleming, William Lundigan, Raymond Burr, Jean Byron, Michael Ansara
From: Columbia
It’s time to talk about William Castle before he made his own horror movies w/ outrageous gimmicks. By the time he was able to go independent, he had worked for (mainly) Columbia for years and made something like 50 B-movies, none of which are ever talked about even amongst nerds like us. Thus, when TCM played this late last night as part of their day devoted to Rhonda Fleming, it was an opportunity that had to be taken; most of those early films can only be found via some deep digging online, if they can be found at all… of course, this actually IS on YouTube, but more on that in a bit. The producer was Sam Katzman, who was a B-movie maven so he worked often w/ Castle.
Serpent of the Nile is a film about Cleopatra and Mark Antony, right after the death of Julius Caesar. Actually, it’s a love triangle as there’s also William Lundigan as Lucilus.Cleo was played by Fleming, an actress I’ve seen little of. Meanwhile, Antony was played by… Raymond Burr! I was surprised at first, but naturally Burr had enough talent to pull it off. It will sound crass to suggest that there was something between the two men given Burr’s sexuality, yet…
It’s for certain not a lavish production, even if you don’t compare it with the epic from the next decade w/ Elizabeth Taylor. Yet the entire effort is short-81 minutes-and every aspect is at least competent; the fact that this was a Technicolor production also helped. There are some rather grand matte paintings which help w/ the illusion. Also, it was shot on the sets of a big budget Columbia release (Rita Hayworth’s Salome) so at least those looked swell.
I read somewhere else that before last night, TCM only played this once… in 2009. The print typically did look nice, and looked better than what was on YouTube, which was ID’ed as from the last showing; who knows if there are enough dorks out there to purchase such a set, but if a label were to put out some of Castle’s early films… apparently, the actress who played Cleo’s sister (not a huge role) was unbilled and well, even now no one knows who the heck she was. On the flip side, we know that this was one of Julie Newmar’s early roles, again in a small part-albeit memorable as she’s painted head to toe in gold!
The film was fine; definitely not a must-see, but thankfully not a disaster either. Speaking of disasters… Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra has been avoided by me; besides the whole race aspect, it allegedly was even more historically inaccurate than this film was. It’s best if I say no more about Queen Cleopatra, as I’ve already stepped on a hornet’s nest just be mentioning it.
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