Imperial Projections in Modern Popular Culture

"Yes. It’s a good part of a very good book. Carry on Cleo , one of the most popular of the Carry On films, is another important way of looking at Julius Caesar. The people who made the films would have probably laughed at the idea that they were a socio-political text, but Nicholas Cull is right to present them in that way. The plot of Carry On Cleo is a mishmash of the stories of Caesar and Cleopatra, Antony and Cleopatra, plus a bit about the invasion of Britain all mixed into one. It is quite a good reminder that a lot of the history we read, which all seems so clear-cut, might be just as much of a mash-up. But it’s also a sort of triple satire—on Caesar himself, on the British Empire (which by the 1960s was fading fast) and, perhaps most importantly, a satire on the new American hegemony. The whole film is based on the set of the great Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra film . Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The Carry On producers said they could make a whole film about Cleopatra in the time that it would take Joseph Mankiewicz and his team to paint one wall of a set. Carry On Cleo was done on the cheap, very quickly, and had a wonderful script. And it has the amazing line of the assassination where Kenneth Williams, as a very camp Julius Caesar, comes storming out of a door with a dagger in his back and a lot of angry assassins behind him, and shouts, ‘Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!’ Many fans of British comedy in the postwar period say that the line was never bettered anywhere."