A chained slave girl (far left) gives Cleopatra some asp while two other slave girls
kneel at her feet and try to act all bummed out about their owner's pending death.
Back in 19-frickin'34 they had slave girls dressed half naked and running around IN CHAINS while they did their slavegirl duties! Then the goddamn Hayes Code descended like an iron curtain on American movies (and you know that has to damage the film stock) and we're frozen into men in diapers and fully dressed dancing girl sword and sandal movies for thirty frickin' years.
And the thing is, the image at the top of this page is not a single stingy image of a slavegirl in chains in the 1934 Cleopatra. No, they were frickin' generous with the slave girls. They even had a scene custom-made for furries.
The opening credits has a long shot of a naked slavegirl (apparently naked, she's seen in silhouette though her breasts are side-lighted and appear to be two distinct orbs rather than the more dumbbell-like shake you'd get if she were wearing a brassiere of any kind). The slavegirl holds a wide, shallow bowl at shoulder height in each hand. And hanging from each wrist are not one, but two chains.
The title credits feature a nude slave girl wearing two sets of chains on each arm.
I guess the second set is a safety chain in case the first set breaks.
It's a powerful image that does a great job of expressing the barbarism and exoticness of the ancient world (nudity and chains, very foreign to rural America in the 1930s) and at the same time, subtly expressing Cleopatra's femininity and vulnerability. (During Cleopatra's time, Egypt was a once-mighty empire trying to maintain some kind of autonomy with the militarily superior Roman Empire in dominance. Cleopatra was in empire terms a slavegirl who could only survive by sexually satisfying her Roman masters. Which is what she did.)
Quite a few slave girls make appearances between the opening credits and the end of the movie, but they are for the most part unchained, However, they're always detectable because they perform menial tasks and/or they act very servile. (There's another weird one for ya -- servile-acting slave girls. You don't see much of that in more modern slave girls on film. ( :::cranky old man::: "I blame the media!" /cranky old man.)
You do see a scene that was clearly designed to warm the heart of every furry, if there WAS a thing in 1934: as part of an entertainment on board Cleopatra's royal barge, slave girls in catsuits wrestle with one another as though they were lions, presided over by a lion tamer. Later they jump through flaming hoops.
Catgirls roll on the floor with their tamer's legs visible behind them. There are a lot
more catgirls in the scene, but I chose this cap because of that nice shot of catgirl butt.
Unusual for 1934.
At the end of the movie, both Marc Anthony and Cleopatra are feeling suicidal, as their forces have been defeated by Pompey and they are on the short list of "people to be captured/torture/killed" by Pompey's victorious forces. In both cases, slave girls bring them poison to off themselves with, and in both cases, those slave girls wear chains on their wrists. Long chains, too. I'm not sure what they chains attach to -- maybe they are siriks and attach to their feet, but there they are.
After a hard day of getting his ass kicked in battle, Anthony
needs a drink really bad -- a drink of poison! Two chained slavegirls
bring it to him. Noting the way the standing slavegirl's chains run, I'd say
we're definitely dealing with a sirik here, with the wrists chained to the feet
by a generous length of chain. Allows the slavegirl to serve, but keeps her in bondage.
Nifty. And about the only sirik in mainstream films that I know of.
In both of these cases, the slave girls are dressed in skimpy slave girl costumes, well, skimpy by 1930s standards) and act very servile. (It should be noted that various artworks from ancient Egypt indicate that slaves ran around pretty much naked there. Just another indicator that sword and sandal makers don't really care about verisimilitude).
This kind of hottitude (especially with regard to the half-nakedness) vanished from the screen when the Hayes Code came crashing down like an iron curtain in 1934. Who knows what kind of hotness we missed out on because of the Hayes Code? A whole hell of a lot of it, if films like Cleopatra, Roman Scandals of 1933 and Sign of the Cross are indicators -- and undoubtedly, they WERE indicators. What a shame that men in those days were so completely lacking in balls.
This movie rates a gajillion on the hottitude scale.
Early in the movie, Cleopatra, played by Claudette Colbert, is bound, gagged and blindfolded.
Note the tight ropework on those wrists, and that tight cleave gag. Nice work.
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