Cleopatra (1963) Review

Caesar arrives in Egypt, finds a young queen delivered to him in a carpet, and the film spends two hours on that and two more on what Mark Antony does with the aftermath.

The 6 is for genuine spectacle and two performances that survive everything around them. Rex Harrison’s Caesar is superb, dry and calculating and visibly amused, and Elizabeth Taylor is doing more than the reputation allows in the first half.

The film’s problems are all structural and all traceable to the production. It was conceived as two films, shot as chaos, cut from six hours to four by people fighting each other, and what reached cinemas is the compressed remains of something else.

It Was Meant to Be Two Films

Mankiewicz’s plan was Caesar and Cleopatra followed by Antony and Cleopatra, roughly three hours each, released separately.

Fox refused, because they wanted to capitalize on the Taylor and Burton affair while it was still in the newspapers and would not wait six additional months. So the two films were compressed into one release of about four hours.

That decision explains almost every complaint about the finished picture. The Caesar half is coherent and well built, and the Antony half is a summary of a film that was written but never fully assembled.

You can feel the seam. Caesar dies, and the picture restarts with a different protagonist, a different tone and a compressed timeline, as though somebody began reading you a second novel at speed.

Burton takes the damage. Antony is written as a man collapsing under a comparison he cannot win, which is a genuinely good idea for the part, and the compression leaves Burton playing the collapse without the film ever showing us the man who had something to lose.

The Money Went Into the Ground

Shooting began in London in September 1960. Sets of tropical Egypt were built, the weather rotted them, palm trees died, and Taylor became seriously ill, requiring an emergency tracheotomy.

The production shut down, moved to Cinecitta in Rome, and rebuilt everything. Mamoulian resigned and Mankiewicz replaced him. Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd were replaced by Rex Harrison and Richard Burton. The project effectively restarted from nothing having already spent millions.

Mankiewicz then rewrote at night and shot during the day, which is a way of working that guarantees waste. Thousands of extras were paid to wait, and the reports of that period read as a portrait of money evaporating on a daily basis.

Taylor was paid a million dollars plus ten percent of the gross, the first actress to reach that figure, and her costumes alone reportedly ran to nearly a hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars across sixty-five outfits, one of them made from gold cloth.

That salary is the part with the longest afterlife. A million dollars for a single picture reset what a star could demand, and every negotiation that followed used it as the floor. The film that nearly destroyed a studio also permanently raised the cost of making any film at all.

What Is On Screen

The entrance into Rome is one of the great sequences in this kind of film. Thousands of performers, an enormous sphinx drawn through the forum, and Taylor at the top of it holding entirely still while everything moves around her.

It works because it is real. Those are physical extras in a physically built forum, and the shot has a weight that no rendered crowd has managed since. Whatever the money bought, some of it is on screen.

Harrison is the reason the first half plays. His Caesar is practical, funny and tired, treating an alliance with Egypt as a logistical matter and being surprised to find he cares. He was nominated and he earned it.

Taylor is better than her reputation in the Caesar material and struggles in the Antony half, and the reason is structural instead of personal. The second half asks her to play grief and political collapse in a fraction of the space, having removed the scenes that would have built to it.

Her Cleopatra is also a specific and defensible reading. This is a ruler who has calculated that her only available weapon is the men who arrive with armies, and Taylor plays the calculation openly, which is more interesting than the seductress the marketing sold and closer to what the historical record supports.

The Cutting Room War

Mankiewicz delivered a first cut of around six hours. Producers reduced it to roughly four. He was fired during post-production after quarreling with Darryl Zanuck, who had returned to run the studio.

Both Mankiewicz and Taylor were reportedly unhappy with what emerged, on the grounds that the release version prioritized the battles over the intention to make Cleopatra a person instead of a spectacle.

The affair did more commercial work than anybody planned. Taylor and Burton were both married to other people, the Vatican condemned the relationship publicly, and Fox timed the release to sell tickets on the coverage. A studio that had lost all control of its production had at least worked out what it still had to sell.

That complaint is visible in the finished film. The political material is thin, the character work is thin, and the sequences that survive intact are the ones with the largest number of extras in them, which is what happens when a picture is cut by people justifying its cost.

A longer version has never been fully restored, and a substantial amount of material is believed lost. What exists is a compromise that satisfied nobody who made it.

Restoration efforts have recovered some footage over the decades and never the six hour assembly. That is worth stating because the version everybody argues about is the studio’s, and the film Mankiewicz delivered has never been seen by anybody outside the room where it was screened once in 1963.

It Changed the Industry and Not for the Better

Forty-four million dollars against roughly fifty-seven in its initial release, the highest grossing film of 1963 and still short of breaking even after distribution and advertising.

Fox sold close to three hundred acres of backlot to stay solvent, production across the lot shut down, and careers ended over it, including the studio president’s. That land became Century City, and the studio spent decades looking across a road at what the picture had cost it.

The industry’s response was stricter financial control over expensive productions, which sounds sensible and had a specific cost. The era of the enormous director-driven historical epic ended here, and the caution that replaced it lasted until the late sixties collapse forced a different kind of risk-taking.

Four Academy Awards from nine nominations, including cinematography, art direction, costumes and special visual effects, with Rex Harrison nominated for Best Actor and the picture itself nominated for Best Picture. Every one of those is a craft award. Nobody gave it anything for writing, directing or performance, which is a fair summary of what survived the process.

Should you watch Cleopatra?

Watch the first half. Rex Harrison and Elizabeth Taylor circling each other for two hours is a genuinely good film, and the entrance into Rome is worth the time on its own. The second half is the summary of a picture that was written, shot in fragments, and never assembled.

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