Cleopatra (1963) Review
9 / 10
Official trailer
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. My gut says this is a really good picture wearing the scars of a disastrous production. I’d happily sit through all four hours for Rex Harrison alone, and the sheer physical size of the thing knocks me back. The trouble is real, and nearly all of it lives in the second half.
The 9 is for real spectacle and two performances that survive everything around them. Rex Harrison’s Caesar is dry, calculating and visibly amused, and Elizabeth Taylor is doing more than her 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 wouldn’t 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 can’t win, which is a 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. I’d fix this if I could. I like Burton here, and I wish Fox had given him the hour it cut, because what’s left is a man falling apart and I never get to see what he’s falling from.
Two stories about the same person aren’t one story. Cleopatra’s relationship with Caesar and her relationship with Antony have different shapes and different endings, and joining them produces a chronicle instead of a plot.
The test is whether your midpoint is a turn or a restart. A turn changes what the protagonist is pursuing. A restart changes who she’s pursuing it with. That’s a new book.
When somebody compresses your two-part structure into one, the second part takes all the damage, because the first has already established the terms and can’t be shortened without confusion.
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. Rex Harrison and Richard Burton replaced Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd. The project effectively restarted from nothing having already spent millions.
Mankiewicz then rewrote at night and shot during the day. That’s 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’s 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.
That entrance is my favorite thing in the film. Taylor sitting perfectly still on that sphinx while the forum churns under her is the image I’d point to if anybody asked why this gets a 9.
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 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. That’s more interesting than the seductress the marketing sold and closer to what the historical record supports.
Physical scale is one of the few things money buys that a reader or viewer can still detect sixty years later. The Rome entrance holds because nothing about it was faked.
Stillness in the middle of motion is the cheapest way to direct attention. Taylor does nothing at all while thousands of people move, and every eye goes to the one fixed point.
For prose the equivalent is a single held detail inside a chaotic scene. Describe the noise generally and one object precisely, and the reader will look where you pointed.
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. That’s what happens when a picture is cut by people justifying its cost. This part is hard to forgive. Somebody decided battles justified the budget better than character did, and I’d trade a good share of those extras for the scenes that would have made the Antony half hurt.
A longer version has never been fully restored, and a major 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’s 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. That sounds sensible and had a 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. That’s a fair summary of what survived the process.
A failure large enough to threaten a company changes the rules for everybody who comes after, and the rules that replace it are usually about control instead of about quality.
That’s the pattern across this whole page. Heaven’s Gate ended director autonomy, this ended the historical epic, and neither correction was aimed at the thing that had gone wrong.
The lesson is that overruns are a governance failure and get treated as an ambition failure. Nobody concluded that Fox should have refused the London shoot. They concluded that films should be smaller.
Should you watch Cleopatra?
Watch the first half. Harrison and Taylor circling each other for two hours is as good as big studio filmmaking got in that era, and the entrance into Rome is worth the time on its own.
That’s where the 9 comes from. What holds it back is the second half, the rushed summary of a picture that was written, shot in fragments and never assembled, and I’ll always wish Fox had let Mankiewicz release his two films.
