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As an almost all Greek thing, I'm flattered
Rabbit, rabbit. As Bertie Owen, my faithful one-lunged laptop, is still having trouble with the idea of not cooking himself to death in half-hour installments, please find herein a short review of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra (1963).
The shortest version is that for all its reputation as a four-hour camp-fest, Cleopatra is not a bad film at all; it is in fact a good film, but it is doubtful that it could ever have been good enough to make up for nearly bankrupting 20th Century Fox. Its production woes are almost as legendary as its subject matter, encompassing two different shoots from scratch in as many countries and under as many directors (Rouben Mamoulian in London, Mankiewicz in Rome) with a revolving door of a cast and a shooting script that never existed as such, being written and rewritten, as if Penelope of Ithaka were in the movie business rather than textiles, each night for the next day's scenes. Elizabeth Taylor successfully negotiated for an unprecedented million-dollar contract and then almost died of pneumonia during the failed British shoot whose elaborate sets and costumes, abandoned by Hollywood, were presently, gloriously co-opted by Pinewood Studios for Carry On Cleo (1964). Her marriage did die, along with Richard Burton's, right on set before God and the paparazzi, and on some level I feel any film whose presiding deities are Isis and Venus should have seen that coming. The budget exploded. The studio imploded. Mankiewicz's original plan of two back-to-back movies—Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra—was forcibly condensed in the cutting room into one 248-minute Cleopatra which was then further shortened for general release, although the premiere version has since been recovered and is what I saw on 70 mm on Thursday night. It was the highest-grossing film of its year. It did not make back its original costs. Considering those were $44 million in 1963 money, nobody should look surprised. I don't even want to get into its historical accuracy: Mankiewicz was the writer-director who put Latin graffiti on the sound stages of Julius Caesar (1953), so I don't believe his artistic choices were made in ignorance, but since it is recorded nowhere in Plutarch or Suetonius or Appian that the last spasm of the civil wars of the Roman Republic was inaugurated by Octavian personally shanking Sosigenes of Alexandria in the Forum of Rome, I think we can leave the historicity of the production somewhat permanently aside. I tend to associate the term film maudit with cult objects, experimental films, stuff that's so weird it risks your sanity to see it, but Cleopatra makes a good case for a mainstream application of the term.
And yet I have trouble thinking of a filmed interpretation that I like better, even the 1934 pre-Code version with Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra and Henry Wilcoxon as Antony and a bargeful of catgirls as a hell of a thing to see after midnight on a big screen. Four hours gives a smart script a lot of time for characterization as well as pageantry and Mankiewicz's script is not dumb. Neither is its leading lady. Taylor's Cleopatra is the most political Cleopatra I have seen: a strategist as well as a survivor, ambitious and aware at every second of the effect she is making, the power that is hers and the power she has to leverage from the men around her; her body with its beauty and fertility is the obvious instrument, but her brain and her fearless showmanship are underestimated at her opponents' peril. Descendant of one of Alexander's generals, she sees herself as the inheritor of his dream of empire, Alexandria at the heart of the world. If she must ally with Rome to realize it, then "the cloak of Alexander cannot be too heavy for Rome and Egypt to carry together." And the script is on her side. The famous anecdote of the carpet makes a disarmingly goofy entrance, spilling a black-haired, violet-eyed girl with little in the way of royal paint or jewelry face-down at the feet of Rex Harrison's amused Caesar: within seconds she's sizing him up, challenging his colonial complacency, criticizing his maps. He speaks flippantly of her divine titles and she corrects him with a cool burn on the fabled ancestry of the gens Iulia: "I am Isis. I am worshipped by millions who believe it. You are not to confuse what I am with the so-called divine origin that every Roman general seems to acquire together with his shield." An early confrontation in her bath is carefully staged to play up to Roman expectations of Eastern decadence and yet to demonstrate that this young queen is no provincial—reclining among an Oriental fantasy of waving fans and diaphanous veils, she's listening to a musical recitation of the poetry of Catullus, who famously declared (among other invective that could never have been translated nicely enough for the screen in '63) nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere, / nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo. In the aftermath of the siege of Alexandria and her brother's death offscreen in the Battle of the Nile, she meets Caesar's admission that he didn't trust her enough to tell her about the reinforcements coming from Pergamon with the reveal that she not only had him watched but spied on him herself, down to his most intimate secret of seizures and headaches: truth for truth.
To be very clear, I am not saying that Taylor's Cleopatra is never loving, or generous, or spontaneous, or afraid of loss; she can be all of these things and slyly funny besides. But she is Egypt's queen, and Egypt itself, and neither she nor the script forgets it. Her entrance into Rome is an eight-and-a-half-minute showcase of political theater: waves of dancers with silks and colored smokes, tribal regalias of Africa and Egyptian friezes come to life, archers and cavalry, a flight of live doves, and finally the daughter of the Ptolemies herself, drawn through the Arch of Constantine on an enormous sphinx as black as the Nile against the red-bannered dazzling whiteness of the Forum's marble.1 The crowd screams for her, exactly as they would for the modern celebrity she extra-diegetically is. She is clad like Isis herself in feathered gold, her young son by Caesar glittering as Horus at her side. Borne down to the Mars-red carpet on the shoulders of men as black and gold as her sphinx, she bows deeply before her lover, her husband in the Egyptian rite, the man who is all but king of Rome. And as she raises her eyes to triumphant Caesar, she winks. It is almost over the top, except it tells the audience unambiguously what is going on. The procession is a spectacle of submission for the punters: all the fabulous wealth of Egypt at Caesar's feet, all that exotic beauty and he knocked her up to boot. Let the Senate fume; the people of Rome are eating it up. And they have managed it all between the two of them, like a director and his star. (Fortunately this metaphor does not extend so far as to get Mankiewicz assassinated, although I'm sure Darryl F. Zanuck at least thought about it.)
Especially because she is a woman with power, I appreciate that her downfall is not simply love, as it might be in a more standard, misogynistic retelling. She doesn't lose her edge with her heart, make panicked, weak decisions out of overriding femininity: it is not being in love with Antony that drives the tragedy of the film's second half. It is the fact that Burton's Antony is a good match for her in love, but a poor one in politics, and neither of them realizes how much until it's too late. "Show me a city and I'll tell you how to take it," he admits at last, "let me face an army and I'll smell out its weak points and hit them hard where they are. Make me to sit down, talk in whispers of this and that, with an emphasis here and a shrug there, and I'm soon confounded and defeated. Meaning to do the best, I suppose I . . . I suppose I could not have done worse." He is speaking of his marriage to Octavia Minor, Octavian's sister, which he viewed as a harmless gesture of keeping the peace between the uneasier two-thirds of the Second Triumvirate and which Cleopatra understood at once as a dangerous subordination to a man who would never settle for a third of anything, not to mention a public repudiation of her. As good a general as he was in Caesar's life, as faithful an avenger as he was after Caesar's death, what this Antony is not is any kind of statesman, in Caesar's shadow or out of it. But neither, and perhaps more fatally, is he any kind of Alexander. On the eve of Actium, as he drinks steadily and fires his own commanders left and right, it's apparent to the audience that even if he can't admit it to himself, he's fighting to lose. The reasons are unclear—despair, self-disgust, some buried awareness that to defeat Octavian would leave him in charge of this strange new shape his world is taking. (Antony more than any of the other principals suffers from plot compression: we see enough of him competent and energetic in the first act that we can understand Cleopatra's passion in the second, beyond the fact that he's played by Richard Burton and the sexual chemistry between him and Taylor is almost enough to pull the film singlehandedly across any gaps left by the four-hour edit, and a mordant sense of humor counts for a lot with me, but we still have much less idea of what he looked like stable before he started to spin out.) Whatever his qualms, they take Cleopatra by surprise. She fought her brother for the throne and won; Caesar marched a legion on Rome. Octavian plays by the rules of republic only so far as they bring him closer to empire. Years ago in Rome, before Philippi and Tarsus, she watched Antony catch the fire of a dream and pledge his legions to Caesar to help conquer "a world beyond the wildest dreams of even Alexander." It never occurs to her that on his own—with only her—he would not do the same. It's an interesting, risky framing of a not-quite-triangle that suggests some kind of alt-historical OT3 might have served everyone's ambitions and temperaments best. Given the production circumstances, I can't tell if Mankiewicz actually wrote it in from the start or if the idea emerged at some point in post, but I can say I haven't seen it before.
As for the rest of the cast, I thought at first that Rex Harrison was doing his best Rex Harrison and Mankiewicz had just written a conveniently Harrison-like Caesar, but in fact he's doing something unusual in this film: he's vulnerable. Some of it is physical, as when he confesses his fears to Cleopatra after the near miss of a seizure: "One day it will happen where I cannot hide, where the world will see me fall. I shall tumble down before the mob, foam at the mouth and make them laugh, and they'll tear me to pieces." But it is also that he never has the upper hand over his co-star, not politically, not romantically. Early in his time in Alexandria, Caesar hears the disapproving claim that Cleopatra "chooses in the manner of a man rather than wait to be chosen after womanly fashion" and unlike most of Rome's rumors about her, this one proves to be true. His one attempt to treat her with the casual possessiveness their respective ages and positions of power would traditionally support is rebuffed with the cold and accurate "I promise you, you won't like me this way." Their real relationship proceeds from a foundation of mutual chessmastering. Each has something the other wants; each is something the other appreciates; it comes out to love, but I am not sure that it is romantic love as a modern viewer would recognize it. Though she wears a collar of gold coins stamped with his profile for three years in the wake of his assassination, their scenes together leave the impression of more emotion on his side, the way he delights in her audacity and dotes on their son; it is rare to see Harrison as the more loving one and I'm impressed with Mankiewicz for getting that performance out of him. (Neither Moss Hart nor George Cukor could do it for My Fair Lady.) I suspect most of Martin Landau's part as Rufio went the way of Antony's backstory, but he's lanky and loyal and his intensity suggests a hard-bitten military history that does not save him from the vortex of tragedy any more than grand gestures save his more flamboyant superiors. I don't have much to say about Andrew Keir's Agrippa because he is the one characterization in this entire film I object to: he's too much of a scowling heavy for me to picture him personally inspecting the Cloaca Maxima, by which I mean sailing a boat through one of the earliest sewer systems in the world. I am always happy to see Pamela Brown in a movie, even when she's a random fire oracle. But if we're talking performances, the one after Taylor's that really gets my attention is Roddy McDowall's tremendous turn as Octavian. Normally an actor of great and seemingly unconscious charm, here McDowall just shuts it off; he makes the future Augustus a fragile monster with no gears between unearthly detachment and imperial furor, cold and fey. It's a striking reversal of the tradition where Antony is the sexually ambiguous sybarite seduced by the glamour of the East. For Mankiewicz, Octavian's Cato-style Roman stoicism is the more perverse. He's fair-haired for the part and it looks as natural on him as it does on John Hurt's Caligula; he's as closemouthed as Calvin Coolidge in a toga (when Antony is needling him about the tight rein he keeps on his virtue, his riches, and his words, I do hear an echo of "You lose" in Octavian's curt "That too") or he makes the listener's hair stand on end. "The soup is hot. The soup is cold. Antony is living. Antony is dead." It is not humanizing at all to discover that he spent the sea-battle of Actium prone with nausea, raising his head to take the victorious news from Agrippa and then collapsing indifferently again as the ship rolls. The internet tells me he was heavily tipped for an Oscar until the studio botched the nomination process, which feels about right for this film.
Okay, that wasn't short at all, but I had to write it in blocks and it took me days; it had all the frustrations of writing to wordcount while not actually being over any sooner. I don't understand Cleopatra's reputation as a flop or a trashy pleasure at best. I liked it a hell of a lot better than DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). It was almost enough to make me forgive Mankiewicz for the hack job he did on The Quiet American (1958). I know no one in their right mind would have given him money for it, but I came away genuinely, weirdly sorry that he never wrote or directed a version of the Pharsalia, because at times his script for Cleopatra has the anti-epic, black-comic edge that characterizes Lucan's poem: Octavian seasick at Actium, Antony's repeated attempts at a heroic death; in Shakespeare, he can get an ear for the best lines in the play, but when Burton addresses the crowd at Caesar's funeral, we can't even hear a word he says. And the film is, in fact, stunning on a big screen: the monumental architecture, the lavish set dressing, the hyper-real saturation of Technicolor which does half the immersive work of the cinematography. It was well received by its audience. Once or twice they snickered at some moment they thought melodramatic, but more often they laughed in appreciation or even cheered, which is a great thing to hear two thousand years after the fact. (When Antony returns to Cleopatra as an awkwardly married envoy of Rome and she puts him on his knees for it, both![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I heard an impressed "DAAAMN.") Expenses, editing, and ill health be damned, as far as I'm concerned the film is entirely worth its four hours and probably even its $44 million. This spectacle brought to you by my strategic backers at Patreon.
1. I know the Arch of Constantine wasn't built until three centuries after Cleopatra's death, and you know that Roman monuments and statues were as brightly painted as anything else in the ancient world, but I said I wasn't getting into historical accuracy because otherwise that'll be a review of its own and I'm sticking to it. Just for the record, however, let me note that Taylor's costumes are a gorgeous panoply of '60's fashions intermittently influenced by Greek and Egyptian styles, she looks great in all of them, and I hope no one ever tried to explain that leopardskin duffel coat she wears to the Battle of Actium.
The shortest version is that for all its reputation as a four-hour camp-fest, Cleopatra is not a bad film at all; it is in fact a good film, but it is doubtful that it could ever have been good enough to make up for nearly bankrupting 20th Century Fox. Its production woes are almost as legendary as its subject matter, encompassing two different shoots from scratch in as many countries and under as many directors (Rouben Mamoulian in London, Mankiewicz in Rome) with a revolving door of a cast and a shooting script that never existed as such, being written and rewritten, as if Penelope of Ithaka were in the movie business rather than textiles, each night for the next day's scenes. Elizabeth Taylor successfully negotiated for an unprecedented million-dollar contract and then almost died of pneumonia during the failed British shoot whose elaborate sets and costumes, abandoned by Hollywood, were presently, gloriously co-opted by Pinewood Studios for Carry On Cleo (1964). Her marriage did die, along with Richard Burton's, right on set before God and the paparazzi, and on some level I feel any film whose presiding deities are Isis and Venus should have seen that coming. The budget exploded. The studio imploded. Mankiewicz's original plan of two back-to-back movies—Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra—was forcibly condensed in the cutting room into one 248-minute Cleopatra which was then further shortened for general release, although the premiere version has since been recovered and is what I saw on 70 mm on Thursday night. It was the highest-grossing film of its year. It did not make back its original costs. Considering those were $44 million in 1963 money, nobody should look surprised. I don't even want to get into its historical accuracy: Mankiewicz was the writer-director who put Latin graffiti on the sound stages of Julius Caesar (1953), so I don't believe his artistic choices were made in ignorance, but since it is recorded nowhere in Plutarch or Suetonius or Appian that the last spasm of the civil wars of the Roman Republic was inaugurated by Octavian personally shanking Sosigenes of Alexandria in the Forum of Rome, I think we can leave the historicity of the production somewhat permanently aside. I tend to associate the term film maudit with cult objects, experimental films, stuff that's so weird it risks your sanity to see it, but Cleopatra makes a good case for a mainstream application of the term.
And yet I have trouble thinking of a filmed interpretation that I like better, even the 1934 pre-Code version with Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra and Henry Wilcoxon as Antony and a bargeful of catgirls as a hell of a thing to see after midnight on a big screen. Four hours gives a smart script a lot of time for characterization as well as pageantry and Mankiewicz's script is not dumb. Neither is its leading lady. Taylor's Cleopatra is the most political Cleopatra I have seen: a strategist as well as a survivor, ambitious and aware at every second of the effect she is making, the power that is hers and the power she has to leverage from the men around her; her body with its beauty and fertility is the obvious instrument, but her brain and her fearless showmanship are underestimated at her opponents' peril. Descendant of one of Alexander's generals, she sees herself as the inheritor of his dream of empire, Alexandria at the heart of the world. If she must ally with Rome to realize it, then "the cloak of Alexander cannot be too heavy for Rome and Egypt to carry together." And the script is on her side. The famous anecdote of the carpet makes a disarmingly goofy entrance, spilling a black-haired, violet-eyed girl with little in the way of royal paint or jewelry face-down at the feet of Rex Harrison's amused Caesar: within seconds she's sizing him up, challenging his colonial complacency, criticizing his maps. He speaks flippantly of her divine titles and she corrects him with a cool burn on the fabled ancestry of the gens Iulia: "I am Isis. I am worshipped by millions who believe it. You are not to confuse what I am with the so-called divine origin that every Roman general seems to acquire together with his shield." An early confrontation in her bath is carefully staged to play up to Roman expectations of Eastern decadence and yet to demonstrate that this young queen is no provincial—reclining among an Oriental fantasy of waving fans and diaphanous veils, she's listening to a musical recitation of the poetry of Catullus, who famously declared (among other invective that could never have been translated nicely enough for the screen in '63) nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere, / nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo. In the aftermath of the siege of Alexandria and her brother's death offscreen in the Battle of the Nile, she meets Caesar's admission that he didn't trust her enough to tell her about the reinforcements coming from Pergamon with the reveal that she not only had him watched but spied on him herself, down to his most intimate secret of seizures and headaches: truth for truth.
To be very clear, I am not saying that Taylor's Cleopatra is never loving, or generous, or spontaneous, or afraid of loss; she can be all of these things and slyly funny besides. But she is Egypt's queen, and Egypt itself, and neither she nor the script forgets it. Her entrance into Rome is an eight-and-a-half-minute showcase of political theater: waves of dancers with silks and colored smokes, tribal regalias of Africa and Egyptian friezes come to life, archers and cavalry, a flight of live doves, and finally the daughter of the Ptolemies herself, drawn through the Arch of Constantine on an enormous sphinx as black as the Nile against the red-bannered dazzling whiteness of the Forum's marble.1 The crowd screams for her, exactly as they would for the modern celebrity she extra-diegetically is. She is clad like Isis herself in feathered gold, her young son by Caesar glittering as Horus at her side. Borne down to the Mars-red carpet on the shoulders of men as black and gold as her sphinx, she bows deeply before her lover, her husband in the Egyptian rite, the man who is all but king of Rome. And as she raises her eyes to triumphant Caesar, she winks. It is almost over the top, except it tells the audience unambiguously what is going on. The procession is a spectacle of submission for the punters: all the fabulous wealth of Egypt at Caesar's feet, all that exotic beauty and he knocked her up to boot. Let the Senate fume; the people of Rome are eating it up. And they have managed it all between the two of them, like a director and his star. (Fortunately this metaphor does not extend so far as to get Mankiewicz assassinated, although I'm sure Darryl F. Zanuck at least thought about it.)
Especially because she is a woman with power, I appreciate that her downfall is not simply love, as it might be in a more standard, misogynistic retelling. She doesn't lose her edge with her heart, make panicked, weak decisions out of overriding femininity: it is not being in love with Antony that drives the tragedy of the film's second half. It is the fact that Burton's Antony is a good match for her in love, but a poor one in politics, and neither of them realizes how much until it's too late. "Show me a city and I'll tell you how to take it," he admits at last, "let me face an army and I'll smell out its weak points and hit them hard where they are. Make me to sit down, talk in whispers of this and that, with an emphasis here and a shrug there, and I'm soon confounded and defeated. Meaning to do the best, I suppose I . . . I suppose I could not have done worse." He is speaking of his marriage to Octavia Minor, Octavian's sister, which he viewed as a harmless gesture of keeping the peace between the uneasier two-thirds of the Second Triumvirate and which Cleopatra understood at once as a dangerous subordination to a man who would never settle for a third of anything, not to mention a public repudiation of her. As good a general as he was in Caesar's life, as faithful an avenger as he was after Caesar's death, what this Antony is not is any kind of statesman, in Caesar's shadow or out of it. But neither, and perhaps more fatally, is he any kind of Alexander. On the eve of Actium, as he drinks steadily and fires his own commanders left and right, it's apparent to the audience that even if he can't admit it to himself, he's fighting to lose. The reasons are unclear—despair, self-disgust, some buried awareness that to defeat Octavian would leave him in charge of this strange new shape his world is taking. (Antony more than any of the other principals suffers from plot compression: we see enough of him competent and energetic in the first act that we can understand Cleopatra's passion in the second, beyond the fact that he's played by Richard Burton and the sexual chemistry between him and Taylor is almost enough to pull the film singlehandedly across any gaps left by the four-hour edit, and a mordant sense of humor counts for a lot with me, but we still have much less idea of what he looked like stable before he started to spin out.) Whatever his qualms, they take Cleopatra by surprise. She fought her brother for the throne and won; Caesar marched a legion on Rome. Octavian plays by the rules of republic only so far as they bring him closer to empire. Years ago in Rome, before Philippi and Tarsus, she watched Antony catch the fire of a dream and pledge his legions to Caesar to help conquer "a world beyond the wildest dreams of even Alexander." It never occurs to her that on his own—with only her—he would not do the same. It's an interesting, risky framing of a not-quite-triangle that suggests some kind of alt-historical OT3 might have served everyone's ambitions and temperaments best. Given the production circumstances, I can't tell if Mankiewicz actually wrote it in from the start or if the idea emerged at some point in post, but I can say I haven't seen it before.
As for the rest of the cast, I thought at first that Rex Harrison was doing his best Rex Harrison and Mankiewicz had just written a conveniently Harrison-like Caesar, but in fact he's doing something unusual in this film: he's vulnerable. Some of it is physical, as when he confesses his fears to Cleopatra after the near miss of a seizure: "One day it will happen where I cannot hide, where the world will see me fall. I shall tumble down before the mob, foam at the mouth and make them laugh, and they'll tear me to pieces." But it is also that he never has the upper hand over his co-star, not politically, not romantically. Early in his time in Alexandria, Caesar hears the disapproving claim that Cleopatra "chooses in the manner of a man rather than wait to be chosen after womanly fashion" and unlike most of Rome's rumors about her, this one proves to be true. His one attempt to treat her with the casual possessiveness their respective ages and positions of power would traditionally support is rebuffed with the cold and accurate "I promise you, you won't like me this way." Their real relationship proceeds from a foundation of mutual chessmastering. Each has something the other wants; each is something the other appreciates; it comes out to love, but I am not sure that it is romantic love as a modern viewer would recognize it. Though she wears a collar of gold coins stamped with his profile for three years in the wake of his assassination, their scenes together leave the impression of more emotion on his side, the way he delights in her audacity and dotes on their son; it is rare to see Harrison as the more loving one and I'm impressed with Mankiewicz for getting that performance out of him. (Neither Moss Hart nor George Cukor could do it for My Fair Lady.) I suspect most of Martin Landau's part as Rufio went the way of Antony's backstory, but he's lanky and loyal and his intensity suggests a hard-bitten military history that does not save him from the vortex of tragedy any more than grand gestures save his more flamboyant superiors. I don't have much to say about Andrew Keir's Agrippa because he is the one characterization in this entire film I object to: he's too much of a scowling heavy for me to picture him personally inspecting the Cloaca Maxima, by which I mean sailing a boat through one of the earliest sewer systems in the world. I am always happy to see Pamela Brown in a movie, even when she's a random fire oracle. But if we're talking performances, the one after Taylor's that really gets my attention is Roddy McDowall's tremendous turn as Octavian. Normally an actor of great and seemingly unconscious charm, here McDowall just shuts it off; he makes the future Augustus a fragile monster with no gears between unearthly detachment and imperial furor, cold and fey. It's a striking reversal of the tradition where Antony is the sexually ambiguous sybarite seduced by the glamour of the East. For Mankiewicz, Octavian's Cato-style Roman stoicism is the more perverse. He's fair-haired for the part and it looks as natural on him as it does on John Hurt's Caligula; he's as closemouthed as Calvin Coolidge in a toga (when Antony is needling him about the tight rein he keeps on his virtue, his riches, and his words, I do hear an echo of "You lose" in Octavian's curt "That too") or he makes the listener's hair stand on end. "The soup is hot. The soup is cold. Antony is living. Antony is dead." It is not humanizing at all to discover that he spent the sea-battle of Actium prone with nausea, raising his head to take the victorious news from Agrippa and then collapsing indifferently again as the ship rolls. The internet tells me he was heavily tipped for an Oscar until the studio botched the nomination process, which feels about right for this film.
Okay, that wasn't short at all, but I had to write it in blocks and it took me days; it had all the frustrations of writing to wordcount while not actually being over any sooner. I don't understand Cleopatra's reputation as a flop or a trashy pleasure at best. I liked it a hell of a lot better than DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). It was almost enough to make me forgive Mankiewicz for the hack job he did on The Quiet American (1958). I know no one in their right mind would have given him money for it, but I came away genuinely, weirdly sorry that he never wrote or directed a version of the Pharsalia, because at times his script for Cleopatra has the anti-epic, black-comic edge that characterizes Lucan's poem: Octavian seasick at Actium, Antony's repeated attempts at a heroic death; in Shakespeare, he can get an ear for the best lines in the play, but when Burton addresses the crowd at Caesar's funeral, we can't even hear a word he says. And the film is, in fact, stunning on a big screen: the monumental architecture, the lavish set dressing, the hyper-real saturation of Technicolor which does half the immersive work of the cinematography. It was well received by its audience. Once or twice they snickered at some moment they thought melodramatic, but more often they laughed in appreciation or even cheered, which is a great thing to hear two thousand years after the fact. (When Antony returns to Cleopatra as an awkwardly married envoy of Rome and she puts him on his knees for it, both
spatch and I heard an impressed "DAAAMN.") Expenses, editing, and ill health be damned, as far as I'm concerned the film is entirely worth its four hours and probably even its $44 million. This spectacle brought to you by my strategic backers at Patreon.1. I know the Arch of Constantine wasn't built until three centuries after Cleopatra's death, and you know that Roman monuments and statues were as brightly painted as anything else in the ancient world, but I said I wasn't getting into historical accuracy because otherwise that'll be a review of its own and I'm sticking to it. Just for the record, however, let me note that Taylor's costumes are a gorgeous panoply of '60's fashions intermittently influenced by Greek and Egyptian styles, she looks great in all of them, and I hope no one ever tried to explain that leopardskin duffel coat she wears to the Battle of Actium.
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