...not required viewing by any means, nor is it the bomb it is sometimes made out to be.
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By the end of the 1940s, the newfangled invention of television was just catching on. By the early 1950s, it had become such a threat to Hollywood that movie studios tried almost anything to lure audiences back into theaters. In some ways, this was good for the motion picture industry because it helped promote the adoption of such now-accepted conventions as widescreen and stereo. But, wide screens and stereo sound were not enough; these technical innovations needed massive stories to convey. Thus came the proliferation of the so-called "spectacular" from the mid fifties to the mid sixties, movies like "The Ten Commandments," "Ben Hur," "El Cid," and "Spartacus." By 1963 it was important to one-up anything that had gone before, and "Cleopatra" did just that, unfortunately unintentionally, as one of the biggest, longest, and costliest movies ever made.
Twentieth Century Home Entertainment present the film in an appropriately imposing, if somewhat extravagant, three-disc set. Whether it´s worth all the bother is open to question.
As far as I can tell, the film stays pretty close to known historical fact, with the possible exceptions of the queen´s final demise, a few character omissions, and some compression of time. It may also be the film´s undoing that it tries to cram the affairs of Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor) with two men, Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) and Marc Antony (Richard Burton), into a single story, making it much too lengthy to sustain continued interest. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz had originally envisioned two three-hour movies released six months apart, but Twentieth Century Fox studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck nixed the idea, wanting, instead, to capitalize immediately on the real-life romance of Taylor and Burton.
The finished product, trimmed to a little over 247 minutes, is still a good hour or more too long for a single sitting. Yet the 194-minute version, released to general distribution just after the film´s premiere, proved disjointed and confusing. Nothing about this picture seems to have gone right.
The story begins with the arrival of Caesar in Egypt in the year 48 B.C., at a time when the independent state of Egypt was a protectorate of Rome. Caesar is there in pursuit of his rival, Pompey, and to settle a dispute between Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy over which of them should rule the kingdom, a clash that had spawned an Egyptian civil war. The Queen of the Nile makes a wonderful first entrance wrapped in a rug, a tiny bit of humor in an otherwise somber affair. She wants Caesar to put her on the throne and depose her brother. Caesar just wants to stop the squabbling and go home. He does put her on the throne, but she wants more. She wants Caesar himself and manages to seduce him in what seems like no time at all. She marries him in an Egyptian ceremony and has a child by him (which is still up to historical debate), much to the chagrin of Caesar´s first wife in Rome.
Then when Caesar brings Cleopatra back to Rome, the Queen enters the Roman Forum (in the movie three times the size of the real Forum, by the way, to make it even more impressive than it was) in one of the grandest spectacles ever to grace a movie screen, the queen herself riding atop a twenty-eight-foot sphinx. Anyway, Cleopatra soon has the Roman dictator thinking of kingship. The Roman senate is afraid of his hunger for power, and to protect the republic they murder him. So ends part one.
With her chance for world domination as the wife of Caesar ended, Cleopatra next seizes on the idea of seducing the second most powerful man in Rome, Marc Antony, Caesar´s best friend, and planting ambition in his mind. She gets him and his legions to declare her son by Caesar the rightful heir to the Roman Empire, and she persuades him to declare war on Rome. This time she succeeds only in getting Antony defeated and expediting his suicide. By the end of the film she´s had two of the most powerful men on the planet as lovers and failed with both of them. Not the best track record in the world. In addition to Taylor, Harrison, and Burton, you will find Roddy McDowall as Octavian (later known as Augustus), Julius´s successor to the dictatorship of Rome; Martin Landau as Rufio, the loyal right-hand man to Antony; Andrew Heir as Agrippa, the admiral of the Roman fleet; and Hume Cronyn as Sosigenes, the queen´s most-trusted counselor.
Over the years I´ve heard the pros and cons of this picture rage on. I´ve heard its defenders say it´s a lyrical epic and its detractors say it´s an epic mess. Certainly, the film suffers the obvious effects of long rewrites and excessive editing. In its existing state it is too long to sustain a cohesive narrative, instead appearing as a succession of attractive set pieces strung together with a good deal of talk. "Too many words," says Caesar to Ptolemy´s tutor, and I agree. If the dialogue were in any way responsible for character development, it might have worked, but we learn everything we need to know about the three principal characters in the first ten minutes of meeting them, and they never change. For anyone seeking character growth or plot development, "Cleopatra" can be a frustrating experience.
The first part of the film, introducing us to Caesar and Cleopatra, is by far the best and most involving portion of the movie. Harrison is ceaselessly fascinating to watch, giving a commanding performance that resonates with the pompous echoes of his Professor Higgins. Burton was probably an even better actor than Harrison, but he is given less to work with. His Marc Antony is easily manipulated by the Egyptian temptress and turns into something of a jellyfish by the time he takes his own life. Ms. Taylor is the enigma. She is at once gorgeous and alluring, exposing a good deal of flesh along the way, yet abrasive and domineering as well. Beyond her physical perfection, one wonders what two otherwise reasonably intelligent men saw in so obvious, scheming, manipulative, and demanding a femme fatale. Well, one cannot argue with history, I suppose; both Caesar and Antony made fools of themselves over her, and Ms. Taylor plays her role as though born to it. Considering her own real love life, one could almost say she was, indeed, born to it.
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