Cleopatra at 60: the expensive epic that almost tanked a studio

As I prepared to write on the 60th anniversary of Cleopatra, I asked a few friends and relatives if they had ever seen it. Some had, but more hadn’t: life, even or perhaps especially for the well-versed cinephile, is short, and four-hour-plus Hollywood follies with steadily mouldering reputations quite reasonably aren’t high on everyone’s catch-up list. But more than one person told me that they weren’t actually sure: “I definitely feel like I have,” said one film writer, citing the reams of well-publicised lore on its tortured production and imposing industry legacy, the popularly cemented visual iconography of Elizabeth Taylor’s lavishly eyelinered Egyptian queen, and the film’s status as the origin of the most glamorously turbulent romance in showbiz history. “But have I actually watched the whole thing? If so, I’ve forgotten all the connecting tissue between its most famous images.”

It was a response that to me captured the odd cultural status of a film that is at once a vast Hollywood behemoth and a dust-gathering curio, one that pretty much everybody knows something about, but precious few who weren’t alive for its noisy initial release have seen. I explicitly remember seeing it as a teenager, because doing so required some complicated VHS-era organisation: when it was broadcast at an inconveniently late hour on South African TV, I watched the first halfhour so the rest could fit on to a fourhour video cassette, and then dutifully trudged through it in instalments.

For years afterward, I maintained that the film was significantly better than its musty reputation – though perhaps at some level I was simply justifying to myself the time and effort spent on watching the damn thing. And like my uncertain colleague, whether he had seen it or not, I too formed few memories of the dramatic specifics on either side of its most extravagant set pieces. Revisiting it last week, it was clear enough why. Scripted, often quite literately but most inconsistently, by a hotchpotch of writers that included Lawrence Durrell, with eventual director Joseph L Mankiewicz finally claiming chief credit, Cleopatra rambles in a manner few blockbusters this expensive – $31.1m in 1963, over $300m adjusted for inflation – would dare today.

It’s a more loquacious film than you might guess or recall: Mankiewicz, a director whose best work (All About Eve, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, A Letter to Three Wives) thrives on smallerscale verbal tension and sparring, has immense faith in the power of conversation and argument to enliven Roman history, and to animate the two marriages – Cleopatra’s chilly, calculated arrangement with Caesar, and her more passionate union with Mark Antony – that essentially form the film’s two vast halves. As producers shovelled money into such spangly, jaw-dropping centrepieces as Cleopatra’s arrival in Rome – an exquisitely choreographed and costumed ceremonial parade that puts certain real-world coronations to shame – you can’t help sensing that Mankiewicz would rather have made a chamber piece.

The upside of this focus on human smallness amid all the spectacle is a jagged quippiness: the chief surprise of the film, to the uninitiated, is how archly funny it is. “You dare ask the proconsul of the Roman Empire,” Antony bristles, when the queen instructs him to kneel before her. “I asked it of Caesar, I demand it of you,” she purrs in response. Later, when he professes a love for “almost all Greek things”, her comeback is as delicious as it is inevitable: “As an almost all-Greek thing myself, I’m flattered.”

Still, there’s an awful lot of hot air here, and Mankiewicz might have shed some of it by fudging a date or two. As the film lumbers rather methodically through history, beginning with Julius Caesar’s victory at Pharsalus and arrival in Egypt, winding languidly to Cleopatra’s snake-assisted death, and taking in assorted military battles and personal contretemps along the way, the film’s grasp of the facts is surprisingly solid in a genre given to radically rewriting the record. But its conscientiousness in this regard also yields a torpid evenness of pacing, a dull resistance to climax. Rest your eyes for 20 minutes at any point in the proceedings