Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s four-hour spectacle is two films joined in the middle. The first, with Rex Harrison, is dry, clever and often funny. The second, with Richard Burton, is loud, wordy and half an hour too long. The sets are worth the ticket either way.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed All About Eve (1950), took over Cleopatra when the production was already in trouble, and the result is the most famous expensive mess in Hollywood history. It runs 251 minutes. It is also, for roughly the first half of them, a good film: a talky, adult, sceptical account of how a clever young woman handles the most powerful man alive. Then Harrison leaves it, for reasons every schoolchild knows, and the second half never recovers the tone.
Harrison is the reason to sit down. He plays Caesar not as a marble bust but as a tired, amused administrator who has seen every kind of ambition and finds this one worth a second look. His scenes with Taylor are the best written in the film, because Mankiewicz gives them something to argue about other than each other: grain, gods, who gets to be a king and who only gets to be married to one. When she is unrolled from the carpet at his feet he does not gasp. He asks her what she wants. Taylor, at this stage, is watchful and quick, and she is better as a politician than she will be later as a lover.
The spectacle earns its reputation. John DeCuir’s Alexandria is a city of pale stone and enormous doors, and his Rome is a forum big enough to hold a sea of extras without any of them looking painted in. Leon Shamroy keeps the wide frame level and lets the crowds fill it, so we always know how far away the throne is from the people. Irene Sharaff, Renié and Vittorio Nino Novarese dress Egypt in gold and Rome in wool, and the film’s single best idea is that the colours tell you which side you are on. Alex North scores the procession into Rome with brass and drums that build for what feels like ten minutes, and when the sphinx comes through the arch with Taylor on top of it we sat forward in our seats. It is a shameless scene and it works, because Mankiewicz for once stops writing and lets the picture do the talking.
The trouble is Burton. He is not bad; he is miscast by the script, which has him drink, sulk and make speeches about his own inadequacy for two hours. Every love scene is staged as a quarrel and every quarrel ends in a monologue, so that two people who are supposed to be unable to keep away from each other are almost never quiet in the same room. We have never seen a screen affair spend so much of its time in committee. Around the three-hour mark we noticed we were tired, and then we were a little sad about it, because Burton and Taylor are plainly capable of the thing the film keeps describing and never once shows.
The supporting players do better than their material. Roddy McDowall’s Octavian is a pale, prim schoolboy who turns out to be the only person in the film who understands power, and his scenes with Andrew Keir’s Agrippa have a chill the leads never reach. Martin Landau is quietly good as the soldier who keeps his opinions to himself. Hume Cronyn and Pamela Brown, as tutor and high priestess, supply the little sanity Egypt has. Dorothy Spencer’s editing shows the joins: scenes open as if something before them has gone, and characters refer to events we have not been shown, which tells you the film we are watching is not quite the one that was made.
Set against Spartacus (1960) or Lawrence of Arabia (1962), this is a chamber drama that has wandered into the wrong-sized rooms. The battle at Actium is brief and confused, and Mankiewicz’s heart is plainly not in it. His heart is in the arguments, and when the arguments are Harrison’s they are worth the time.
Watch it at home, in two sittings, with an evening between them. Take the first half as the sharp political comedy it is. Take the second as a very long look at some very good costumes. It carries a PG certificate, and it opened in British cinemas on 12 July 1963.
