Mankiewicz’s four-hour epic is two films joined at the interval: a witty, talkative one in which Rex Harrison has all the best lines, and a slower one in which Richard Burton broods in gold. The sets earn their keep; the second half does not.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra runs 251 minutes and is credited to three screenwriters, Mankiewicz, Ranald MacDougall and Sidney Buchman, which works out at roughly one an hour with change. It is one of the last of the big studio Roman pictures, and the one whose troubles behind the camera are better known than the film itself. For close to two hours, though, it is a good film. Rex Harrison’s Caesar arrives in Alexandria, Elizabeth Taylor’s queen arrives rolled in a carpet, and they spend the first half talking rings round each other. After the interval Richard Burton steps forward and the film slows to a march.
The first half is Mankiewicz’s kind of film, which is to say people being clever at one another in rooms. Harrison plays Caesar as a tired, amused administrator who finds Egypt absurd and says so, listening to each speech with his head on one side as if he had already written the reply. Taylor gives him a queen who is young, imperious and plainly enjoying the argument, and when she has Apollodorus (Cesare Danova) carry her into Caesar’s quarters inside a rug, the scene is played for comedy and gets the laugh. We laughed more than once, and at lines rather than at the film.
John DeCuir built Alexandria at something close to full size and Leon Shamroy photographs it accordingly: the camera sits back and level, and the frame fills edge to edge with columns, water and people. The palace is turquoise and gold; Rome is white stone and red cloth. Irene Sharaff, Vittorio Nino Novarese and Renié give Taylor a new gown for nearly every scene, each with more gold in it than the last, and put the Romans in leather and short red cloaks. Cleopatra’s entry into Rome, seated on a black sphinx hauled by hundreds of men with dancers and coloured smoke going before it, is the best piece of spectacle in the film, and we sat up for it. Alex North writes it a march for full brass and drums. Elsewhere his love theme for strings returns so often that we came to hear it as a warning.
Then comes Antony. Burton is a fine actor handed a part written as a decline before it has been given a summit. He drinks, he broods, he shouts at Rufio (Martin Landau), and Taylor, so quick with Harrison, slows to his tempo. Their love scenes are the film’s weakest: two people declaring passion in long, balanced sentences that nobody in the grip of anything ever spoke. The script turns every exchange into a short essay, and in the first half Harrison’s timing hid it. Burton plays the words straight, at volume, and you hear every one.
Dorothy Spencer’s editing has a story of its own. The studio wanted a shorter film than Mankiewicz shot, and the second half shows the marks: scenes open as if we had missed their first minute, the sea battle at Actium is staged with real ships and burning models and then hurried off, and Roddy McDowall’s Octavian, the most interesting Roman in the film, keeps turning out to have gained power between scenes without our seeing how. Andrew Keir’s Agrippa and Kenneth Haigh’s Brutus get a scene or two apiece before the plot moves on. Somewhere in the third hour we caught ourselves wondering how much was left, and then were annoyed with ourselves, because the pictures were still handsome and it was not their fault.
Mankiewicz had done Rome before, in Julius Caesar (1953), with Shakespeare’s script to carry the weight, and his best films, All About Eve (1950) chief among them, are about people who talk well and know it. Cleopatra is that film for as long as Harrison is in it. After that it is a costume picture with a tragedy attached, and the tragedy is the weaker part.
See it at home, over two evenings, with the interval respected. The first evening is a witty film about an old man and a young woman working out who is using whom. The second is a studio putting its money back on the screen, and the barge at Tarsus is the one stretch of it we would not want you to miss. It carries a PG and opened in British cinemas on 12 July 1963. Its 251 minutes divide at the interval into the film we liked and the film we sat through.
