Cleopatra (1963): The Epic That Nearly Destroyed Hollywood
The 1963 Cleopatra directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz — or rather, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and then by Mankiewicz after Mamoulian was fired, with extensive interference from the studio and the cast throughout — cost approximately forty-four million dollars, which was enough to nearly bankrupt Twentieth Century Fox, take four years to complete, survive the death of one director, the illness and near-death of its star, and the most extensively documented off-set romance in Hollywood history. The resulting film runs for four hours and seventeen minutes in its complete version. It is simultaneously one of the most expensive disasters in studio history and a more interesting film than its reputation suggests.
The historical content, for a 1963 Hollywood epic, is surprisingly serious. Mankiewicz was a sophisticated filmmaker who had read the sources and who understood that Cleopatra’s relationship with Caesar and Antony was political before it was personal. Rex Harrison’s Caesar — patrician, intelligent, amused by his own position — is the film’s best performance and the closest any mainstream Hollywood production has come to rendering what Caesar’s contemporaries describe: a man of extraordinary mental agility who found the world’s resistance to his will mildly entertaining. The political dynamic between Caesar and Cleopatra, in which each is using the other for strategic purposes while developing a genuine personal investment, is handled with more nuance than the romance-driven narrative structure requires.
Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra is where the film’s internal tensions are most visible. Taylor was cast as the most beautiful woman in the world playing the most powerful woman in the world, and the production’s difficulties — the illness, the multiple directors, the production moving from England to Rome after Taylor nearly died of pneumonia — meant that the performance was assembled rather than sustained. The result is a Cleopatra who is most effective in the political scenes and least effective in the romantic ones, which is the inverse of what the studio wanted and the correct historical emphasis. Taylor understood something about Cleopatra’s intelligence that her contemporaries’ focus on the romance obscured: this was a woman who spoke nine languages, administered one of the ancient world’s wealthiest states, and survived thirty years of Ptolemaic dynastic violence. The romance was a strategic instrument.
Richard Burton’s Mark Antony arrives in the second half and the film changes quality. The Burton-Taylor relationship, which was generating tabloid coverage of unprecedented scale during production, introduced an off-screen reality that the camera registered without either actor being able to control. What should have been political calculation reads as emotional reality, which is wrong for the history and right for the drama. The scenes between them — particularly the Donations of Alexandria sequence, in which Antony distributes eastern territories to Cleopatra’s children — have a weight that the film’s more conventionally dramatic sequences cannot match.
The production design is the film’s most unambiguously successful element. The sets built at Cinecittà for the Alexandria sequences were among the largest ever constructed for a film, and the spectacle they provide — the entry of Cleopatra into Rome on a mechanical sphinx before thousands of extras — remains visually overwhelming fifty years later in a way that digital equivalents are not. Scale produced by real materials and real people registers differently than scale produced by computation, and the Cleopatra sequences that work best are the ones where the camera simply points at the world the production has built.
The film was not a success on release — it took years to recoup its costs — and it contributed to the collapse of the studio epic as a commercially viable form, a process that Ben-Hur’s success had briefly interrupted. What it left behind was a visualization of late Republican Rome and Ptolemaic Egypt that shaped subsequent representations for decades, and a set of performance choices that serious actors working in the same material have been responding to ever since. Taylor’s Cleopatra and Harrison’s Caesar are not the last word on their subjects. They are the most visible word, which is a different and durable form of authority.