Pi in the Sky

Cleopatra

Posted on September 8th, 2007 at 9:42pm by Pi.
Categories: Cinema.

Cleopatra
Drama. USA, 1963
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Writers: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison

The estereotype of superproductions, Cleopatra is an historical drama telling the story of the almost mythical egyptian queen, and her relationships with the rulers of Rome, Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony.

Cleopatra seeks for Caesar’s help in recovering the throne of Egypt from her brother, and then aims for Alexander The Great’s dreams of an unified world. Married with Caesar, she slowly achieves her goals until Caesar’s killing, when she returns to Egypt to care of her country and her son. Later, her fate will reunite her with Marc Anthony, falling in love with him, getting married again, and pursuing her old dream again.

Well, yes, I also watch this kind of movies, I have a very broad taste, or as some would say, eclectic. This thursday I was deadly bored, so I started downloading about 70 movies (20 of them cartoons), and Cleopatra was simply one of them. I wanted to revive the fuzzy memories I had of this film, and try to understand the history behind the movie, rather than the story of the movie itself.

I have to confess that while the movie is not bad, it has been a bit painful to watch. Four hours of love stories, political and diplomatic arrangements and betrayals, military strength against strategic cunning, etc… It’s just too much. I don’t mind long movies, I like them, but only if they’re really capable of maintaining your interest for so long. Cleopatra didn’t. Everything in this movie is spectacular, it’s a really huge movie in many senses, but the ultimate result is not that huge.

The rhythm of the movie is irregular, with some extremely boring parts, and some ununderstandable reasoning from the characters. While Mankiewicz had in mind two separate movies of three hours each one, what the studio approved was a cut-down four hour version. So, this is the short version! Everyone knows the over budget stories about this movie, which started as a modest $2 million project, and ended costing $44 million, from which 7 were for Elizabeth Taylor and several others were stolen during production in Italy. Today that means about $300 million with adjusted inflation. To imagine how big that amount is for a single movie, the recent The Lord Of The Rings trilogy had an estimated final budget of $292 million. There are much more expensive movies, that was just an example. Cleopatra was for more than 40 years the most expensive film ever made, and not until this year this record has been broken.

And all that counting that the Alexandria set was rebuilt three times, multiple production and filming delays, several recasts for almost all the roles, the complex logistics of coordinating thousands of extras, the whimsical egos of the three main actors, changing directors, no shooting script, the absolutely huge amount of dresses for the queen…

Everything in this movie was quite excessive, including the love-hate relationship between Taylor and Burton, which started in the filming of Cleopatra, and lasted until Burton died. Such a huge movie attracted a huge attention from the public, and made the movie very famous, probably more famous than what the movie (as a finished product to be watched) deserved.

Urban legends about Cleopatra are frequent, but perhaps the most repeated one is that it was a total flop in the box office. Not at all, it did very good and was among the highest grossing movies of the decade. The problem is that with such a very high cost, it took the movie a bit more than usual to get even and recover the expenses.

In the line of epic superproductions, I liked much more Gone With The Wind and the absolutely wonderful Spartacus, but Cleopatra just doesn’t do the cut for me. But while the movie is far from perfect, or being a masterpiece (as I understand what is a masterpiece), it is part of the history of cinema, and a classic by own merits. It’s one of those movies that while not among the greatest, are still a must for cinephiles.

My score: 5/10. Boring but spectacular, a must for historical purposes.

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