One afternoon this past week I spent over four and one-half hours watching this epic - and trust me, "epic" is the only word that can reused to discuss this one - 1963 movie that was written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton. What prompted me to seek out and watch this sixty-three year old movie, you may ask? Well, earlier in this year, I listed to the most recent season of TCM's The Plot Thickens podcast entitled simply "Cleopatra".
This is a terrific series of podcasts hosted by Ben Mankiewicz, and if you love movies, I highly recommend that you seek it out and listen to all six seasons. The six episodes centered around the making of this movie, and the effect that it had on Joe Mankiewicz, a noted screenwriter and director who had garnered four Oscars in his career, including writing and directing Oscars for 1950's "All About Eve", one of the all time great movies ever. Ben Mankiewicz is Joe's great uncle, which gave this podcast a little more personal touch.
The idea for this movie first came to 20th Century Fox producer Walter Wanger sometime in late 1959/early 1960. From the very beginning, the movie was beset with budgetary and artistic problems. No one was able to come up with a coherent script and the original director, Reuben Mamoulian, resigned from the project. Elizabeth Taylor was 29 years old at the time and already a huge star. She didn't really want to do it. She told Wanger that she would do it if they paid her $1 million in salary and ten percent of the gross.. She figured that there is no way the studio would agree to her demands and that would put an end to it. However, Fox said "yes", and Taylor became the first actor ever to sign for a million dollars for one picture.
Joe Mankiewicz was brought in to both save the script and direct the movie. He didn't really want to do it. Epic pictures weren't his thing. He was reported to have said "I wouldn't go to see "Cleopatra" so why would I want to direct it?" If that quote is accurate, you can see why he won two Oscars as a screenwriter. So why did he end up doing it? As you might suspect, the answer was money. In addition to a large salary, Fox agreed to buy Mankiewicz' production company for $3 million, a sale that netted Joe $1.5 million. Doing "Cleopatra" was, he said, "an act of whoredom". Another great line.
As they say in Hollywood, complications ensued. Taylor developed some serious illnesses that delayed the start of filming. Costs were skyrocketing. Locations for filming changed from Hollywood to Egypt to London before finally settling on Italy. Each location change required rebuilding of the elaborate sets, the likes of which had never been seen before. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on wigs for actors, many of which were never seen because of the helmets that the actors wore. One line item in the budget was "$100,000 for paper cups". Paper Cups!! "Cleopatra" would go on to be the most expensive movie ever made up to that time. It cost $44 million to make. Its eventual gross receipts, according to IMDB, were $57.8 million. It virtually bankrupted 20th Century Fox.
But the biggest brouhaha of all was the love affair that began between Taylor and Richard Burton, each of whom were married to other people at the time. People may shrug at such goings on in 2026, but in the world of 1960-63, this was a scandalous act and a HUGE news item. Even an eleven year old Grandstander was aware that events surrounding the making of this movie was a really big deal, even if he did not fully understand the making of movies and the marital status of Hollywood big shots.
Anyway, listening to the podcast made me want to see this movie that I had never before seen, which, as I said at the beginning, I finally did the past week.
So how was it?
Well, it was way too long. Mankiewicz shot a movie that was over six hours long. He actually had the idea that the Fox should actually package "Cleopatra" as two separate movies, "Cleopatra and Caesar" and "Cleopatra and Antony", and release them separately a year apart. This was revolutionary at the time, and Fox said no, it had to be one picture. This necessitated drastic editing on Mankiewicz' part and the result was a somewhat disjointed and choppy picture, that still had a running time in excess of five hours.
For all of that, though, I actually liked the movie. It was campy and fun. (Unlike the current "The Odyssey" another sword-and-sandal epic that I found to be dark and grim.) The costumes and the sets were magnificent and beautiful to look at. I thought that while Taylor was terrific and, although much of her performance consisted of chewing major portions of scenery, there were several moments of a very nuanced performance on her part. Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar was nominated for an Oscar for his performance. He was the only actor from the movie to receive a nomination. (Sidney Poitier won that year for "Lillies of The Field".) Richard Burton was good as Antony. Has any actor ever had as distinguished a voice as Richard Burton? One actor at the time who received positive critics' reviews for his performance was Roddy McDowell, of all people. Roddy McDowell!!! Go figure. Also interesting cast members to note were Martin Landau in his pre-Mission Impossible days. He had a rather large role as one of both Caesar's and Antony's military advisors. Oh, and nine years before he became television's Archie Bunker, Carroll O'Connor was one of the Roman senators who participated in the assassination of Julius Caesar. Purportedly, he had called Caesar a "meathead" but that line was cut from the final version of the film.
The costumes and the make-up were fantastic. I loved Taylor's eye make-up:
Liz supposedly did her own eyes for the movie and it took two hours to apply every time.
And then there were the gowns, and it seemed that Taylor had a different one in every scene. This was one of the more spectacular ones.
Oh, the humanity, am I right?
I said that this movie was "epic". There were at least four separate scenes that were simply amazing in scope but easily the most spectacular of all was the nine minute sequence showing Queen Cleopatra's entrance into Rome. It was a spectacular parade featuring dancers, horseback riders, chariots, arrows shot into the air, and a release of thousands of doves over Rome, and it culminated in Liz/Cleo arriving atop a 36 foot replica of a Sphinx being pulled by hundreds, if not thousands of slaves while wearing a spectacular dress and crown of gold.
I have included the entire nine minute clip of that scene HERE, and trust me it is worth watching. It is especially enjoyable when you listened to that portion of the Plot Thickens podcast that describes all that went into the filming of the scene.
As I mentioned, I did check the interweb to look up some reviews of "Cleopatra". Reviews in both the New York Times and Variety at the time of its release were positive. I was unable to find a review by critic Judith Christ of the New York Herald-Tribune that reportedly savaged the move and has become famous for Christ calling Taylor a "fishwife" in her critique of her performance. Retrospective reviews written upon the 50th and 60th anniversaries of the movie are less kind.
As for me, despite its length and unevenness, I rather enjoyed it and assign it Three Grandstander Stars, if for no other reason than the sheer value of this movie in Hollywood history. I am glad that I watched it on DVD where I could pause it from time to time as needed rather than sitting through it for five hours in a theater, even if there was an intermission in the film.
"Cleopatra" received nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Rex Harrison. It won four Oscars: Cinematography, Art-Set Decoration. Costume Design, and Special Effects.
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor ended up divorcing their spouses and were married and divorced from each other twice in the years ahead.
"Cleopatra" pushed Joe Mankiewicz to his breaking point. He never talked about in interviews over the years, and according to his children, it is the one movie that was never discussed in the Mankiewicz household. In 1949, he won Screenwriter and Director Oscars for "A Letter To Three Wives" and in 1950, he did the same thing with "All About Eve", a back-to-back achievement that had never been done before nor since, and probably will never be done again. He was nominated for nine director and/or screenplay Oscars in his career. He directed only four more films after "Cleopatra", the last of which "Sleuth" in 1973 earned him a Best Director Oscar nomination. He died in 1993 at the age of 83.
Richard Burton accrued seven Oscar nominations from 1952 to 1977. He never won one. He has 314 acting credits listed in IMDB. He died in 1984 at the age of 58.
Elizabeth Taylor earned five Oscar Nominations and two Oscar wins from 1957-67. She has an incredible 562 credits in IMBD and spent much of the her life devoted to various humanitarian efforts. She died at age 79 in 2011.
Taylor and Burton starred together in 1967 in Mike Nichols' "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf". Each earned Best acting Oscar nominations for that one, with Taylor winning her second Oscar for this performance.
Oh, and I am halfway through listening to The Plot Thickens - Cleopatra podcast once again.
