Rent Cleopatra (1963)

SUPERFICIAL EPIC - Cleopatra review by Frank Talker™

Cleopatra is one of the largest epic-films ever made. But the presentation of thinking, living people against a background of splendid production-values fails to fully-engage in a way that a film director like David Lean would never have allowed. This movie lacks the necessary vitality that would have made it a classic like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - the latter film simultaneously being both more vast and more intimate than this one.

Cleopatra is a physically-opulent movie but possesses a not-literate-enough cinematic recreation of an historical epoch - similar to the aesthetic failings of the movie The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). As drama, the movie never really sweeps the audience up into its story; just generally bumping from scene to ponderous scene on the square wheels of exposition.

Rex Harrison's brilliantly-quizzical Julius Caesar, the best-written role in Joseph Mankiewicz's erratic script, is haunted by Richard Burton's tragic Mark Antony - the latter of which is an actor's triumph over a writer's sometime-mediocrity. Cleopatra is necessarily focused upon Elizabeth Taylor, oddly out-of-her-depth as a petulant Cleopatra - only partly saved by the obvious sexual-chemistry between herself and Burton. However, the supporting players are uniformly-excellent

especially Hume Cronyn, Martin Landau & Roddy McDowell.

The director does try to make this a film about people and their emotions rather than just a spectacular slide-show. But for this ambition to hold-up over the film's four-hour length, he needed a visual style which would be more than merely illustrative; with dialogue really worth speaking and not mostly just exposition.

As the movie sets become more and more grandiose so, progressively, the actors dwindle. The screen is so wide that any concentration on character results in a strangely-static epic in which the overblown close-ups are only ever interrupted by a pageant, a dance, a march or a battle. A lush, ostentatious epic which sags and almost collapses from its over-length - a colossus of the analogue era of special effects.

Director Mankiewicz made a bad decision to take-over directing this troubled production from film director Rouben Mamoulian since it's not one of his usual smaller-scale movies such as A Letter to Three Wives (1949), All About Eve (1950) or Sleuth (1972). And his writing and producing it as well as directing did not leave him enough time to improve it while shooting, so that the dialogue sounds somewhat-unpolished throughout.

Cleopatra is most-often a verbose and a muddled affair that is not even all-that-entertaining as a star vehicle for Taylor and Burton. The film is a stately spectacle that is sometimes lumbering, but still strangely-watchable thanks to its psychological ambition, prodigious size & undeniable glamour.

The film does improve as it proceeds (because it was shot in chronological order) but by the third act it's a little too late to really care enough. Cleopatra is not a great movie, it is primarily a vast, popular entertainment which side-steps total greatness for broader audience-appeal: A huge and disappointingly-superficial film.