Moviegoers invested in what’s seen on the big screen like nothing better than being told that the emotions they’re watching are duplicating reality. Audiences were enthralled when Greta Garbo and John Gilbert fell in love while making 1926’s Flesh and the Devil, and Burton-Taylor upped the ante in a way that remains potent today.
Cleopatra is more than life imitating art, it’s life and art feeding on and changing each other. The lovers dallied as the world’s press salivated. Things got so intense that Vatican City’s weekly newspaper ran an open letter accusing Taylor of “erotic vagrancy” and Hedda Hopper reported that studio executives were rooting for astronaut John Glenn’s Project Mercury flight to make it into earth’s orbit and finally kick the potent, passionate liaison off newspaper front pages.
That this film exists at all is due to a passion of a different sort, a lifelong dream of Walter Wanger, a prolific producer whose Hollywood experience goes all the way back to purchasing the property that became 1921’s Rudolph Valentino-starring The Sheik. His idea, as related in the film’s substantial souvenir program, was a motion picture “that would interpret, more realistically than ever done before, Cleopatra’s life and the era in which she lived.”
Rather than ask what went wrong with that dream, it’s more instructive to say “What didn’t?” The film was bedeviled from the get-go by all manner of ills, from dreadful weather and a hairdressers’ strike in England (the production site before Rome) to several Taylor illnesses, including one that nearly killed her but led to a sympathy Oscar for Butterfield 8, as well as a director, Rouben Mamoulian, who was better at spending money than creating usable footage.
Partially at Taylor’s suggestion, Mankiewicz, whose credits included All About Eve and The Barefoot Contessa and had worked with the actress on Suddenly, Last Summer, took over to both write and direct. The trouble was the budget-driven necessity, aided by pills and injections, to do both almost simultaneously, shooting by day and writing by night.
The result, as the filmmaker sardonically related in Kenneth L. Geist’s Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, was “the hardest three pictures I ever made … Cleopatra was conceived in emergency, shot in hysteria, and wound up in blind panic.”
In an atmosphere like this, everything that could become a crisis did. When the filmmakers changed their minds about using a group of elephants, their owner insisted the animals had been “slandered” and decided to sue. And when eleven U.S. Congressmen found a reason to visit the set in Rome and Taylor didn’t find time to meet with them, the resulting story (“Film Set Snub Irks Visiting Congressmen”) became an international incident.
It is a shock after all of this silliness to discover how serious the intentions for Cleopatra were. Mankiewicz was nothing if not a thoughtful, adult filmmaker, and his aim here, which fit nicely with Wanger’s, was to create what the producer described as a “modern, psychiatrically rooted concept” that dealt with the complex personal relationships between mentor Julius Caesar, protégé Mark Antony, and the woman that intoxicated them both. It was a worthy goal but one that the film, beset on all sides as it was, could no more than partially realize.
Part of the difficulty stems from the reality that Cleopatra is not one long narrative interrupted by an intermission but rather two quite different films. 20th Century-Fox, realizing this, gave serious consideration to releasing Cleopatra as two separate entities, but, bowing to the reality that the audience for the first part alone was close to non-existent, went the one big film route.
With the dignified, capable Rex Harrison cast as Caesar, it’s inevitable that the first part of Cleopatra, detailing the measured realpolitik relationship between older Roman ruler and younger Egyptian queen, is more serious than what happens when the age-appropriate tabloid-fodder romance between her and Mark Antony takes center stage.
Here are some of Mankiewicz’s better lines, zingers like “you stand here dribbling virtue out of the corner of your mouth” and Caesar’s noting of Egypt’s chief eunuch that his is “an exalted rank not obtained without certain sacrifices.” But even during this part the stab at seriousness is both self-conscious and undercut by more boisterous scenes like Cleopatra arriving in Caesar’s presence rolled in a rug, or her Greatest Show on Earth arrival in Rome on an enormous Sphinx-headed chariot pulled by hundreds of men. When Mark Antony says, “nothing like this has come into Rome since Romulus and Remus,” he is not being hyperbolic.
Once Caesar is gone, conveniently assassinated by a group of Roman Senators led by, of all people, All in the Family’s Carrol O’Connor as Casca, the way is clear for Burton and Taylor, his football captain to her homecoming queen, to take center stage and give the audience, both then and now, what they’ve come to the movies for.
Whatever else is said about Cleopatra, the first kiss between these two remains a classic and the couple’s scenes together are alive in the way the rest of this at times stodgy production (not to mention, with the notable exception of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, their ten other theatrical features) manage to be.
Though not the bigger star, Burton is the more commanding performer. He holds the screen without effort, energizes Mark Antony with his great open smile and cocky charm, and masters lines like “everything I shall ever want to hold or look upon or have is here now with you.” Of the aspects of Cleopatra that merit reconsideration, Burton’s performance tops the list.
Taylor did not have her costar’s acting credentials, but she was not the icon of her generation for nothing. Detractors could and did mock—Stanley Kauffman remarked that “she needs do no more than walk across the throne room to turn Alexandria into Beverly Hills”—but her energy and passion are unmistakable.
This is especially true in the scene where Cleopatra discovers that Mark Antony has married the pale Octavia (Jean Marsh, millennia away from her Upstairs, Downstairs career) and takes her revenge on their abandoned bed. According to David Kamp’s encyclopedic article in Vanity Fair, Taylor shot the scene on the day Burton announced (prematurely as it turned out) that he would not leave his wife. In a tantrum that electrifies even today, “Taylor went at it with such gusto that she banged her hand and needed to go to the hospital for X rays. She was unable to work the next day.”
Though it remains easy to laugh at this flawed film’s expense, Cleopatra was hardly the fiasco its place in public memory would indicate. It was nominated for nine Oscars, including best actor for Harrison, and won in four categories (cinematography, art direction, costume design, and special effects).
And while everyone remembers the reviews that savagely attacked Cleopatra (Brendan Gill waspishly commented that the film “would have made a marvelous silent picture” and Judith Crist memorably skewered it as “at best a major disappointment, at worst an extravagant exercise in tedium”), the film got its share of positive notices, including a rave from The New York Times’ powerful Bosley Crowther, who called it “one of the great epic films of our day.”
Even in the all-important area of box office, Cleopatra eventually turned a profit despite its great cost, which is more than many of today’s epics can say. With the public completely consumed by the Burton–Taylor liaison, Cleopatra became one of the highest grossing films of 1963, ended up playing in New York for sixty-three weeks, and went into profit in 1966 after ABC paid $5 million for television rights.
On one level the limited success Cleopatra achieved in the face of ungodly obstacles can be seen as a triumph of the system, the victory of industry worker bees over snarky gossipistas. But from another point of view the lesson of this film fifty years down the road is how little remembered that triumph is and the recognition of how often perception becomes reality in this town. It is the oldest of Hollywood lessons, and one we have to learn over and over again.
—Kenneth Turan
KENNETH TURAN is a film critic for the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, as well as the director of the Los Angeles Times Boo
k Prizes. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he teaches film reviewing and nonfiction writing at USC. His most recent books are Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told and Never Coming to a Theater Near You.
My Life with Cleopatra Page 19