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Reputation is a powerful thing, so powerful that it can overwrite contemporary reactions and material facts in the collective memory. This is as true of the arts as it is of social lives and political turmoil. If movies pick up a certain reputation during production, that can kill any chance of an audience looking at it with an open mind, on initial release or in posterity. Take The Godfather Part III, for example. Rushed into filming with a hasty change in casting, its reputation is as a pile of garbage unworthy of being a sequel to two of the greatest films ever made, despite the fact that it got relatively good reviews, picked up a lot of Oscar nominations, and is pretty damn good. There’s a tendency to dismiss Disney’s animated Cinderella as a dull and helpless girl unworthy of modern viewers, even though she’s the most developed of the Walt-era princesses and has greater agency in her own story and rescue than her counterpart in Disney’s recent live-action remake.
Or, compare the reputation with the product in the case of Cleopatra (1963), which I only saw for the first time a few weeks ago. It is, on the whole, quite good. A good few epic films from the 1950s and ’60s come off as stiff, particularly those set in antiquity and favoring highly formal, classical dialogue. Cleopatra’s stars had the same sort of lines to work with, but there’s more vitality and life to their performances. Elizabeth Taylor’s megalomaniacal Cleopatra, Rex Harrison’s guileful Caesar, Roddy McDowell’s smug Octavian, and Richard Burton’s pathetic Antony — they’re all human. Romanticized and stately, but human.
Excess, Excess, Excess
It’s with that kind of foundation that the scale and excesses of epics can really shine, and Cleopatra has plenty of excesses. In an age where massive crowds and elaborate flourishes of smoke and color can be cooked up in a digital program, to see the pomp and ceremony of Cleopatra’s arrival into Rome, or the siege outside Alexandria, done for real, is still jaw-dropping. The detail spent on costumes, props, sets, and Todd-AO 65mm cinematography should make every aspiring film technician stand up and salute. Alex North’s musical score is gorgeous. And the screenplay, credited to Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Ranald MacDougall, and Sidney Buchman but growing from a much more lengthy and convoluted process, does a fair job at balancing these soaring aspirations to grandeur with more intimate human concerns, at least through the first half. The movie is a really fun watch.
‘Cleopatra’s Reputation Has Been Defined By the Production History
And yet Cleopatra, even before its 1963 release, has been dogged by its reputation as a disaster. A miserable start to production that lost a director, an out-of-control budget, a scandalous love affair between two of its stars, and a financial ruin — that’s the lens the film is often seen through.
And there’s some truth to all of that. 20th Century Fox initially hoped that a modestly budgeted Cleopatra, a remake of their 1917 silent film, could be the answer to their prayers after a string of flops in the late ’50s. Unfortunately for that vision, the project ended up in the hands of producer Walter Wanger. An epic biopic on Cleopatra was a dream project for Wanger, and he wasn’t about to squander the opportunity on a quick dust-off of a silent picture. The script for the 1917 version couldn’t be translated into sound and color anyway. Wanger went through a string of writers searching for a new approach, and in the meantime, he hired a director (Rouben Mamoulian) and the star he had long envisioned as the perfect Cleopatra — Taylor. (This being 1950s Hollywood, no one thought of filling the role of the Greco-Egyptian Cleopatra, or any of the prominent Egyptian roles, with Egyptians.)
The chaotic production was detailed in an AMC making-of documentary. Signs of bloat and the excesses of star power emerged early. The Todd-AO format was a contractual demand by Taylor; her late husband invented the process, and she got royalties off its use. She also didn’t want to shoot in Hollywood. Over Wanger and Mamoulian’s objections, London was chosen as a location; the local landscape wasn’t even close to matching Rome or Egypt, but Pinewood Studios was a premiere filmmaking facility, and the Eady Levy was a tempting incentive. With Peter Finch as Caesar, Stephen Boyd as Antony, and Keith Baxter as Octavian, shooting began in September 1960.
There was union trouble over hair styling on the first day, Taylor’s already-poor health was worsened by the British climate, and Mamoulian had little to shoot without her. When Taylor’s condition forced a halt to the production, the script was rewritten again, partly to generate material that didn’t need Cleopatra. The results pleased neither the star nor the director. Costs were rising, the weather was destroying the set, and only ten minutes of film in the can. The studio blamed Mamoulian, whose own rewrites of the script with a favored writer didn’t make Taylor happy either. When Mamoulian attempted to bluff for time by threatening to resign, he found Fox willing to oblige him.
The studio could have cut its losses at that point. Instead, they hired Mankiewicz, one of the few directors to meet Taylor’s contractually granted approval. The new filmmaker brought with him a new approach to the story. For example – it was Mankiewicz who approached Antony as an ersatz Caesar, forever in his hero’s shadow and slowly destroyed by his inadequacies. He also oversaw the relocation of the production from Pinewood in London to Cinecittà in Rome. But he didn’t bring a change of luck with him; Taylor nearly died of pneumonia, and the film lost all its leads except for her.
A New Cast
Harrison, Burton, and McDowell picked up where Finch, Boyd, and Baxter left off. The scale of the new sets in Rome was such that the country faced a material shortage on account of the production. Creative accounting helped camouflage the ever-rising costs of Cleopatra, but studio chief Spyros Skouras couldn’t keep getting money from Fox’s board without a sign of progress, and he pushed Mankiewicz to start filming again. The director/writer was only halfway through script revisions, so he shot in sequence to buy more time for the remaining material. He ended up entrusting most of it to MacDougall.
Shooting in sequence isn’t the most efficient way of making a movie, and with Fox’s financial woes growing, the prospect of actors and crew waiting around for months, burning through their expense accounts as luxuries were flown in from back home, seemed a galling waste. From a business perspective, there was no firm hand on the tiller of production; Mankiewicz was desperate for the time and money needed to pull off something spectacular, Skouras was more worried about keeping his job than fulfilling his duties, and an ailing Wanger was nearly fired from his dream project for failing to manage it. Support from the cast saved him his title, but Mankiewicz in effect assumed the producer’s responsibilities on top of directing and writing, a development that only worsened his stress.
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s Affair
And then, there was the affair. To hear Wanger tell it, sparks flew between Taylor and Burton almost immediately. Both stars were married, and their dalliance with one another went from tabloid fodder to a full-fledged media sensation, rivaling coverage of the trouble-ridden production itself and inspiring ardor and condemnation from different corners of the press, public, and papacy. Cleopatra is bound to the Taylor-Burton romance, one of Hollywood’s favorite real-life love stories from its own ranks. Ironically, the relationship between Cleopatra and Antony is among the weaker elements of the film. Mankiewicz at one time envisioned making two three-hour epics from the available footage, Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra, to be released simultaneously. I suspect that approach would have fleshed out the latter romance considerably. As the film is, Cleopatra’s relationship with Caesar grows organically and develops believably in multiple directions in Act I, but her bond with Antony starts rather abruptly and stumbles into a heated state without sufficient support in Act II.
The publicity around Burton and Taylor helped kill Mankiewicz’s two-film scheme. Toward the end of production, Skouras was out as studio chief. Fox’s one-time mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, deeply suspicious of Cleopatra, took the president’s chair and made sure the board tightened the budget for the remaining material. He also assumed that a public mad for Burton and Taylor’s romance wouldn’t see the first movie if Mankiewicz stuck to his plan. Zanuck fired Mankiewicz and brought in Elmo Williams to oversee editing, but Cleopatra proved too much to handle without the participation of its writer, director, and de facto producer. Though he grew sick over it, Mankiewicz agreed to come back and supervise the cutting down of Cleopatra to a “mere” 251 minutes, later chopped to 184 minutes for general release in America.
One of the Costliest Movies Ever Made
When all was said and done, Cleopatra cost $31 million, the most expensive movie ever made up to that time. That budget would be $275 million in 2022 money, and still holds a respectable place on the “costliest films ever” list. Zanuck’s imposed cuts left many in the cast unsatisfied, including Taylor. She wasn’t shy about voicing her displeasure in the press (she reportedly threw up on seeing the London premiere), and Mankiewicz didn’t keep all his battles with Zanuck private either. Wanger, frozen out of post-production, aired his grievances in a tell-all book. The scandalous on-set affair and the damnably unlucky production had been the talk of the town for months. Zanuck himself didn’t like the approach taken with Antony or the movie as a whole.
But with that kind of money already spent, Fox was desperate to recoup its costs, and it went big on its publicity campaign. Cleopatra opened to great pomp on June 12, 1963. It made $40 million on its initial release, a massive haul for its time. But between the film’s hefty budget, the controversy surrounding it, and its length limiting screenings, it was impossible to break even. And it was impossible for the movie to be seen for what it was as a finished product; it could only be seen as a reputed debacle.
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