Cleopatra

As a movie fan, I’m interested in extremity – what’s the longest movie ever released and what’s the shortest? Which were the biggest money makers, and which were the biggest financial flops. What film won the most Oscars and which won the most Golden Raspberries? Which had the biggest cast, biggest budget, biggest profit margin, or most universal critical acclaim. I’m particularly interested in giant failures, movies that misfire so badly either critically or creatively that they end careers, bring down studios, and go on to live as punchlines for years. Movie making is such a long, expensive, collaborative undertaking, when a movie like Heaven’s Gate or Ishtar or The Last Action Hero or John Carter comes along, I have to wonder, where did it go wrong? At what point in the process did things just fall apart? Didn’t somebody say, “Hey, whoa guys. We’re spending millions of dollars and this movie is actually kind of bad. Maybe we should change it so that it’s not so bad.” Of course they did. And sometimes those tweaks saved the picture. And sometimes they made things a million times worse.

 This last week, I finished a personal one-movie extreme marathon of my own. I watched all of 1963’s Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton. The picture is the zenith of overstuffed, over-indulgent classic Hollywood filmmaking at the very tail end of the classic Hollywood period. This long, rambling story of desire and conquest literally had a cast of thousands, was the most expensive movie in history up to that point, featured a record-setting number of 65 costume changes for Elizabeth Taylor, and had an original running time of six hours. The film was directed by three different men over the three years it took to get the thing made and at least two of the lead actors bowed out before finishing, causing their scenes to have to be reshot. Many of the ornate, over the top sets had to be constructed twice, once in London and then again in Rome. Elizabeth Taylor had a health crisis in the middle of filming and had to have an emergency tracheotomy which shut production down for six months. Partly because of that delay, Taylor’s salary ballooned from an already record-breaking one million dollars to an almost laughable seven million dollars. Adjusted for inflation today, that would be the equivalent of her getting paid over fifty four million dollars. The total cost of the film ended up being 31 million dollars which in today’s dollars would be 340 million. It almost bankrupted 20^th Century Fox. As if all that wasn’t trouble enough, it was on the set of Cleopatra that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton met for the first time and began the adulterous affair that blew apart both their current marriages and marked the start of their notoriously tumultuous relationship.

Now, of course, the six hour cut of Cleopatra never made it to theaters. In fact, the credited director, Joseph Mankiewicz was fired from the production not long after her presented that cut to the studio. (He was later rehired because no one else could edit together a comprehensible version of the footage he shot.) The theatrical release was somewhere around three hours long. The version that’s available on streaming now, the 50^th anniversary restored edition, is four hours and three minutes long. It’s not just a movie, it’s an investment. 

Is the movie itself any good? That’s almost beside the point. If you’re watching a four hour epic with a backstory like Cleopatra has, it’s much more about the experience and bragging rights of saying you did it. To put it simply, the movie is too much of some things and, amazingly, not enough of others. It’s extreme but that’s sort of the point. It’s a fascinating piece of Hollywood history and is worth seeing for that reason alone.