It’s a more loquacious film than you might guess or recall: Mankiewicz, a director whose best work (All About Eve, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, A Letter to Three Wives) thrives on smaller-scale verbal tension and sparring, has immense faith in the power of conversation and argument to enliven Roman history, and to animate the two marriages – Cleopatra’s chilly, calculated arrangement with Caesar, and her more passionate union with Mark Antony – that essentially form the film’s two vast halves. Scripted, often quite literately but most inconsistently, by a hotchpotch of writers that included Lawrence Durrell, with eventual director Joseph L Mankiewicz finally claiming chief credit, Cleopatra rambles in a manner few blockbusters this expensive – $31.1m in 1963, over $300m adjusted for inflation – would dare today. Revisiting it last week, it was clear enough why. And like my uncertain colleague, whether he had seen it or not, I too formed few memories of the dramatic specifics on either side of its most extravagant set pieces. I explicitly remember seeing it as a teenager, because doing so required some complicated VHS-era organisation: when it was broadcast at an inconveniently late hour on South African TV, I watched the first half-hour so the rest could fit on to a four-hour video cassette, and then dutifully trudged through it in instalments.įor years afterward, I maintained that the film was significantly better than its musty reputation – though perhaps at some level I was simply justifying to myself the time and effort spent on watching the damn thing. It was a response that to me captured the odd cultural status of a film that is at once a vast Hollywood behemoth and a dust-gathering curio, one that pretty much everybody knows something about, but precious few who weren’t alive for its noisy initial release have seen.
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