CLEOPATRA started life in Pinewood with director Rouben Mamoulian and co-stars Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd at a budget of £5 million; Elizabeth Taylor's pneumonia moved filming to the warmer Rome, jettisoning Mamoulian, Finch and Boyd as well.
It resumed with Taylor's choice of director Joseph L Mankiewicz both filming and rewrititng the script at the same time. 20th Century Fox kept throwing money at the production, it's budget totalled $44 million.
This budget meant that despite being the highest grossing film of the year, it only broke even through television sales.
With the publicity surrounding Taylor and Burton's off-screen love affair, oddly enough their on-screen relationship doesn't set the film on fire.
While Taylor gives a pure film-star performance, Burton is mostly pure prosciutto.
Luckily CLEOPATRA has two excellent performances balancing the story's two halves: Rex Harrison's urbane Julius Caesar and Roddy McDowall's slippery Octavian.
Shelf or charity shop? Pure shelf, it's what Sunday afternoons were made for. Mankiewicz's script strains itself leaning as far away from Camp as it's can so at times it is deliberately verbose, which is fine when you have Rex Harrison's Caesar saying the lines but the Antony and Cleopatra section is a glum affair with Burton declaiming his lines like he is playing to the Old Vic balcony. But you should just stand back - or better lie on a couch - and just let the stunning Academy Award-winning cinematography, art direction and costumes parade in front of you, marvelling at the visual splendour with hundreds of extras as far as the eye can see, and the thrilling Alex North score. With so much source material being used, Mankiewicz really should have worked Shakespeare's "I am fire and air" speech into the scene of Cleopatra's impending death; it needs to be elevated to greatness but sadly no such luck. For all it's failings, it is still one of my favourites.
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