Cleopatra

Release Date: June 12, 1963

Watch Date: March 8 – March 10, 2024

“Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Rex Harrison star in this sweeping tale of power and betrayal – the legendary story of Cleopatra and her conquest of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony.”

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   When I tell you that neither Bob, nor myself, were looking forward to this film, don’t take it lightly.

   We’ve been watching it creep up on us for months, and how to tackle it was an extremely heavy conversation on our minds. We knew that, look, schedules have been slow. The kids have been really sick, Bob has been going to school while working a full time job, and being a parent. I’ve got my full time job and parenting as well. The blog has slowed down, it’s broken both of our hearts. How were we meant to tackle a four hour melodrama about Cleopatra? Did we watch it first thing and get it over with? Did we watch it last and dread it? How did we schedule it around the kids? Could we get someone to babysit for a cumulative four hours? How violent was it?

   In the end, obviously, we made it work, and we made it fit, and to our absolute surprise…we loved every second of it.

   This film gets mixed reviews, and it deserves it. It is too long. In the modern era it would have been a movie split into two parts “Cleopatra: Part One” and “Cleopatra: Part Two” and done quite well for itself. The two halves of the film have very different tones, and tell very different stories. Of course, so did Cleopatra’s life, but I digress. The cast is all white which is…inaccurate, to say the least. Even if you have a bunch of amazing and historically well known actors, which they did, it doesn’t stop the fact that Cleopatra – or at least the people who lived in Egypt – weren’t white. That’s kind of annoying, just from a historical perspective. But hey, this was made in the 60s so, alright, maybe a racially accurate cast wouldn’t have drawn people to the theatre the way Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were going to. I get it.

   There are scenes that drag on way too long. Far too long. Cleopatra’s entrance in Rome, while impressive, could have been cut in half at least and had just as much of an effect. The ending feels like it drags with long, well written speeches, when – given the circumstances facing both Marc Antony and Cleopatra – a little bit of rush, a little bit of urgency in tone and activity might make a more poignant finale.

   But taken as a whole…I mean this movie is impressive. And there’s a reason it’s still talked about to this day. I’d never seen Cleopatra, never had any desire to watch the film, nor any real interest in old movies – but I knew about this movie. Bob knew about this movie. I don’t know too many people who don’t have a passing interest in film that don’t know about this movie. And there’s a reason for it.

   CGI didn’t exist, and the set pieces are gorgeous. There’s weight to everything, a sense of realness, of physicality. Would a movie about the same characters shot today have gorgeous backdrops and epic buildings, yes, but there’s something to the fact that the actors could actually move around in the space, and not just on a green screen that makes everything feel more, real?

   The long monologues are well written, beautifully acted by some of the best actors of their time, and the way these actors work together it feels like a labor of love. Maybe it wasn’t. I’ve never seen any of these actors in anything else, at least not anything that comes to mind, so maybe this wasn’t their best work. But if it wasn’t, then I’m very interested in seeing their best, because this is fantastic.

   The music is fitting, the shots are well thought out. There’s this scene where Cleopatra and Antony are fighting and every few sentences the characters change location and clothes to show the passing of time, I really enjoyed that. It was a bunch of quick cuts in a film that loves to hold on a scene, and it worked really well for me. The build of Octavian being a threat was well done, and the descent of Antony into depression and drunkenness. My only wish was that we had been able to hear Caesar’s famous last words, but I understand that this film is meant to focus on Cleopatra and not her famous husbands, still, just to have them mouth them when we could have heard them is a bit of a loss.

   As the end music played, Bob and I both sat there silent for a moment. It feels like a movie you need to digest. And we both simultaneously agreed that we would need to watch this again. Maybe not for another decade, but we would. It brings back fond memories of my dad flipping through the television and landing on an old classic film and just sitting and watching it. It brings back a more romantic vision of Hollywood filmmaking to Bob. I don’t know if it’s fabricated nostalgia or what but we adored this movie.

   That’s what I love about this marathon, sometimes the things you dread the most turn out to be the things that surprise you utterly.