Cleopatra turns 50: Fall in love all over again

Joseph L Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra is remembered as the film that almost broke 20th Century Fox but, though it cost more than $330 million (about £220m) in today’s terms, it grossed $533m (adjusted for inflation), won four Oscars and was nominated for five more.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burtons romance helped save Cleopatra and, ultimately 20th Century Fox. Picture: PA

Today, at 50, it is expertly restored, reissued and revalued upwards – no longer the lumpen flop some critics thought at the time.

What almost sank Fox was, in fact, not the film but the advent of television, which had Hollywood running so scared it made more expensive epics to counteract the attractions of the box. Something similar is happening again now.

Cleopatra is an example of exactly how not to do it. The film started shooting in September 1960 and finished in June 1962, moving from London to Italy and having to start all over again. Elizabeth Taylor’s salary ballooned from $1m to $7m because of the weeks of extra shooting, but also because she was so ill at one point that she went into a coma. Replacing Stephen Boyd with Richard Burton as Mark Antony was also costly as Fox had to buy the production of Camelot on Broadway, in which he starred, to get him.

Between epic drinking bouts, Taylor and Burton fell in love. Their romance made worldwide headlines and, in the end, helped the film recoup its costs.

Mankiewicz, one of the cleverest men in Hollywood, who had already made one classic as writer-director of All About Eve, replaced the great but extravagant veteran Rouben Mamoulian as director and by the time the film was finished, was pushed aside as producer Darryl F Zanuck took over.

Mankiewicz had planned two films from the material, spanning six hours – Caesar and Cleopatra, then Antony and Cleopatra – and even today there are archivists trying to reassemble the footage as he would have wished.

When you watch Cleopatra now you will see enough lavish splendour to compensate for a wordy screenplay and some not very wonderful acting. It’s no masterpiece, but this mammoth “failure” was to become one of the ten biggest successes of all time.

• Cleopatra is in selected cinemas from this week, including Glasgow Film Theatre on 11 August.