CLEOPATRA barged onto 1963 screens with a four-year publicity trail behind its budget-devouring, studio-wobbling, marriage-wrecking course to glorious infamy. Bangs for bucks are delivered in a all-you-can-scarf feast of magnificent proportions. As for fulfillment, the Nile-long yakking (over four hours, with just a few brief action scenes) leaves you visually stuffed but emotionally underfed. Contrary to endlessly repeated snipes, it’s not a disaster and wasn’t a flop, eventually making back its gargantuan investment. If you’re patient, it’s a pretty good movie with some great aspects.

Egypt and Rome, circa 48 to 30 B.C. Having vanquished another in an endless line of enemies, Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison, 54) visits Egypt to straighten out their succession squabbles. Taken with the beauty and brains of Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor, 31), the Roman ruler and Egypt’s royal siren forge bonds for relations, political and carnal. Later, after a Senate power grab, Caesar’s right-hand man Mark Antony (Richard Burton, 36) also trips head over tunic for the enchantress and the fate of one empire hinges on the misfortunes of another. Bring popcorn and a thermos.

After over a year of costly false starts (16 weeks and $7,000,000 yielding 10 minutes of usable film), health scares (Liz back from the brink), cast evacuations (Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd out for Harrison and Burton) and a new director (Joseph L. Mankiewicz replacing Rouben Mamoulian), production resumed…and never seemed to stop. Initially conceived as a $1,500,000 item with Joan Collins, by the time it wrapped the cost had H-bombed to $31,000,000; when prints and advertising were tallied that staggered to $44,000,000. At the time, and for a long while after, the most expensive movie ever made.

Discarding the contributions of a slew of writers, among them Lawrence Durrell and Nunnally Johnson, Mankiewicz took on the script as well as direction, aided by Ranald MacDougall and Sidney Buchman. His idea of presenting it as two 2-hour movies was canned by Fox chieftain Darryl F. Zanuck; prodigious editing had it unveiled at 251 minutes. After early engagements that was trimmed to 222, then 194. Stick with the long one; along with getting more of some of what Mankiewicz slaved over, bask in the Overture, Intermission and Exit music from composer Alex North.

So whaddaya get? On the scribbled side of the hieroglyph, Mankiewicz overreaches with his verbal gymnastics, too often too glib, some effective barbs and insults alternating with windy exercises in oratory so anxiously elaborate they’re enervating. Crucially, it’s hard to feel much for the characters, who remain stalled in demi-God land. Instead more sympathy goes to the actors, gamely wading through the speeches. Each of three vaunted leads are a good deal more than adequate, yet they rarely approach admirable. Battling the mouthfuls, Harrison is waspish, clinical and removed. Burton, who in later, more relatable roles was brilliant as a tormented mortal (The Night Of The Iguana, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?) is here saddled with being a morose whiner, and despite that powerful vocal instrument he doesn’t possess the physical gravitas to suggest a legendary warrior. Liz, looking like a zillion bucks (or the $7m she eventually pocketed) in 65 knockout costumes, varies between poignant and pestering, at times not so much impassioned vixen as nagging fishwife. While there are some memorable scenes of spectacle, the few action sequences are only moderately exciting, and the climactic sea battle of Actium is oddly underpopulated and truncated.

BUT—Pyramid high above the shifting sands of the script and slip-sliding protagonists, there is a pharaoh’s treasure of dazzling accoutrements. The supporting cast is stocked with interesting actors, and Roddy McDowall gets the best role of his adult career as the reptile Octavian. Leon Shamroy’s fine cinematography does honor to the expansive sets, hordes of intricately detailed costumes and props and sun-dappled locations in Italy (Rome, Naples, Anzio), Egypt and Spain. Alex North’s majestic score coats the epic elements in an aura of majesty and exotica and underlines the romantic drama with a lush but not intrusive portent of longing and loss.

Eddie who?

Genuine showstoppers are two entrances, one by sea with Cleopatra’s giant barge rowing into Alexandria harbor with a battalion of daring swimmers risking a clobber by huge oars, and the biggie by land, her triumphant entry into Rome. The latter is one of the 60’s most awesome spectacles, an exultant, colossal display of successful excess with thousands of extras, stirring music and a massive block-long sphinx bearing imperious Liz at her most world-devouring.

The most-attended release in 1963, the US gross came to $57,800,000. Cleopatra played in 8,500 theaters in America alone (half of the country’s), and finally made its money back by 1966, helped by ABC coughing up $5mil for TV showings.  Abroad it amassed 82% as much, with 10,900,000 tickets just in Italy. When shown in the USSR in 1978, it sold 32,900,000.

The Academy Awards bestowed mantelpieces for Cinematography (uh, better given to How The West Was Won), Art Direction (fully deserved), Costume Design (a shoo-in) and Special Effects (beating the other, better nominee, The Birds; this really belonged to the ancient action of un-nominated Jason And The Argonauts) and offered nominations for Best Picture, Actor (Harrison), Film Editing (huh?), Music Score and Sound.

It’s really good to be the Queen

Jostling for purchase in the swarm: Hume Cronyn, Martin Landau, Cesare Danova, Kenneth Haigh, Gregoire Aslan, Pamela Brown, Michael Hordern, Martin Benson, Carroll O’Connor, John Hoyt, Robert Stephens, Finlay Currie, Laurence Naismith, Jacqui Chan, John Doucette, Marne Maitland, Douglas Wilmer, Desmond Llewelyn, Marie Devereux, Jeremy Kemp, Calvin Lockhart. Eloquently spoken narration by Ben Wright.

* Amaze acquaintances with your antiquity acumen—-for our fistful of denarii, the keenest, most believably human interpretations of Antony and Cleopatra came from James Purefoy and Lyndsey Marshal in the stunning HBO series Rome. Pre-dating that small-screen winner, behold the fun 1934 DeMille version of Cleopatra with Claudette Colbert. Count quips traded in 1946 by Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains in Shaw’s Caesar And Cleopatra. Unveil 2002’s Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra with Monica Bellucci, then excavate 1954s Two Nights With Cleopatra as embosomed by an unknown Sophia Loren. Sarah Bernhardt covered Cleo on the stage, Theda Bara in a silent. More empiric vamps wait their turn…

History to the rescue—-it took another invasion of Europe to save Hollywood from its patrician class. The grosses from Darryl F. Zanuck’s The Longest Day were enough to keep 20th Century Fox from being cremated by Cleo’s expense account.