Cleopatra Reviews

The presentation is first class: the sets, props, costumes, location photography, and music are all of the caliber befitting the grandiose ambition of the production. I personally found the acting by the truly all-star cast to be uniformly excellent throughout with McDowall's Octavian and Harrison's Caesar deserving special mention. Taylor deserved the million dollars she got for the title role and Burton's occasional scenery chewing didn't detract significantly from his interpretation of Mark Antony.

Because of its notorious reputation, I was quite eager to check this flick even though I wasn’t sure what to expect from it. Eventually, I thought it was not bad at all and it is actually a decent peplum in my opinion. First of all, the whole thing was just gorgeous with some awesome sets and costumes (even though, I have to admit it, some of those costumes did look ridiculous sometimes). Furthermore, even though the production was a mess (it turned out to be the most expensive movie made that at the time and it remained so for a couple of decades), it still remains quite a fascinating story. The main issue was that, in my opinion, Elizabeth Taylor was not the best choice to portray the title role. In mean, obviously, she was probably one of the biggest stars at the time and also a tremendous actress but, in my opinion, she did not look like the part at all. Also, even though the story was quite interesting, it was a very long movie (more than 4 hours) and, unfortunately, it did loose some steam and focus from time to time. To conclude, it is definitely not a masterpiece but it is far from being a bad movie and it is definitely worth a look.