The story of the film tells of a series of victories and tragedies of the Egyptian Queen, Cleopatra. During this process, Cleopatra tries to manipulate Julius Caesar and Mark Antony in her ominous attempt to save the Egyptian empire from destruction and reach safety again.
Though it owes as much to Shakespeare's interpretation and to Roman propaganda as to the historical record, this interpretation of the great queen's life succeeds in conveying something of the intelligence and force of personality her opponents feared.
A lumbering monstrosity of a movie with all manner of preposterous hairstyles and improbable fashions. Worth seeing -- once anyway -- at least as wayward legend.
It may not be as compelling and tightly edited as Ben-Hur, but Cleopatra is still a Hollywood epic that tells a grand story in a grand way. Save it for a night when the family feels like a four-hour spectacle.
The film has a spectacular variety of liabilities (and, to be fair, strengths as well), but the most visible and crushing is that's an utter dud as a star vehicle.
Cleopatra is not only a supercolossal eye-filler (the unprecedented budget shows in the physical opulence throughout), but it is also a remarkably literate cinematic recreation of an historic epoch.
Taylor inhabits the role with a focussed but uninhibited imperiousness, as when she turns Cleopatra's entrance into Rome, aboard a giant rolling sphinx, into the ultimate red-carpet photo op.
