Cleopatra (1963)

Long film is long.

That's because everything in this epic film is done on an epic scale, and that means everything is big, or long, or both. It's great.

At almost four hours in length, this could have been two films, or even a mini-series. Supposedly it nearly was two films, the first about Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, the second about Cleopatra and Mark Antony. This is noticeable in the finished film, with Caesar's assassination coming roughly halfway through.

The events depicted run from Casear's defeat of Pompey through to the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, and as such almost precisely coincide with the events depicted in the 2005 TV series Rome, only without the additional adventures of Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo. This film was obviously an inspiration on that series, with it contrasting itself against the relatively cleaner and more sanitised version of history depicted here, and with Cleopatra as an incidental character rather than absolutely central.

This film also very clearly influenced a couple of BBC historical dramas, most obviously the final few episodes of The Cleopatras, which covered the same territory, but also I Claudius, where the events of this film are recent history at the point that series begins (and are poetically recapped for the audience's benefit by Aristarchus near the start of episode one). With only 13 years between the film's release and the TV series being shown, Cleopatra would doubtless have been in the minds of the makers and much of the audience at the time.

As a Hollywood epic of the classic era, the real star is the cinematography - the exotic locations and the enormous sets. The grandeur of Rome and the opulence of Egypt are both conveyed through these, and of course there was no CGI in those days so they either had to build them for real or else use camera trickery, paintings or models - the number of real ships involved in filming the battle of Actium being disguised about as well as the number of real Daleks involved in Dave the Daleks.

These great big sets needed equally big performances to fill them, which might explain some of the casting choices. In these terms the film is dominated by Richard Burton as Antony and Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, with a lot of the film's most dramatic scenes not being the battles but the romantic scenes - which mostly consist of those two shouting at each other.

The secondary cast is equally up to the challenge of filling the scenery, mostly by chewing on it so outrageously that even the likes of William Shatner might have struggled to keep up. Foremost among these is Roddy McDowell as Octavian, who makes season four Paul Darrow look positively restrained by comparison.

Other noteworthy cast members include Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar, failing to talk to any animals as far as I could see; George "Arfur Daley" Cole as Caesar's mute servant; Andrew "Quatermass" Keir as Agrippa; Martin Landau as Rufio, a Roman general - a significant role only three years before he would begin repeatedly guest-starring in Mission: Impossible. Michael "Gandalf" Hordern was Cicero and Robert "Aragorn" Stephens was Germanicus (not that one), both senators, leading me to assume that the rest of the Roman Senate was filled with other Lord of the Rings radio actors. A very young Richard O'Sullivan played Cleopatra's brother Ptolemy, but perhaps the most surprising appearance of all to me was Jean "Morgaine" Marsh as Octavian's sister Octavia - a small but pivotal role since she is the wife who Antony abandons to be with Cleopatra.

Anthony Hopkins does not appear in the film, but if you close your eyes you could swear it was him playing Mark Antony. Richard Burton doesn't always sound like Hopkins, such as in his War of the Worlds narration, but here he sounds nigh identical, it's uncanny.