As I prepared to write on the 60th anniversary of Cleopatra, I asked a few friends and relatives if they had ever seen it. Some had, but more hadn’t: life, even or perhaps especially for the well-versed cinephile, is short, and four-hour-plus Hollywood follies with steadily mouldering reputations quite reasonably aren’t high on everyone’s catch-up list. But more than one person told me that they weren’t actually sure: “I definitely feel like I have,” said one film writer, citing the reams of well-publicised lore on its tortured production and imposing industry legacy, the popularly cemented visual iconography of Elizabeth Taylor’s lavishly eyelinered Egyptian queen, and the film’s status as the origin of the most glamorously turbulent romance in showbiz history. “But have I actually watched the whole thing? If so, I’ve forgotten all the connecting tissue between its most famous images.”
It was a response that to me captured the odd cultural status of a film that is at once a vast Hollywood behemoth and a dust-gathering curio, one that pretty much everybody knows something about, but precious few who weren’t alive for its noisy initial release have seen. I explicitly remember seeing it as a teenager, because doing so required some complicated VHS-era organisation: when it was broadcast at an inconveniently late hour on South African TV, I watched the first half-hour so the rest could fit on to a four-hour video cassette, and then dutifully trudged through it in instalments.
