During the final seasons at Candlestick, the San Francisco Giants gave out pins of "survival" to anyone who stayed through an extra-inning game at the frigid and windy park. Similarly, 20th Century Fox would do well to award "I endured Cleopatra" buttons to anyone who is able to watch the entire 4-hour spectacle. In fact, Universal Studios might do well to promote watching Cleopatra, so audiences will think the studio's Gladiator actually deserves its Best Picture award in comparison.

On the other hand, Universal would do well to hide the fact that Cleopatra received nine Oscar nominations and won four of them—Best Cinematography, Best Special Effects, Best Art Direction, and Best Costume Design. Let's see; it was also nominated for Best Sound (it's loud), Best Musical Score (it's loud and overbearing), and Best Picture—what were the Academy members smoking that day? Actually, Cleopatra reminds me of a 1963 version of Gladiator, except the film is even more inept and plays like an endless TV soap-opera script.

Most of the renewed interest in the epic has its roots in soap-opera melodrama, highlighted by the scandals surrounding Liz Taylor. If you can remember back then, Liz first created a Hollywood scandal via a quick Las Vegas marriage to Eddie Fisher, after her fourth husband, Mike Todd, died in a plane crash. Fischer had left wife Debbie Reynolds behind for Liz, and was present during the Cleopatra shoot while Liz began her romance with Richard Burton (who plays Marc Antony).

The commentaries on the DVD edition with Chris and Tom Mankiewicz, Martin Landau, and Jack Brodsky telling a few stories—about having lunch with Eddie Fischer and keeping the Taylor affair secret, about how Roddy McDowall (Octavian) knew of the affair but kept it secret, about producer Walter Wanger pretending to be a reporter on the phone and calling to cue director Joe Mankiewicz about a Liz Taylor suicide attempt, and other tidbits. After hearing just a few of these items on the second disc, I am now obligated to go through the whole 4-hour film again, and feel so like a Hollywood gossip whore. It's really the only reason to suffer through this bloated piece of camel dung.

Perhaps some would like to examine the art design. The sets are pretty—very elaborate and gaudy. Most everyone will highlight the vast set announcing Cleopatra's arrival in Rome on the giant Sphinx—pulled in by thousands, and surrounded by thousands of other costumed extras, all finished off with Liz's private wink to Caesar (Rex Harrison). This is one of the main areas into which Wanger sunk some $44 million (this translates into over $400 million in today's economy)—a project that nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox and caused the studio to shut down production on all other projects immediately preceding Cleopatra's release. It wasn't cheap to gold-plate a good portion of Cleo's barge, nor was it cheap to supply Liz with her own private makeup person and provide her with a record-setting 65 costumes (and Cleo doesn't shop at Kmart).

Rex Harrison doesn't do a bad job as Caesar, and Roddy McDowall stands out among the lesser characters, but both have to deal with a banal script that is better suited for TV soap-operas or for large stage plays in theaters with poor acoustics. Numerous writers worked on the script, but pity the poor director. After dealing all day with production headaches (just imagine the ones that grande dame Liz would cause by herself!), he went to his private chamber to rewrite the script daily. He had begged for time off to do a rewrite, but the production was underway and the fate of 20th Century Fox was in his hands. The stress really got to Mankiewicz—he had to receive daily injections to get him going in the morning and keep him going in the afternoons, and had to receive nightly injections for a few hours of restless sleep.

Poor guy—after creating such great movies as All About Eve, The Barefoot Contessa, and Suddenly Last Summer, Mankiewicz would never again have the stomach to tackle another major film project. Given the situation, not even directing/writing geniuses like Charlie Chaplin or Woody Allen could have saved this film, but it would have been more fun to see what they could have done with the script.

Mankiewicz falls into easily recognizable patterns that almost border on the humorous after you’ve become familiar with them in the first hour. Three to watch for:

1) Line repetition—to make sure the audience "gets it." The first time will be in a regular tone of voice, then to make sure the audience hears it, the actor will shout the same line. Although this occurs regularly, it becomes especially funny during the final scenes in which Marc Antony (Richard Burton) and Roddy McDowall follow each other with the pattern. First Burton asks the servant "Will you help me?" —and then blares out "HELP ME TO DIE, APOLLODORUS!!!"

Later, Roddy comes around and calmly begins "Marc Antony is dead—the soup is hot; the soup is cold—Antony is living; Antony is dead." Then he launches into a resounding "SHAKE WITH TERROR if those words are TRUE! The dying of such a man must be SHOUTED! SCREAMED! ANTONY IS DEAD!!!"

The production even tries a bit of propaganda with its last lines, attempting to convince us that we have witnessed a far better movie than we have actually seen, and true to the pattern—the lines are stated twice in succession, the final time by the off-screen narrator: "Was this well-done of your lady? Extremely well, as befitting the last of so many noble rulers."

2) Send a messenger. One of the cheapest ways to "create" action scenes—have the event occur off-screen, and send a messenger to describe what happened. (The multimillions didn't go to any elaborate battle scenes, film-watchers.)

In fact, this messenger pattern becomes so repetitious that by the final reel I was laughing each time I saw a scene begin with a group of characters gathered on one of the inside sets, and saw a person walking deliberately from stage right—"I'll bet this is the messenger to deliver the last piece of action." I was right every time!

Even the one battle scene they show—complete with Burton on the burning ships—uses the messenger technique. After a quick glimpse of a ship ramming another with a very amateurish-looking Burton flailing away with his fake sword, we switch to Cleopatra and her military advisors looking over a large-scale map of the harbor, complete with model ships meant to represent the exact positions of the battle. But that's not all, friends. Imagine this: The models were actually set on fire! And THIS represents the crux of the battle—especially the close-up of Cleo's models of Antony's and Octavian's ships set ablaze, as the messenger explains how the battle is going (at least Gladiator uses inept CGI).

3) Laughable groaners. A number of quotations qualify here, but my favorite occurs when Cleopatra successfully seduces Caesar: "My breasts are full of love and life. My hips are round and well-apart. Such women, they say, have sons." No wonder Liz demanded a script session with the director because she was afraid her career could be over after this bomb.

After failing to get through Cleopatra on a cable channel a long time ago, and giving up partway through a video rental a few years back, I endured Cleopatra this time, but I must admit, I "cheated" a bit with my DVD version, taking it in over the weekend in parts. I had no difficulty sitting through a fascinating 2-hour background film about the making of Cleopatra (a real production from hell), but I cannot imagine watching the actual movie in one sitting (even with an intermission). I was able to tolerate it only by seeing the film over a 2-day period with many breaks when the "action" became especially tedious.

It could have been worse though. Mankiewicz's original vision saw Cleopatra as two separate 3-hour movies with the first about Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, and the second about Cleopatra and Marc Antony. When the studio insisted on one film in order to capitalize on the widespread publicity the Burton-Taylor scandal was getting, Mankewicz cut a 5-hour, 20-minute version! A 3-hour, 15-minute version was released to theaters in 1963, and now we have a 4-hour version available for home viewing, along with the bonus documentary.

It's amazing to imagine that 20th Century Fox survived this train wreck long enough to produce Star Wars some 14 years later. I must give the studio's marketing department credit for finding a way to package and promote this painfully bad epic into a reasonably good DVD experience by focusing on the nightmares of the production itself, and by providing juicy commentary on the behind-the-scenes soap operas and scandals.