Cleopatra seeks new power after Caesar's death, drawing Mark Antony into a consuming alliance that reshapes empires, loyalties, and the fragile balance of Rome and Egypt.
Antony and Cleopatra is the most cinematic play Shakespeare wrote, and the hardest one to stage, for the same reason. It is built from dozens of short scenes that jump between Egypt and Rome and Athens, a galley at sea, a battlefield, on the assumption that an audience will keep up. A theatre has to suggest all of that with a bare stage. A film can go there, and this 1972 version does, which makes it a good place to meet the play and a fair test of how much of it survives the journey.
Charlton Heston's adaptation brings Shakespeare's epic to life, focusing on Cleopatra's political urgency after the murder of her lover Caesar and her search for a powerful new Roman ally.
She seduces his probable successor, Mark Antony, who becomes the centre of shifting allegiances, torn between Roman duty and the magnetic pull of Cleopatra's charisma, ambition, and strategic brilliance.
Heston directed it and plays Antony himself, a part he had already played in Julius Caesar, and the reading he gives is a soldier's. His Antony is a great commander who is being managed by everyone around him. Cleopatra manages him. The young Octavius, who beats him at everything including dice, manages him. So does a political marriage to Octavius's sister, agreed for the sake of peace and then walked away from. The film keeps Shakespeare's language, and it keeps Enobarbus, whose job is to stand at the side and tell the audience what it is watching: the triple pillar of the world turned into a strumpet's fool.
The film explores the tension between love, power and empire, portraying two leaders whose choices reverberate across nations as rival factions vie for dominance.
The film is at its strongest around Actium. Antony has sixty ships, and nineteen legions with twelve thousand horse on land, and every soldier in the room tells him to fight where he has always won, on the earth, foot to foot. He fights at sea, because Cleopatra's fleet is at sea. Our leader is led, says one of them, and we are women's men. The battle that followed decided who would rule the Roman world, and the play makes it turn on a decision taken in a tent to please somebody.
Two hours and twenty-eight minutes, in Shakespeare's text, filmed in Egypt and Italy.