Why Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur & Other Hollywood Classics Still Look So Good

Cleopa­tra cost Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry Fox $44 mil­lion, by the stu­dio’s own esti­mate. That may sound like the bud­get of one of those genre pic­tures that winds up going straight to stream­ing, but if we con­vert those 1963 dol­lars into cur­rent ones, it comes out to $480 mil­lion. The most expen­sive film ever made up to that point, it remained an indus­try sym­bol of near-par­o­d­i­cal­ly trou­bled pro­duc­tion and grotesque cost infla­tion for decades. Like The Wiz­ard of Oz, it failed to recoup its invest­ment dur­ing its ini­tial the­atri­cal run, even­tu­al­ly turn­ing a prof­it thanks only to re-releas­es and tele­vi­sion rights sales. And yet, these six decades lat­er, the invest­ment seems to have proven sound, at least accord­ing to the video above from YouTube chan­nel Wolfcrow, “Why Cleopa­tra Still Looks Like a Tril­lion Bucks.”

Unlike some infa­mous­ly expen­sive movies, Cleopa­tra does­n’t leave you won­der­ing where all the mon­ey went. Wolfcrow cre­ator Sareesh Sud­hakaran points out some of the myr­i­ad ways it man­i­fests onscreen, from the 70-foot-long giant sphinx to the full-scale Alexan­dria har­bor built on the coast to the Roman Forum set designed to be three times larg­er than the actu­al Roman Forum to the 65 or so out­fits Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor wears in the title role (to say noth­ing of the 26,000 oth­er cos­tumes made for all the oth­er char­ac­ters). Even the mat­te paint­ings and opti­cal cam­era tricks still look con­vinc­ing. The film’s pro­duc­tion design­ers knew that noth­ing could be done by half mea­sures, giv­en that the 65mm Todd-AO stock used for film­ing would expose any flim­si­ness on the big screen.

Just as unfor­giv­ing was the ultra-wide aspect ratio used for the 1959 ver­sion of Ben-Hur, which neces­si­tat­ed painstak­ing labor on every­thing that went before the cam­era, but also a new approach to the com­po­si­tion of the shots them­selves. Even those of us who’ve nev­er seen the movie can call to mind images of its cli­mac­tic char­i­ot race, a sequence that earned its cul­tur­al impact the hard way.

It took five months to film on the largest set ever built at that time, with 1,500 extras in its stands. A few years lat­er, Lawrence of Ara­bia took Hol­ly­wood grandeur up to the lev­el of sub­lim­i­ty with its real desert land­scapes. David Lean “was obsessed with scale and detail,” Sud­hakaran explains. “He want­ed the desert to be more than just a back­drop. He want­ed it to be a char­ac­ter in the sto­ry,” which required metic­u­lous plan­ning of all the ways its nat­ur­al light could pos­si­bly be used to dra­mat­ic effect.

Though Sud­hakaran clear­ly has an inter­est in spec­ta­cles from the gold­en age of the Hol­ly­wood his­tor­i­cal epics, he’s also made videos on last­ing­ly impres­sive movies from oth­er times and gen­res. When was the last time you sat down to enjoy the satir­i­cal urban tech­no-dystopia Robo­Cop, the com­ic-strip noir fan­ta­sia of Dick Tra­cy, or the flam­boy­ant de-famil­iar­ized twen­ty-third cen­tu­ry of The Fifth Ele­ment — or bet­ter yet, saw them prop­er­ly screened at a revival house? When they came out, those films met with vary­ing degrees of box-office suc­cess and crit­i­cal praise, if not regard­ed as the absolute peak of cin­e­mat­ic sophis­ti­ca­tion. In our time, their ambi­tion and craft look noth­ing short of aston­ish­ing, espe­cial­ly when we remem­ber that they built their worlds in phys­i­cal real­i­ty with real human beings, most­ly ana­log tech­niques, and a whole lot of labor and imag­i­na­tion. Could even a tril­lion dol­lars buy the same results today?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Scene That Reveals the Beau­ty of Clas­sic Hol­ly­wood Cin­e­ma

Why Movies Don’t Feel Real Any­more: A Close Look at Chang­ing Film­mak­ing Tech­niques

Why Movies Don’t Feel Like Movies Any­more: The Rise of Meta­mod­ernist Films, and How They Grew Out of Mod­ernism & Post­mod­ernism

The Great­est Cut in Film His­to­ry: Watch the “Match Cut” Immor­tal­ized by Lawrence of Ara­bia

The Cin­e­matog­ra­phy That Changed Cin­e­ma: Explor­ing Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, Stan­ley Kubrick, Peter Green­away & Oth­er Auteurs

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.