A Queen for Caesar - 1962

Review: A Queen for Caesar - 1962: About six months after the release of this relatively modest Italian production telling the story of how Cleopatra (Pascale Petit) ended up in a rug rolled out at the feet of Caesar (Gordon Scott), the 1963 Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor appeared. Often cited as the most expensive film ever made (after adjustments for inflation and paying attention to a ratio of how production costs differ), the Taylor Cleopatra is famous for both the cost and gossip surrounding its production. That film came out in a flurry of publicity that had been building for years over which time the film had reached a status of fame where it was famous for being famous. Not the case here with this 1962 film.

A Queen for Caesar seems to anticipate a lot of the Taylor film by running through some of the same storyline (such as the rug rolling scene) but then each film is borrowing from DeMille's 1934 Cleopatra with Claudette Colbert which also had Cleo spun out on a carpet. The main difference compared to the two American films is that this Italian Cleopatra is played by Pascale Petit (who is French) and features her as a quite young woman (this film makes sure to mention to us several times she is only 18 years old) who is both somehow ruthless and full of heart and good intentions.

The script by Fulvio Gicca Palli and Arrigo Montanari isn't like the Joseph Mankiewicz script which makes efforts at historical accuracy (and tries to make sure we know it) and to showcase Mankiewicz's intelligently written dialogue while having his Cleopatra maneuver men and nations to war, theoretically in the pursuit of stopping war, which is where Mankeiwicz film starts trying to have its cake and eat it, too. In this 1962 A Queen for Caesar, the writers Palli and Montanari want us to have a good time seeing our heroine getting out of one scrape after another and having a paladin-like protector in the form of an Egyptian soldier (George Ardisson as Achillas).

When Cleopatra is jailed secretly in an Egyptian dungeon (by her brother who is temporarily King) and then guarded by Achillas, my first thought was "hey, that guard ought to just spring her out of there," and then Cleopatra starts trying to woo the soldier in that same direction. He appears to be immune to every angle of seduction and pleading that Cleopatra throws at him. When the soldier is finally commanded to deliver Cleopatra bound-and-gagged to the quarters of a powerful Egyptian advisor to the King (who intends to have her slain not too long into the future), Achillas delivers her but then turns on his boss and cuts him down with a sword. We learn this loyal Egyptian soldier has been plotting Cleopatra's escape all along and getting her to his boss's digs was the place he needed to make for their secretive flight out of Egypt.

Where's Caesar in all of this? He's somewhere over the horizon preparing to engage against Akim Tamiroff as Pompey the Great, who we meet when Achillas and Cleopatra flee to Syria to evade the wrath of her petulant and half-crazy brother Ptolemy (Corrado Pani). The Elizabeth Taylor film covers a little bit of the same ground with the brother, but has Pompey in the rear view mirror in the story, and we hear about the great admiration (or fear) the Romans had for this general. In A Queen for Caesar we have a somewhat humorous Tamiroff playing an indolent genius who can't get his thoughts together and plan an attack, always putting it off until tomorrow, no matter how perfect the moment is when opportunities arise for decisive action.

And then he meets Cleopatra. Now all he is concerned about is her and her pretty smile. This seems to be a contagion that effects everyone in this film, and in this way isn't much different from other Cleopatra movies. Yet A Queen for Caesar goes to the effort to make sure we understand her vulnerability isn't just political and as a famous woman among the powerful and famous, because this movie dumps her into spots where she's is only a pretty girl at the mercy of untrustworthy soldiers and difficult circumstances. (Concerning soldiers in A Queen for Caesar, there is a highly satisfying scene where the Roman troops refuse to assist a particularly corrupt leader who has been causing trouble for everyone and now wants Cleopatra's bodyguard killed. In what has a certain funny aspect to it, these soldiers cite a technicality on why they can't step in to aid this fellow Roman. We don't like that guy, and neither do they, and he doesn't last a minute fighting mano a mano by himself against this Egyptian who has been loyal and true throughout the movie.)

There's no crowd scenes in this 90 minute runtime that are anything like the gargantuan scale of the Taylor movie, but we do get decent sized crowds of horses stomping over the screen with hard-riding Roman soldiers, and the set design is respectable and adequate, and viewed as a Peplum genre film, this is a first class production. Pascale Petit's Cleopatra is the center of the movie and she's got a lot of youthful energy. At times the character comes across as a pretty sharp planner of intrigue, but there's a sense to her effort that this Cleopatra might burst into laughter at any moment from the sheer fun she's having, and in that way sets it far apart from the underlying tragic (or tragicomic, if you want to look at it that way) of the much more massive production of the other self-serious Cleopatra film that closely followed on the heals of A Queen for Caesar.

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Original Page June 16, 2026