“Pinewood’s Alexandria stood through most of last winter and spring, through Elizabeth Taylor’s illness, the lengthy arguments over the Cleopatra insurance, the substitution of Rouben Mamoulian as director by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and the calling in of Lawrence Durrell to write a new script. Now the whole Cleopatra project has removed itself to sunnier locations, the stone lions and temples and obelisks have been pulled down, and the twelve minutes or so of film actually shot by Mamoulian—whose final cost, one newspaper cruelly estimated, must have been in the region of a thousand pounds a foot—is all that survives. These photographs, taken shortly before the demolition of the set, record its sad splendours. The ‘Royal Calendar’ below was put up by the unit outside Elizabeth Taylor’s dressing-room; and will be set up again in California, or Italy, or wherever Alexandria is finally reconstructed.”
Photographs by Thomas Picton. Sight and Sound. Summer 1961.
chained and perfumed 