One of the greatest casualties of the traumas at 20th Century Fox Studios was the film that the future of the company depended upon. Cleopatra was hit by every calamity imaginable, from Fox's declining fortunes to its fragile star's precarious health to Egypt's refusal to allow the filmmakers to shoot locations in that country because of Taylor's adoption of the Jewish faith after her marriage to Eddie Fisher. The wonder of Cleopatra is that when the film is good, it is as good as these rather top-heavy spectacles get. Miss Taylor's verbal skirmishes with Rex Harrison's Julius Caesar in the film's first half are as witty and barbed as anything writer/director Joseph Mankiewicz wrote for All About Eve. If the second half of Cleopatra is a disappointment, the same can certainly be said of Gone With the Wind. Cleopatra was the most highly anticipated movie of its day and perhaps of all-time. The feeling in Italy, where most of the picture was shot, against Taylor's personal life was so volitile that snipers were hired and placed on rooftops for the scene where Cleopatra enters Rome in case someone amongst the thousands of extras in the scene made an attempt on her life. Many people took issue with her occasionally strident performance as the Egyptian queen, but even the most vocal of her detractors would have to admit that Taylor is unquestionably the most gorgeous aspect of a visually sumptuous movie. And none of it originated in a computer. The recipient of four Academy Awards, Cleopatra eventually returned its astronomical cost.