Looking much as she did in "The Ten Commandments", Debra Paget points out here that movie costume designers didn't think that fashion had changed between the days of Moses and post Cleopatra days a thousand years apart. The ridiculous story has Cleopatra with an alleged daughter Shila given up to the Assyrians to raise who becomes against her will the new Pharaoh's wife and is accused of his poisoning after refusing to make love to him. The fact that not only is this Pharaoh (Corrado Pani) totally insane but possibly gay makes the film even more ridiculous with his overly possessive mother (Yvette Lebon) standing over everything he does while it is obvious all the time who was responsible. Throw in the doctor (Ettore Manni) who must save Shila from being buried alive with the dead Pharaoh's rotting corpse and you have one laughably macabre plot.
Poorly photographed and dubbed into English, this film does at least try to make itself look like it attempted to give a true ancient Egyptian feel to the proceedings. While historically speaking the film is utter tripe, at least the film doesn't utilize phony British accents as Hollywood did to dub the performers, and some of the props momentarily had me convinced that there was a slight semblance of authenticity to what they were trying to dramatize.
Poorly photographed and dubbed into English, this film does at least try to make itself look like it attempted to give a true ancient Egyptian feel to the proceedings. While historically speaking the film is utter tripe, at least the film doesn't utilize phony British accents as Hollywood did to dub the performers, and some of the props momentarily had me convinced that there was a slight semblance of authenticity to what they were trying to dramatize.