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Age cannot wither her, but it doesn't improve her much either.

Not when she is Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra.

Age seems simply to have left her alone, as it often does with the movie

actors. But then the chance of time travel is very real, especially since a restored print of the film

is now showing at various cinemas around the country. The trip doesn't have to be nostalgic.

It might be exploratory, a way of wondering what it meant to be the way we thought we were,

or the way they thought they were, if you feel remote enough from the occasion.

We know we were in 1963, even before the film stars.

We are staring at a thick red curtain under a proscenium arch,

and a handsome title card with small golden sphinxes at

its corners tells us that this image and the lush music that goes with it is the overture.

The overture persists for several very long minutes. Later, about halfway through the film,

there was an intermission, and when the film ends, curtains close on the final scene.

Quite a few movies go in for this effect from Gone with the Wind and perhaps before,

but it's always meant to be special, a posh night at the theatre,

a step up from your ordinary flick,

and totally different from anything you could get on TV.

Cleopatra was also over four hours long and so meant to make television look small in every way.

In fact, the whole genre of the Hollywood epic, which had a vogue in the late 1950s,

relied a great deal on the supposed competitive opportunities of the big screen.

Cleopatra started out as two movies, as what we might think of as retakes of the Bernard Shaw and the Shakespeare versions of the Queen's Life, first Caesar, then Anthony.

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