Filmed in Spain, it was released by United Artists and stars Richard Burton as Alexander along with a large ensemble cast.

The Greek orator Demosthenes of Athens is advocating war to resist King Philip II of Macedon and his planned invasion and takeover of all the city-states of Greece.

After the victory at the Granicus, Alexander goes to Phrygia and solves the challenge of the knot tied by King Gordias by cutting it with his sword.

Alexander takes his status to heart, his arrogance and paranoia increasing to unstable proportions, but the bold young leader's conquests come to an end after he kills his close friend, Cleitus, with his spear following a drunken argument.

He marries Roxane at Susa, but falls ill soon after, and asks that his corpse be thrown into the Euphrates to disappear, so that people will think his body went back to the gods.

Its usage of sigma in its opening titles produces Alsxander the Grsat and the location names on maps in the film are in Latin.

[30] A. H. Weiler of The New York Times wrote that despite the film's length "its moments of boredom are rare," and that the battle scenes "make a colorful and thunderous show."

"[32] In his write-up of the Los Angeles premiere, Edwin Schallert stated: "The initial audience had a chance to view some very powerful individual portrayals by Burton, March and others and to witness some overwhelmingly big and spectacular battle and crowd scenes.

However, as a piece of storytelling, historical or otherwise, mainly revolving around the title character as a great conqueror for Greece, the film seemed to run off in a dozen and one different directions at practically every stage.

"[34] Harrison's Reports wrote, "Beautifully photographed in CinemaScope and Technicolor, it is without a doubt one of the most opulently mounted pictures ever produced, a magnificent eye-filling epic with a scope and splendor that is alone worth the price of admission to see.

"[35] John McCarten of The New Yorker wrote that "while the picture has plenty of interesting pageantry, it doesn't offer quite enough drama to hold one's attention for its full length—a matter of two and a half hours.

"[36] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "Conviction is considerably dissipated here by Rossen's refusal, in spite of obviously serious intentions, to present character in terms much more convincing than those of comic strip history ...

The battle sequences are well composed, but the generally pedestrian style and approach of the production ultimately reduce Alexander the Great to a well-intentioned historical jamboree, protracted and intermittently quite enjoyable.

"[37] Hartley Ramsay, writing in the National Board of Reviews, criticized Burton's performance as "petulant and passionless" and its runtime, but stated that the film was "interesting and worth seeing".

[38] The review by The Guardian criticized its unfocused and broad story stating that had Rossen "been less ambitious he might have made a memorable work" and that "the result is a great, unwieldy blunderbuss of a film".

[41] R.H. Gardner, writing in The Baltimore Sun, criticized the film as "frequently slow-moving, difficult to follow and cluttered with confusing details", but that it was "perhaps as close to being great as any film-historical since the Olivier production of Shakespeare's Henry V".

He stated that Rossen's writing of Alexander "slows down and confuses the action on the one hand, but, on the other, lifts the film from the ranks of the average unimaginative, overblown historical to a position of some distinction".