career on celluloid. The film flopped at the box office and has since been described as "the first flop in CinemaScope". Crowther, however, lauded Burton's scenes where he performed Shakespeare plays such as Richard III. Shortly after the release of Prince of Players, Burton met director Robert Rossen, who was well known at the time for his Academy Award-winning film, All the King's Men (1949). Rossen planned to cast Burton in Alexander the Great (1956) as the eponymous character. Burton accepted Rossen's offer after the director reassured him he had been studying the Macedonian king for two years to make sure the film was historically accurate. Burton was loaned by Fox to the film's production company United Artists, which paid him a fee of $100,000 (). Alexander the Great was made mostly in Spain during February 1955 and July 1955 on a budget of $6 million. The film reunited Burton with Bloom and it was also the first film he made with her. Bloom played the role of Barsine, the daughter of Artabazos II of Phrygia, and one of Alexander's three wives. Fredric March, Danielle Darrieux, Stanley Baker, Michael Hordern and William Squire were respectively cast as Philip II of Macedon, Olympias, Attalus, Demosthenes and Aeschines. After the completion of Alexander the Great, Burton had high hopes for a favourable reception of the "intelligent epic", and went back to complete his next assignment for Fox, Jean Negulesco's The Rains of Ranchipur (1955). In this remake of Fox's own 1939 film The Rains Came, Burton played a Hindu doctor, Rama Safti, who falls in love with Lady Edwina Esketh (Lana Turner), an invitee of the Maharani of the fictional town of Ranchipur. Burton faced the same troubles with playing character roles as before with Belch. The Rains of Ranchipur released on 16 December 1955, three months before Alexander the Great rolled out on 28 March 1956. Contrary to Burton's expectations, both the films were critical and commercial failures, and he rued his decision to act in them. Time magazine critic derided The Rains of Ranchipur and even went as far as to say Richard was hardly noticeable in the film. A. H. Weiler of The New York Times, however, called Burton's rendering of Alexander "serious and impassioned". Burton returned to The Old Vic to perform Henry V for a second time. The Benthall-directed production opened in December 1955 to glowing reviews