The Big Whatsit

Many met the return of the grand, large-scale historical epic with indifference, but for me it was a good thing. Though I would stop my life for two hours of film noir happily enough, nothing really beats a lush, three-hour marathon with a cast of thousands, vast ornate sets and soundtrack thundering throughout. In the fifties and sixties, the work of Cecil B DeMille and William Wyler dominated. They often referred to the Bible and early Christianity as a source, which transformed their films into church-friendly tales crammed with an omnipotent God and those who believed (the goodies) and others who did not (always met a sticky end).

The biggest of these was Ben Hur, a multi-Oscar winning four hours about a Jewish prince whose deeds are related in parallel with the life of Jesus. Like all such movies, it was pretty obvious stuff, hammering its values and points home and relying on a cast of straightforward heroes and villains. El Cid moved the action out of ancient times, and concentrated on a medieval Spanish warrior who fought the Moors in the name of God. Both starred Charlton Heston, a sombre voiced, square jawed presence who practically carried The Ten Commandments, another bottom discomforter, in which he took on the massive role of Moses. It was a great picture, and a top-drawer performance, as your man goes from adopted Egyptian prince to bearded sage, replete with magical staff that causes untold damage to Yul Brynner’s Pharaonic empire.

Perhaps the best epic barely touched upon Christianity at all. Spartacus commanded a superb turn from Kirk Douglas as the eponymous slave turned revolter. Even better was Lord Laurence of Olivier, playing Marcus Crassus, the patrician Roman Consul who’s charged with crushing the rebellion whilst lusting after Tony Curtis. It possessed more style and subtlety than many of its predecessors combined, though it came as the genre was winding to a close. By the late 1960s, audience tastes had moved on. There was a growing preference for realism and contemporary subject matter, leading to the gritty modern classics that dominated much of the 1970s. Spending untold millions on high concept historical melodramas just didn’t draw the public anymore. The studios couldn’t afford the outlay, and the risks involved in recouping the costs were too high.

Partly to blame for all this was The Fall of the Roman Empire, released in 1964 and making a big loss. Though Cleopatra is perceived widely to be the death stroke for this type of movie, TFOTRE was just as grand and opulent. It was off to a sticky wicket from the start, given that its contents held little relevance to the masses (clearly, the twin towers of God and Sex sell tickets, and this had neither), and consequently its ironic title referred not only to its subject matter but to the demise of the genre itself.

And yet it remains a thing of beauty, a folly of the celluloid world that contains an ensemble cast and a sweeping saga of no little grandeur. Anthony Mann, best known for his iconic Westerns, directed it. No doubt aided by his experience of filming vast expanses of empty country, he gave a great sense of scale to TFOTRE, entirely at home when depicting scenes in all-engulfing German forests, or the jungle of the Roman Senate. So much of this picture depended on size. In one memorable scene, the corpse of the old Emperor is laid to rest before an entire army. With snow billowing, the camera swoops over thousands of people, joined in the sort of collective mournathon for which Elton John might have composed the theme tune.

One of the academic problems with the film was that there is no easy way of defining the moment when the Roman Empire actually fell. Some might argue that it came with the sacking of Rome by the Ostrogoths in the fifth century, when the empire shifted wholesale to its new base in Constantinople and breathed for another millennia as Byzantium. Others suggest the rot started much, much earlier, that the seeds of destruction were already in place even before Rome became an Empire. It’s possible that Rome’s doom was spelled out as soon as someone demonstrated that whoever was in command of the army effectively controlled the state. Whatever. It’s a debate that has worked many brilliant minds, and will obviously do so forever because there’s no single answer. What counts here is the perspective the filmmakers took - they went for the reign of Commodus in the second century AD.

Why then? The movie implies this was a real turning point in Rome’s existence, that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius had declared the borders of the empire to be drawn, and that everyone inside those borders was to become a Roman citizen. Whether this actually happened at all is something of a historical debate, but the point is that Marcus Aurelius was in a position to guarantee freedom and harmony within the Empire, so that it was in better shape to face its foes - the Germans and the Persians. Unfortunately, the ageing Emperor died before he could turn his dream into policy, and when his son, Commodus took over, his subsequent folly led to a complete reversal of this way of thinking. Rome never returned to the hopes and visions of that time, and a series of despotic, short-sighted rulers gradually unravelled the Empire.

The film opens in Germany, a lush and wintry carpet of trees dominated by the Roman fortress. Marcus Aurelius (played by Alec Guinness in typically brilliant, character-led mode) is preparing to announce his grand plan for Rome, and calls on the provincial princes and proconsuls to hear it. In a long-winded set piece, the Emperor meets and greets the lot of them, all driving chariots and dressed in what passes for a rough estimate of what they might have looked like. Omar Sharif pops up as an Armenian prince, wearing a pair of gold underpants - he’ll catch his death. The Emperor’s daughter is Sophia Loren, whose classical looks often lended themselves to such fare. Loren’s problem was that basically, she couldn’t act. Her attempts at dialogue had a Shatner-esque tendency to stop and start at no particular place, and in this film she uses two facial expressions - horrified, and melancholy with a hint of nobility. It doesn’t really matter of course. However you chose to look at her, Loren was an absolute babe in her prime and looked smashing as a decoration in ancient epics.

Her love interest is Livius, who in reality is Stephen Boyd. Making a name for himself as the baddie in Ben Hur, Boyd - actually from Northern Ireland - went all blond and blue-eyed to portray the utterly heroic commander of the Roman army. He spends his time lusting after Loren (who is about to be betrothed to Sharif - damn those political alliances!) and being offered the rule of Rome by Marcus Aurelius. As it happens, the fair-minded soldier is considered a more suitable candidate for pushing the Emperor’s vision than his own son, Commodus. Once the wiry Commodus (Christopher Plummer, who gives a blinding performance as someone losing his sanity as he gains ultimate power) finds out what is going happen, he sulks and struggles to maintain his friendship with Livius. When the latter leads the army into a battle against the Germans, Commodus and his fighting gladiator corps offer themselves as the sacrificial bait, the ones who’ll walk into a trap, draw the enemy out so that the bulk of the Roman forces can wade in afterwards.

Fortune doesn’t favour the brave. A bunch of prominent nobles realise that theirs will be a poor lot if Marcus Aurelius’s dream of a united Empire comes to fruition. They decide to see him off first, and in one of the picture’s best scenes, a blind aide hands the Emperor an apple that has been cut in half by a knife, one side of its blade secreting deadly poison. As the aide eats his unpoisoned half, Marcy Marcus chomps on the other, and the next we see of him is his prone form, as he struggles to get the word ‘Livius’ out, thus naming his successor.

It doesn’t happen. Commodus becomes Emperor, and Livius is left to smoulder his way through what remains of German resistance in the north. Needless to say, the new ruler is pretty crap, spending his time farting around with his gladiator mates and altering the images of divine statues so that they now bear his visage. The empire starts to fall apart. As Commodues levies higher taxes in an attempt to raise the money to transform Rome into a city of beauty, the east revolts, Livius is called to help and the plot turns a notch as he catches up with Loren, herself one of the rebels

All well and good, and indeed the massive, grinding story moves nicely when it’s not engaged in stately marches and processions that appear to be a ‘look at the money we spent on this!’ demonstration. You can, of course, recreate all this with CGI now, but until Rome it was hard to imagine the costs involved in recreating the Roman forum, which at the time was the largest movie set ever built. It’s a study in marble, brilliant and white and completely alien to anything we can see now. In the eastern scenes, ruined heads of statues lie in the sand, silently staring for eternity. The trouble is that as usual, there’s a great deal of marches and processions. We get to see just how much detail went into the costumes, and how blaring the orchestra gets, and maybe it happens once too often.

But naturally, movies like these were all about size. Everything had to be big, so that you can only imagine what it would have been like to sit in a cinema, staring goggle-eyed at the screen and havng your eardrums perforated by the sound of trumpets en masse. The story isn’t as pedestrian as it sounds either. Well, it is, but this is the grand sweep of history, and in a picture like this there was never going to be much room for subtlety. We all know Commodus is going to be a bad ‘un, and he is. We can see Livius has the weight of the world on his shoulders, and it doesn’t ever lift.

If the above sounds quite familiar, then sure, it was virtually ripped off by Gladiator, a film that is being described as one of the best in recent years. It isn’t. Apart from a riveting turn by Russell Crowe, its tale is as hackneyed as they get, with characters just as two-dimensional. If it appears superior to TFOTRE, then it’s because Crowe fills the screen in a way Boyd could only ever dream about. That apart, there’s no contest. Witness the very similar battle scenes that pretty much kick off the proceedings. In Gladiator, Crowe makes a stirring speech to his soldiers and off they go! In TFOTRE, tensions are already mounting between the protagonists as they slink into the forests, and whilst they make their way deeper in, it turns out the enemy are watching them, hidden behind every tree and just waiting for the call to attack. All the while, the score, which to this point was crashing and bombastic, slows and lessens to something as wistful as the cool breeze.

Gladiator shows Commodus as a more ruthless killer, one whose madness is equalled by his rising megalomania. Underneath, he’s a coward, and the bully in him rises to the surface a number of times, but the steel in him is clear to see. Plummer’s earlier take sees him start as an almost decent man. His father might not rate him, but all he’s really done wrong is take his duties not too seriously as the Emperor in waiting. He doesn’t kill Marcus Aurelius, but instead is installed as a puppet by greedy Senators who know too well that the old Emperor’s visions of a peaceful, non-expansionist Empire will curtail the regular income such people earned from battles and putting down revolts. Though Commodus is the ultimate power by the close of the movie, he has very little real might in actuality, flattered by those around him and willing in return to give them what they want. Nor is he a coward, being quite willing to enter the ring against Livius without delivering a fatal wound first.

Enough rambling about which was the better movie. It suffices me to say that Gladiator isn’t the only picture to have derived some inspiration from TFOTRE. The Phantom Menace borrowed heavily on much of its imagery, and certainly stole its musical highs and lows. There was also much of its style evident in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I’d go so far as to suggest that Peter Jackson’s vision for that little-known bunch of flicks was made more realistic by the fact that the likes of The Fall of the Roman Empire showed what could be done if you simply thought big.

In my eyes, it’s a forgotten classic, the sort of thing I could snap up for a fiver on VHS twenty years ago. It’s also an imperfect movie, self-indulgent, slow and letting some poor performances slip through the net, including - sadly - those of the main actors. But there’s also so much that’s great about it. The sets, locations, costumes and the sheer imagination to create a film on such a grand scale is the sort of thing we see too little of these days. You have to admire the people involved for throwing so much cash at such a vanity project. Whatever else you may think about it, you have to admit that they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.