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BARABBAS
The convict freed in place of Jesus becomes a gladiator in Rome. The subject is Christian faith, but the story is deliberately constructed so that the existence of the Jews’ god and the miraculous resurrection of Jesus are never affirmed; all we see for certain is the harsh world in which Barabbas lives. The great Anthony Quinn delivers a powerful performance as the man who moves through life with a taciturn, beast-like acceptance of his circumstances, which take him from Jerusalem to a mine in Sicily to Nero’s Rome.
Underrated Hollywood director Richard Fleisher creates an entirely convincing portrait of the grimy ancient world; the truly spectacular scenes of gladiator combat in the arena are probably the best ever filmed. (Jack Palance as the terrifying Torvald is the stuff of nightmares!) A remarkable atmosphere is created by the muddy color palette of the cinematography and a sometimes eerie musical score, and the story leaves the viewer (Christian or not) with much to contemplate. Based on the novel by Nobel Prize winner Pär Lagerkvist.
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CLEOPATRA
I can’t claim to be objective about this movie. I couldn’t wait to see it as a boy, and once I did, I was never the same; the story of Caesar, Cleopatra, and Marc Antony became one of the central myths of my life. For me, to watch this film is to enter a realm of dreams; I am transported to the harbor at Alexandria, to Cleopatra’s mind-boggling arrival in Rome, to her over-the-top reception of Marc Antony on her barge, and on to their disastrous naval defeat at Actium. I witness the Queen’s final moment on earth, when she submits to the bite of the asp and attains immortality.
Filmmaker Joseph Mankiewicz intelligently adapted the ancient sources with an ear for sophisticated dialogue. This was the man who gave us both JULIUS CAESAR with Marlon Brando and ALL ABOUT EVE with Bette Davis; here his intimate understanding of power, wealth, and sophistication all come together to render a memorable portrait of a woman whose name is still a household word two thousand years after her death.
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ELECTRA
When the victor of the Trojan War, King Agamemnon, is murdered, must his children avenge him — even if it means killing their own mother? Working in primal black and white, with a Greek-speaking cast headed by the great Irene Papas, director Michael Cacoyannis (ZORBA THE GREEK) sets a deliberate pace that builds to a powerful climax. The music score by Mikis Theodorikis is mesmerizing, full of raw emotion and strange beauty, a perfect counterpart to the stark visuals and powerful performances.
Roger Ebert calls ELECTRA “the best film ever made from a Greek tragedy.” I tend to agree, but Cacoyannis made two other films based on Greek tragedies, and all three are remarkable. In IPHIGENIA, the Greeks are unable to sail to Troy because of a windless sea, and their leader, Agamemnon, decides to make a terrible sacrifice. In THE TROJAN WOMEN, an all-star cast — Vanessa Redgrave as Andromache, Katherine Hepburn as Hecuba, Genevieve Bujold as Cassandra, Irene Papas as Helen — captures the tragic fate of the female survivors after the fall of Troy.
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FELLINI
SATYRICON
It’s been a few years since I watched this totally idiosyncratic work of genius, but Fellini’s vision of ancient Rome is unforgettable. Working from the erotic novel by Petronius (Nero’s arbiter of taste), inspired by previous cinematic incarnations of Rome, and informed by his lifelong love of the Eternal City, Fellini crafted a movie like no other.
The result is uneven, to be sure (like all the master’s movies), but the world would be a poorer place if this film had never been made. Moments of breathtaking beauty contrast with images of appalling horror; love, lust, madness, and laughter crowd the teeming screen; and in the end, the will of the gods remains obscure. As the promo ads promised when the film was released, this is “Rome — Before Christ, After Fellini!”
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A FUNNY THING HAPPENED
ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM
The Romans loved comedy, but their sense of humor often eludes us. How to bridge the cultural gap? Re-imagine the comedies of Roman playwright Plautus through the filters of vaudeville schtick and the Broadway musical! Stephen Sondheim wrote the songs. Zero Mostel stars as Pseudolous, the clever slave, with Jack Gilford, Phil Silvers, Michael Hordern, and Buster Keaton along for this wild chariot ride of a movie.
This was the first time ancient Rome was shown on screen as a dirty, cluttered, thriving, real city, instead of a white marble wedding cake. Filming in Spain, director Richard Lester invited local peasants to live and work in the rustic sets, and allowed fruits and vegetables to rot, just to achieve the right atmosphere.
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THE FURY OF ACHILLES
Of all Trojan War movies, this is the best. Like The Iliad of Homer, THE FURY OF ACHILLES begins toward the end of the war and ends before the episode of the Trojan Horse. The focus is strictly on one man, Achilles, and his fate.
Unlike any other Trojan War film I’ve seen, this one includes Homer’s gods and their divine intervention in human affairs. Achilles’ near-invincibility is a supernatural fact, as demonstrated in a scene when he’s stabbed and the blade is destroyed as if blasted by lightning. Yet the film doesn’t feel like a fantasy; it’s a psychological drama in which the main character is driven by his understanding of his divine destiny. An oracle has revealed that Troy cannot fall until its champion, Hector, dies; Hector cannot die until Achilles slays him; and once that happens, Achilles must die. This is the burden of greatness — and doom — that lies upon Achilles. No wonder he’s full of anger; his victory means his death.
Even dubbed, Gordon Mitchell gives a powerful portrayal of the warrior who is both hero and monster. His physique is statuesque but his features are so rugged as to be ugly (think of Charles Bronson); he is sexually alluring, physically intimidating, and frightening to look at.
The script is surprisingly, sometimes amazingly, literate, verging on the poetic. Especially memorable are Achilles’ explanation of his invulnerability to the captured Briseis, which ironically reveals his vulnerability and wins her pity and affection; Patroclus’ plea to Hector to kill him after he’s been wounded; and Hector’s farewell speech to his wife and the people of Troy before he goes out to battle Achilles. The climactic duel between the two warriors is riveting.
I wonder if the makers of TROY saw this movie? If so, they learned nothing from it. If they had simply remade this film, reproducing its insights into the tragedy of Achilles and Hector, Brad Pitt might now be the proud owner of an Oscar!
(The best print available on DVD seems to be in the boxed set WARRIORS 50 MOVIE MEGAPACK; this barely passable full-screen print gives only a hint of what the movie must have looked like in its original widescreen version.)
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I, CLAUDIUS
It’s been years since I’ve rewatched this classic BBC television series (a sprawling, 11-hour adaptation of the famed novel by Robert Graves). First broadcast in 1976, it made an enormous impression on me during my college days at UT Austin, where I majored in History and dabbled in Classics.
Production standards were modest, but writing and performances were top-notch. Derek Jacobi as the stuttering Claudius, John Hurt as the mad Caligula, Siân Phillips as the scheming Livia, and Brian Blessed as the long-suffering Augustus (“Is there any man in Rome who has not slept with my daughter?”) all made indelible impressions on my psyche. Imperial intrigue consumes the first family of Rome in an ever-widening vortex of power-madness and paranoia.
The DVD set includes “The Epic That Never Was,” a documentary about the previous, failed attempt in 1937 to film the novel with Charles Laughton as Claudius.
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MASADA
The subject of this 6-hour miniseries is the Roman siege of the mountaintop fortress of Masada in Judaea in 72 A.D., where a band of Zealots made a last stand against Roman authority. Peter O’Toole plays the world-weary Roman commander, Flavius Silva, a man torn between political expediency and personal decency; from his amazing first scene to the last, O’Toole delivers perhaps the finest performance of his career. Peter Strauss plays an equally challenging role; is the insurgent leader Eleazar ben Yair a visionary freedom fighter, or the ancient equivalent of a suicide bomber — or both?
The script, based on Ernest K. Gann’s novel The Antagonists, follows the account of the historian Josephus but intelligently embellishes the story and characters to offer keen insights into religion, politics, military discipline and the psychology of war. The scale is epic, but the focus is intimate, drawing us into the tragic battle of wills and wits between two charismatic and very human leaders.
The action scenes and the lighting sometimes remind us that this is a TV miniseries from 1981, but these limitations are more than made up for by the quality of the costumes and sets (including siege engines) and the fact that MASADA was filmed on location. The tone of a brief prologue and epilogue about the place of Masada in modern Israel also dates the movie, but adds another layer of history to a tale that seems remarkably timely now, as once again a superpower embroiled in the Middle East faces a relentless desert insurgency against its military occupation. Many of the issues evoked by MASADA are in play today; only the players are different.
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QUO VADIS
Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz is Poland’s most revered author; this 2001 adaptation of his world-famous novel is the most expensive movie in Polish history. It’s lavish, to be sure, but its real impact comes from the power of its storytelling and the timelessness of its themes.
Sienkiewicz was a devout Catholic, and writer/director Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s intent is undoubtedly pious — one viewer called QUO VADIS a cross between a Catholic mass and I, CLAUDIUS — but to me, the Christian point of view neither diminishes nor enhances the basic integrity of the story, which is about human beings caught in the maelstrom of Nero’s reign. Some, like the pagan Petronius, tread the razor’s edge, as must all artists and intellectuals who live under an autocrat (Eisenstein under Stalin comes to mind). Others, like Vinicius and his beloved Lygia, happen to be members of the particular cult which Nero chooses to scapegoat after a fire ravages Rome and destabilizes his regime. This is a tragedy repeated throughout history: when a catastrophe strikes, like the burning of Rome — or the attack on the World Trade Center — the scapegoating impulse of the populace will be exploited by evil men to bring about the death and suffering of innocent people. Whether Christians are the victims or the perpetrators of such scapegoating, it is the duty of history and of art to record the suffering of the innocent — which QUO VADIS achieves, hauntingly and brilliantly.
Michal Bajor as Nero surpasses all other screen incarnations of the deranged emperor. Boguslaw Linda plays Petronius, the shrewd survivor, with the multi-layered subtlety the role demands. The other characters are equally well cast, from Judo world champion Rafal Kubacki’s towering Ursus to Agnieszka Wagner’s blood-chilling Poppaea. Special kudos to Jerzy Trela in the tragicomic role of Chilo Chilonides.
Although QUO VADIS was edited for theatrical release, it’s the original 6-part TV series that’s available on DVD with English subtitles. The pace never flags and the sprawling novel is well suited to serial format.
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THE TROJAN HORSE and WAR OF THE TROJANS
Steve Reeves, in a brief but remarkable cinematic career, played three of the great heroes of the Ancient World: Hercules, Romulus, and Aeneas. Of the three portrayals, his Aeneas is the most complex, admirable, and ultimately heroic. Together, Reeves’s two Aeneas movies comprise a single epic.
THE TROJAN HORSE (available in the DVD set THE ADVENTURES OF HERCULES) begins at the very end of the Trojan War. The focus is on the Trojan noble Aeneas, a man of peace forced by circumstance to become a great warrior. Paris and Helen are portrayed as burned-out, bitter lovers, and the various Greek besiegers (Achilles, Ajax, etc.) are sharply drawn. The sets are wonderful. The CGI monstrosities of TROY were far too overblown to be historically credible; here we see a much more likely representation of the Bronze Age city, with a low wall, small but exquisite temples, dirt streets, and a populace weary of siege and infighting. The camp of the Greeks is built on an equally convincing scale.
Reeves reprised the role of Aeneas in WAR OF THE TROJANS (available in a widescreen edition along with GIANT OF MARATHON). After his arrival in Italy, the warrior must again take up arms to achieve the peace he desires. The scale of the sets and the rustic costumes evoke a convincing atmosphere of Bronze Age Italy. (Small details like the king’s peculiar-looking crown are based on authentic artifacts). The curious customs of the natives have the ring of historical truth; the bird-shooting contest on horseback is a brilliant bit of cinema.
In both movies, the use of elements from The Iliad of Homer and The Aeneid of Virgil is intelligent and laudable; together, they deliver a memorable vision of the earliest legends of ancient Rome. Anchoring both films is Reeves’ portrayal of Aeneas. Hercules made him world famous, but this is the role he was born to play.
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