When a movie genre returns after years of neglect, it sometimes comes back with a bang. But its success usually depends on how cleverly it reconciles the old with the new.
Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator,” in which Russell Crowe plays an enslaved Roman general turned gladiator superstar, proves the point: It shows Hollywood unleashing its creative lions on ancient Rome with all the digital and photographic wizardry usually reserved for movies like “Star Wars” or “The Matrix.”
Scott’s movie is a cinematographic and design knockout, a Roman festival of astounding visual richness. Yet, for all its high-tech bravura, the film also honorably represents one of the most venerable of all movie genres. It’s an ancient Roman costume epic, a “sword and sandals” adventure set in the age of the Caesars, a type that actually dates back to the first great spectacle movie, Italy’s “Cabiria,” in 1914.
It was “Cabiria” that inspired D.W. Griffith to make both “Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance,” but it also spawned a century’s worth of Roman and Christian costume film sagas, ranging from the sacred (1951’s “Quo Vadis?”) to the profane (1969’s “Fellini Satyricon”), the sublime (1959’s “Ben-Hur”) to the ridiculous (1964’s “Hercules Against the Moon Men”).
Though “Gladiator” is indebted to these movies, particularly the super spectacles of the late ’50s and ’60s, there is an important difference: The violence, action and spectacle have almost overpowered the drama and history.
It’s a welcome return, though. Movies like “Spartacus” were a staple of my own childhood, a time when I eagerly sopped up historical costume dramas from Cecil DeMille’s 1956 “The Ten Commandments” to William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur.” The Rome-set epics were often opulent and delightfully extravagant movies in which the Romans were either unwisely throwing Christians to the lions or killing each other in wars and palace intrigues. They were full of lusty idealistic heroes, passionate brave heroines and crazed evil tyrants parading around in short skirts and white robes before parthenons and coliseums, racing their chariots, waving their swords and sometimes watching Rome Burn. (Nero was the movies’ favorite Roman tyrant; Caligula a close second.)
Until “Gladiator” popped up, I hadn’t realized how much I’ve missed those Roman extravaganzas.
“Gladiator,” of course, is to sword-and-sandal movies what 1990’s “Dances With Wolves” was to Westerns: a huge, spectacular revisionist epic, done with the massive modern technical resources available to today’s filmmakers. (Back in 1960, if you wanted a coliseum, you had to either find or build one. Today, you can use computers–as in “Gladiator.”)
As in Hollywood’s vaunted Golden Age, we are transported back to the age of the Caesars. We’ve seen much of it before: from director Cecil DeMille and star Charles Laughton (as a puffy Nero) in 1932’s “The Sign of the Cross.” In “Quo Vadis?” with young Peter Ustinov as another Nero. In 1960’s “Spartacus,” with Kirk Douglas leading the legendary slave rebellion under the wide-open eye of young Stanley Kubrick. In 1963’s “Cleopatra,’ with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton dallying in spendthrift luxury on the Nile.
And in 1964’s “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” which is set in the same year (180 A.D.) evoked by “Gladiator,” and uses many of the same characters and events.But we haven’t seen it all that often since the late ’60s, when the biblical or Roman movie spectacular fell victim to changing tastes, economics and the collapse of the “Golden Age.” What’s changed most since then is attitude. “Gladiator” isn’t about the moral struggle between the Roman Empire and emerging Christianity, the subject of most Roman epics since “Cabiria.” And it isn’t, like the deliberately iconoclastic “Spartacus,” about revolution against the corrupt elite.
Now the gladiator is not a rebellious slave, like Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, but a brilliant, upright Roman general, Maximus (“The Spaniard”), who refuses the throne, escapes evil new emperor Commodus and is forced into slavery and stadium combat. So “Gladiator’s” hero is a member of the elite himself, a general whom, it’s suggested, is Rome’s rightful leader.
The message is different, but so are the times. For the moviegoing generations before and after World War II, Hollywood biblical epics (especially Cecil B. DeMille’s) were mostly meant to be reassuring allegories of manifest destiny, anti-statism and morality in modern times. Ancient Rome actually seemed made to order for the old Golden Age Hollywood, whose chief executives probably liked to imagine themselves as Caesars or Neros–and lived in similar luxury and vice.
DeMille, who had made the earlier 1934 “Cleopatra” (with Claudette Colbert), set the early pattern: Show lots of sin, exploit vice, but let goodness triumph. The formula worked and, for a while–before the 1963 “Cleopatra’s” excesses almost sank 20th Century Fox–they seemed to translate well to the ’50s and ’60s. (These jobs weren’t to the taste of every director, though; John Huston once got down on his knees, begging MGM to be released from directing “Quo Vadis?”)
Later, in the hands of more liberal directors like William Wyler (“Ben-Hur”), Joseph Mankiewicz (“Cleopatra”) or Kubrick, the movies became more irreverent or even subversive epics, meditating on revolt and political corruption, painting a jaded picture of evil empires and licentious royalty. By the time Wyler made the smashingly popular “Ben-Hur” in 1959 and Stanley Kubrick made “Spartacus” in 1960, a kind of anti-DeMille spectacle was in full bloom. These were smarter spectacles with more literate scripts, more liberal politics, more progressive ideas about history and psychology and more sophisticated and sometimes subversive sexual content.
In the end, “Gladiator” simply couldn’t have existed without all those models, especially “Spartacus,” “Ben-Hur” and “Fall of the Roman Empire.” Indeed, what’s wrong with Scott’s movie may be the fact that, despite its incredible visual coups, its script is so derivative–not just of the older Roman epics from America and Italy, but of contemporary revenge movies with Stallone, Schwarzenegger or Mel Gibson. Imagine Stephen Boyd’s hero General Livius in “Fall” somehow becoming a slave/gladiator and you pretty much have the plot of “Gladiator”–which may be how the screenwriters dreamed it up.
All this isn’t to say that “Gladiator” doesn’t have more modern things to say about political corruption, war and especially about the way the media uses violence and spectacle to seduce the crowds. If its script pales next to most of its epic models–not to mention the BBC’s version of Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius”–in pure cinematic terms, it’s still a barn-burner, a coliseum-burner.
The primary difference between “Gladiator” and its models comes in the way the later movie balances drama and action. “Spartacus” and “Fall of the Roman Empire” are lavish, exciting movies, both of which hold up well today, but they are epics containing memorable action scenes rather than epics dominated by them. Gladiator,” by contrast, is swallowed up by its action and visual spectacle, the drama a somewhat underdeveloped thread in between.
What most of us remember best in “Ben-Hur” and “Spartacus” may be the chariot race and the gladiator school sequence; nowadays, audiences may find much of the rest of both films too slow and wordy. They’re wrong, but like the movies themselves, they’re just reflecting their times.
Maybe someday, though, we’ll get all of it in perfect balance: violence and drama, literacy and spectacle. And that Roman epic will deserve a coliseum full of upraised thumbs.
