This might sound a little greedy. But after a period when Hollywood has surprised everyone with complex, intelligent movies, the time may be ripe for the retrograde virtues of action, spectacle and noise. All of which are in abundance in the first 10 minutes of Gladiator: a Roman legion is attacked by a desperate barbarian army in a German forest. Archers fire blazing arrows, there are bloody cavalry charges, brutal close fighting and the confusion of battle. All rendered with every visual trick that Ridley Scott can muster.
There’s something both familiar and unfamiliar about Gladiator. The story is simple. Maximus (Russell Crowe) is the favourite general of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). When the emperor dies, his twisted son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) orders Maximus to be killed. Maximus survives, is captured and enslaved and becomes a champion gladiator. It has most of the elements from the likes of Quo Vadis: a mad, incestuously inclined emperor; honourable generals; camaraderie among gladiators; scheming senators; characters who speak with great portent (humourless people, these Romans). There’s a massive baying Colosseum mob. Yet Gladiator is more brutal than any previous Roman movie: there are several decapitations and an excess of sprayed blood. A gladiator wets himself with fear. There are no Christians and – significantly – no orgies. The multicultural nature of the empire means giving a major part to an African-born actor, Djimon Hounsou. The main female character is neither a virtuous servant girl, nor a chillingly evil aristocrat. And at two and a half hours, Gladiator is a long film but a short epic.
Central to the reinvention of the genre is the way it is filmed. It looks unmistakably like a Ridley Scott film; in fact, it looks more like the work of Ridley Scott than any of his films since Black Rain. At its worst, you are reminded of some very expensive ad. The cinematographer is John Mathieson, who worked on Plunkett and Macleane for Scott’s son, Jake. And what was bold about that film was that it ignored the strange conventions that have built up around period film-making (someone insisted recently that you shouldn’t use hand-held cameras for non-contemporary stories – why ever not?). The same theory runs through Gladiator, where photography of the battle scenes has more in common with Three Kings than Spartacus.
But despite Scott, the film still relies on one actor. Gladiator confirms that Russell Crowe is one of the great movie stars of our time. Coming only months after his extraordinary performance as the paunchy, socially unskilled middle-aged Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider, here Crowe transforms himself into a hardened Spanish-born Roman general. Which brought a little clash between Crowe and Scott. ”My character was Spanish, and I wanted to do Antonio Banderas with better elocution,” Crowe claims, ”but they wouldn’t let me. They didn’t want people to be distracted by it.” Terrific actor that he is, Crowe’s most important contribution to the film is an intangible quality: he looks as though he could survive in the arena.
Until you see the film, it’s hard to figure out why anyone would make this film now. After all, it is 36 years since Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, the last of the great toga epics, which also told the story of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, played then by Alec Guinness and Christopher Plummer. A year later the genre was effectively ploughed into the ground by The Greatest Story Ever Told: more than four hours long, ill-prepared stars by the dozen, and John Wayne as a Roman centurion. It was a way of saying ”enough”. By then, the Hollywood staples were dying: the western was in crisis and the classic musical was on its last legs. Like musicals, there were always good reasons not to make epics: they wereexpensive and nightmarish to stage.
It was the historical epic that brought huge budgets to Hollywood: DW Griffith’s insistence on rebuilding ancient Babylon larger than lifesize pushed the budget for Intolerance up to $2,5million – in 1914 – and left the director bankrupt. Bigger yet was the 1925 Ben-Hur, one of the most turbulent productions in the history of film. Shooting started in Italy, and then the whole set was rebuilt in the US. The director, star and writer were all replaced. Twenty galleons were built and destroyed. One hundred horses died in the four months it took to stage the chariot race (try getting away with that under today’s laws). When it was all over it had cost $3,95-million, which even now could pay for a decent film. Adjusted for inflation, it would come close to $130-million – or rather more than the reputedly $100-million Gladiator.
After the coming of sound the epic was elbowed aside by gangster movies and screwball comedies. The epic returned after the war, in the age of Technicolor. These were the glory years of the splendidly wooden but perfectly muscular Victor Mature, in films like Samson and Delilah and The Robe. It was the Mature style that contributed to one of the things that undermined the Hollywood epic: the cheap and skin-heavy gladiator movies churned out in Italy by the directors and crews who would later make the spaghetti westerns.
But throughout the Fifties, with Mature eventually being eclipsed by Charlton Heston, movies set in the ancient world thrived. And they had a particular dynamic to them: they always involved spectacular pagan decadence, the suggestion of untold wickedness portrayed in lavish detail – DeMille spent three weeks on the orgy scene of his 1956 version of The Ten Commandments. In order to fit with official US morality of the time, the heroes were always absurdly highly moral Christians or proto-Christian Jews. The films themselves often worked to undermine the surface message: it is impossible to watch Quo Vadis (1951) without feeling more kindly to Peter Ustinov’s deliriously camp Nero than to Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr as the tiresomely virtuous Christians.
Spartacus and The Fall of the Roman Empire pushed things forward, losing the Christianity (and replacing it with Marxism in Spartacus). But still, the early Sixties epic looked stiff, old-fashioned and unnecessarily long: the Heston Ben-Hur clocks in at three hours 37 minutes. The fiasco of Cleopatra (1963) didn’t help. It remains – in real terms – the most expensive film ever made, and a study in wasting money. The original set was built in England, until someone worked out that the English weather was unsuitable for sun-baked Rome and Egypt. The whole production then shifted to Rome. And although audiences did flock to see the film, the horrors that went into creating its luxurious glory didn’t encourage anyone to follow in its wake.
Throughout the Sixties, movies acquired greater verisimilitude, encouraged by more location shooting. Which was trouble if you had to rebuild the Colosseum. ”The audience tolerance level in terms of reality is making it tougher and tougher,” says Ridley Scott. ”When you are doing a period movie there are no excuses any more.” It’s hard now to believe that The Greatest Story Ever Told was made only two years before Bonnie and Clyde, or six years after A Bout De Souffle. The whole context around the epics collapsed rapidly: by 1968 Victor Mature had the Monkees playing dandruff in his hair in the frazzled, self-deconstructing Head, while Charlton Heston reinvented himself for the hippie era in Planet of the Apes.
So why are we looking at the return of the epic? Part of the reason is technical: although Gladiator does have the ”cast of thousands” and large sets, much of it is computer generated. A precursor comes in the pod race scene of The Phantom Menace, an open nod to Ben-Hur (incidentally, there’s a strong Roman theme to the Lucas film, which is about a decadent aristocratic Senate conceding power to a man who will become emperor). Only the first tier of the Colosseum was actually built for Scott’s film: the rest was filled in with computer-generated effects. The film was expensive, but not shockingly so. It is also never safe to write off Hollywood genres.
Before Titanic, sinking ship movies weren’t dominating the box office. And when was the last big swashbuckler before The Mask Of Zorro? And like the swashbuckler, there’s something about the Graeco-Roman blockbuster that’s a bit more human than action films starring Schwarzenegger.
Which makes it not surprising that the first-post Gladiator epic is already in the works. Michael Mann has commissioned two scripts: one is about Caesar and Pompey, the other is Gates of Fire, from a novel about how 300 Spartans held of a huge Persian army at the battle of Thermopylae – George Clooney may produce and possible star. And another venture into the ancient world sounds like a good idea.