NR | 1 h 46 min | Drama | 1950
David Bradley is probably better known for having directed former First Lady Nancy Reagan in “Talk About a Stranger.” But he’s also the one who helped Hollywood discover Charlton Heston as a natural in the sword-and-sandal world of epics.
Bradley doesn’t deviate from the overly familiar Shakespearean storyline of “Julius Caesar.” Yet, he uses his camera to offer an unassuming, thought-provoking study of power. Shorn of the glamor and finesse of Roman epics that followed, Bradley’s black and white movie examines how morality shifts and shapes relationships between citizens and their state.
Rome’s citizens plan to crown Caesar (Harold Tasker) king, as he returns triumphant from military campaigns in Gaul. But some in the Roman Senate, notably Cassius (Grosvenor Glenn) and Brutus (David Bradley), cook up a coup built on the idea that Caesar’s ambition, not their private political projects, endangers Rome.
When they do kill Caesar, it’s up to the lone dissenting senate member, Mark Antony (Charlton Heston), to rouse Rome’s citizenry from slumber and to challenge the conspirators.
At heart is the common good. Must members of the senate, from among whom citizens crown emperors, decide what’s good for people? Or must people themselves decide, retaining their power to crown (and unseat) emperors at will?
A Different Shakespeare Film
This film differs markedly from others centered around Shakespeare’s play.After Enrico Guazzoni’s silent 1914 production based loosely on the play, Bradley’s is the first with dialogue that’s wedded to the play. Far from stripping it of its Shakespearean pitch and tenor, Bradley as screenwriter invites contemporary audiences to be drawn into the drama of his film by the sheer power of its language.
Unlike the 1953 and 1970 movies on Caesar, where British and international casts support the handful of American lead actors, here Illinois-born Bradley relies entirely on a Chicago-based team. Chicago’s giant structures double as Roman facades: The Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the Elks National Veterans Memorial.
Alongside a brilliant Grosvenor Glenn, Heston is the standout in a largely average cast. This film is the first to place Heston in the Graeco-Roman setting that would launch him to stardom. The minute he walks toward a felled Caesar, the rest of the senate members, until then spewing showy speeches, start looking like schoolboys.
Heston’s commanding voice makes theirs seem like nothing more than a back-of the-classroom tiff. His compelling turn, as a 26-year-old, awed Hollywood giants who, within a decade, cast him in their films: Cecil B. DeMille and William Wyler twice, each.
Glenn sports just enough villainy as Cassius to allow Brutus and Antony to appear honorable, in their own ways, leaving the rest of the senate to decide who is more deserving of soldierly support to wrest Rome back from the brink of lawlessness.
Whether he received credit for it or not, Bradley’s imaginative use of light, darkness, shadow, images, and framing would find echoes in films a full decade later. Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” imitates Bradley’s use of a sculpted face of Caesar, crumbling. Wyler’s “Ben Hur” uses the image of rainwater to show the cleansing power of blood, the image Bradley uses to convey the corrupting, consuming power of blood.
Orson Welles’s “The Trial” uses techniques that Bradley does to show people struggling to negotiate the power of the state. Bradley shows you humans, looking tiny before massive pillars. His bottom-lit characters are insidious, his brightly lit ones benign. His extreme close-ups reveal a character’s state of mind, and shadows on walls add meaning to what characters are feeling, pretending to feel, or saying and not saying.
Bradley loses his way a bit in the second half with long shots that don’t capture the words or emotions of his actors, especially outdoors. Still, he uses telling images such as the statue of a roaring lion that’s, in fact, mute and powerless precisely because it’s just a symbol of power.
And, as if the limping figure of a soothsayer draped in deathly black isn’t enough to haunt dreams, Caesar’s or ours, he’s the one who utters that fateful warning, “Beware the Ides of March!”
