Rewind, Review, and Re-Rate: ‘Julius Caesar’: Do Commoners or Kings Decide the Common Good?

Rewind, Review, and Re-Rate: ‘Julius Caesar’: Do Commoners or Kings Decide the Common Good?
Charlton Heston as Marc Antony. The location is Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. Photo by Chalmers Butterfield. Sba2/CC BY 2.5
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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.

Production shot from "Julius Caesar" with director David Bradley in costume in back of the camera. The location is Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. Photo by Chalmers Butterfield. (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/">CC BY 2.5</a>)
Production shot from "Julius Caesar" with director David Bradley in costume in back of the camera. The location is Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. Photo by Chalmers Butterfield. CC BY 2.5

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?

Antony believes that Caesar was a righteous choice for the crown; After all, he’d publicly spurned it on three occasions. Cassius and Brutus argue differently: What a man does before he’s crowned matters, but what he might do after, matters more.

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!”

Director David Bradley’s black and white movie examines how morality shifts and shapes relationships between citizens and their state. (Brandon Films, Inc.)
Director David Bradley’s black and white movie examines how morality shifts and shapes relationships between citizens and their state. Brandon Films, Inc.
‘Julius Caesar’ Director: David Bradley Starring: Charlton Heston, Grosvenor Glenn, Harold Tasker, David Bradley MPAA Rating: Not Rated Running Time: 1 hour, 46 minutes Release Date: March 8, 1950 Rated: 3 stars out of 5
Rudolph Lambert Fernandez
Rudolph Lambert Fernandez
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Rudolph Lambert Fernandez is an independent writer who writes on pop culture.
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