Much of Julius Caesar takes place in rooms, tents, shadowed walkways and one painted backdrop that even the black and white filming can't really conceal. Luckily Mankiewicz showed rather more restraint in making Julius Caesar (plus, his lead actress didn't become seriously ill and then need to relocate somewhere hotter than England on this film).įilms based on Shakespeare plays always have to find a balance between the way the play is written - to be performed by a few people on a small stage with little or no scenery - and producing something that feels properly cinematic. Mankiewicz, later went on to direct one of the films that helped to bring the Classical epic fashion to an end, Cleopatra (1963), which nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox and, despite being the highest grossing film of the 1960s, didn't go into profit until 1973. Julius Caesar was made relatively early on in the 1950s heyday of epic Classical films, following on from Quo Vadis (1951) and made in the same year as The Robe. That's a shame, though, because there's some great stuff in these plays, based on various ancient sources but especially on the Lives of Plutarch - in this case, those of Julius Caesar and Brutus (Mark Antony as portrayed in this play is rather more cunning and upstanding that he appears in Antony and Cleopatra, which, thanks to Octavian/Augustus' effective propaganda and Plutarch's Life of Antony, depicts him in the more familiar way, as a womanising alcoholic). There aren't all that many big-screen adaptations of Shakespeare's Classically-themed plays, partly because they can be a bit hard to follow if you're not familiar with the historical context.
"Friends! Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your ears!"
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