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I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself that of yourself which you yet know not of
Obviously, we watched Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar (1953). It gave away the ending right there on TCM: "Expires: Mar 15."
I was shown the film for the first time in tenth grade: it was part of my mother's program to rescue the curriculum from the well-intentioned efforts of that year's English teacher, who had already ensured my imprinting on Ronald Colman by setting an essay on the subject of Sydney Carton as a Christ figure. Of what she attempted to render out of Caesar, I remember little except that to this day I remain skeptical of the psychosexual significance of Portia's voluntary wound in the thigh. But the film stuck, with unusual vividness for a medium I was used to tuning out at parties as soon as a bookcase presented itself. I remembered its black-and-white Rome of cut-out skies and steps swarming with bodies, like a frieze on a sarcophagus. I had seen James Mason by then, but never as doomed and beautiful as his fatally honorable Brutus, his voice of anguished velvet so spellbinding in argument and soliloquy, so passionately inadequate in politics and war. I had not seen John Gielgud and for years he looked to me like Cassius self-sick with spite, his eyes as empty as a mask of bronze from which the glass has fallen and shadows rusted in. They make a chessboard pair, dark and fair, as crucially combined to the success of their conspiracy as to its disastrous unraveling afterward. Controversially cast as Antony, which I had no way of knowing since it was my introduction to him, too, Marlon Brando looks like an athlete in marble and may be as inhuman, a chameleon of ambition who can afford to eulogize his mentor as a populist coup de théâtre and honor a fallen enemy now that the tragedy is won. I had had almost two years of Latin at that point; it delighted me to see scrolls in the film written in the style of Roman cursive like graffiti from Pompeii. When Caesar, dying, turned to his last and most conflicted assassin, I could recognize the vocative.
It didn't strike me as strange when I was in high school, but it is notable to me on revisiting how much this star-studded production from MGM in the same decade as sword-and-sandal spectacles like Ben-Hur (1959) is deliberately not a costume epic. Instead of the expected historical Technicolor, writer-director Mankiewicz and producer John Houseman—no stranger to notable, contemporarily relevant Caesars—chose the monochrome realism of newsreels and TV broadcasts, so that the violence of Republican Rome would register like a political conflict of recent memory rather than a safely distant classical fantasia. Outside of the substitution of Bronson Canyon for Philippi, the staging is theatrically minimal and suggestive, the Roman sets partly repurposed from Quo Vadis (1951) dressed as much with shadows and the spare, contrasting cinematography of Joseph Ruttenberg as with doves, busts, garlands, or Latin graffiti. Dead leaves blow in the streets of the Suburra, torn flowers are strewn on the steps of the Colosseum, the white togas of the conspirators are blotched and smudged with blood. Brutus in his orchard musing on the murder of Caesar roams within a net of dry vines and branches, observed by the regicide bust of Lucius Junius Brutus and a bronze of the Capitoline Wolf. The assassination itself is nothing like a frieze: it's tense, sudden, struggling, and messy, a scrum of ugly noises of breath and blades out of which Louis Calhern's Caesar staggers in bleeding collapse, a nightmare advance under which Brutus closes his eyes in grief, shock, shame, resolve, before bracing himself for the quick, jerked embrace of the most unkindest cut of all. It is almost the same gesture as his own suicide, run on his own sword in the arms of Edmund Purdom's Strato, who will stand over his body like Ajax with Patroklos as the army of the Triumvirate approaches. Pompey himself stood in effigy over the slumped corpse of Caesar, one arm tangled up behind its back as no living person lies even in sleep. The film is filled with these sharp, iconic images, used to engage the text rather than stand in for it; it isn't the uncut play, but it concentrates on its actors as powerfully as if it had no cyclorama or special effects to scaffold them with. Everyone, incidentally, brought their own voices to the part. American and British accents are not differentiated by class or faction. Edmond O'Brien's Casca sounds exactly like a Brooklyn ward heeler, an obligingly corrupt ironist who throws away but for mine own part, it was Greek to me as naturally as Brando uses lend me your ears to shout down a tumultuous crowd. Greer Garson and Deborah Kerr do as much with Calpurnia and Portia as their elegantly sidelined parts allow, locked out of the unstoppable trajectory of the violence promised—in such a scene-setting touch of police state that I would love to know if Houseman brought it with him from the Mercury Theatre—by the opening arrest of two protesters for defacing a statue of Caesar. Cinna the Poet does not appear in this version, so we may imagine him played by the shade of Norman Lloyd, who wasn't dead at the time of filming, just blacklisted. The crowd that Antony swells to riot with the last word of Caesar's corpse would have done it whether we see it or no.
This film isn't it, but its personal fatalism, its political cynicism, and its low-key mise-en-scène made me think that someone must have staged a noir Julius Caesar at least once in the last eight decades—Brutus compromised by his idealism and Cassius by his discontent, each of them persuaded by the other at the worst moments and bound to the bitter end, which here comes for Brutus not after further battle, but at the sight of Cassius folded over his own hilts. O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet! Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords in our own proper entrails. Hark thee, Clitus— A folie à deux with a body count isn't too far under the surface of Shakespeare. To be honest, Gielgud and Mason kind of play it, the one sinuous, relentless, and fragile, the other troubled and transparent, a romantic loser on a republican scale. It's not possible to picture Brando's Antony, who lays down his stylus over a table of proscriptions and coolly turns a bust of Caesar like a sunflower to his smile, softening enough to be credible for Cleopatra, but it never is. The point is, it is not necessary to endure a sub-optimal high school English class in order for this movie to hit the mark. It's eloquent and intelligent, a play from angles that only exist on film; the score by Miklós Rózsa is actually terrific, somber and martial and more like incidental music for a stage production than a wall-to-wall cinematic treatment. According to Houseman, even the sets and costumes were done in black and white even though the audience would never know it, exactly as they would have looked on the regular stage. It made TCM's 31 Days of Oscar for winning Best Art Direction – Black-and-White, a category which no longer exists as such. I love the business of Brutus with his book, an intellectual whose philosophies are about to become dangerously real. This spirit brought to you by my modest backers at Patreon.
I was shown the film for the first time in tenth grade: it was part of my mother's program to rescue the curriculum from the well-intentioned efforts of that year's English teacher, who had already ensured my imprinting on Ronald Colman by setting an essay on the subject of Sydney Carton as a Christ figure. Of what she attempted to render out of Caesar, I remember little except that to this day I remain skeptical of the psychosexual significance of Portia's voluntary wound in the thigh. But the film stuck, with unusual vividness for a medium I was used to tuning out at parties as soon as a bookcase presented itself. I remembered its black-and-white Rome of cut-out skies and steps swarming with bodies, like a frieze on a sarcophagus. I had seen James Mason by then, but never as doomed and beautiful as his fatally honorable Brutus, his voice of anguished velvet so spellbinding in argument and soliloquy, so passionately inadequate in politics and war. I had not seen John Gielgud and for years he looked to me like Cassius self-sick with spite, his eyes as empty as a mask of bronze from which the glass has fallen and shadows rusted in. They make a chessboard pair, dark and fair, as crucially combined to the success of their conspiracy as to its disastrous unraveling afterward. Controversially cast as Antony, which I had no way of knowing since it was my introduction to him, too, Marlon Brando looks like an athlete in marble and may be as inhuman, a chameleon of ambition who can afford to eulogize his mentor as a populist coup de théâtre and honor a fallen enemy now that the tragedy is won. I had had almost two years of Latin at that point; it delighted me to see scrolls in the film written in the style of Roman cursive like graffiti from Pompeii. When Caesar, dying, turned to his last and most conflicted assassin, I could recognize the vocative.
It didn't strike me as strange when I was in high school, but it is notable to me on revisiting how much this star-studded production from MGM in the same decade as sword-and-sandal spectacles like Ben-Hur (1959) is deliberately not a costume epic. Instead of the expected historical Technicolor, writer-director Mankiewicz and producer John Houseman—no stranger to notable, contemporarily relevant Caesars—chose the monochrome realism of newsreels and TV broadcasts, so that the violence of Republican Rome would register like a political conflict of recent memory rather than a safely distant classical fantasia. Outside of the substitution of Bronson Canyon for Philippi, the staging is theatrically minimal and suggestive, the Roman sets partly repurposed from Quo Vadis (1951) dressed as much with shadows and the spare, contrasting cinematography of Joseph Ruttenberg as with doves, busts, garlands, or Latin graffiti. Dead leaves blow in the streets of the Suburra, torn flowers are strewn on the steps of the Colosseum, the white togas of the conspirators are blotched and smudged with blood. Brutus in his orchard musing on the murder of Caesar roams within a net of dry vines and branches, observed by the regicide bust of Lucius Junius Brutus and a bronze of the Capitoline Wolf. The assassination itself is nothing like a frieze: it's tense, sudden, struggling, and messy, a scrum of ugly noises of breath and blades out of which Louis Calhern's Caesar staggers in bleeding collapse, a nightmare advance under which Brutus closes his eyes in grief, shock, shame, resolve, before bracing himself for the quick, jerked embrace of the most unkindest cut of all. It is almost the same gesture as his own suicide, run on his own sword in the arms of Edmund Purdom's Strato, who will stand over his body like Ajax with Patroklos as the army of the Triumvirate approaches. Pompey himself stood in effigy over the slumped corpse of Caesar, one arm tangled up behind its back as no living person lies even in sleep. The film is filled with these sharp, iconic images, used to engage the text rather than stand in for it; it isn't the uncut play, but it concentrates on its actors as powerfully as if it had no cyclorama or special effects to scaffold them with. Everyone, incidentally, brought their own voices to the part. American and British accents are not differentiated by class or faction. Edmond O'Brien's Casca sounds exactly like a Brooklyn ward heeler, an obligingly corrupt ironist who throws away but for mine own part, it was Greek to me as naturally as Brando uses lend me your ears to shout down a tumultuous crowd. Greer Garson and Deborah Kerr do as much with Calpurnia and Portia as their elegantly sidelined parts allow, locked out of the unstoppable trajectory of the violence promised—in such a scene-setting touch of police state that I would love to know if Houseman brought it with him from the Mercury Theatre—by the opening arrest of two protesters for defacing a statue of Caesar. Cinna the Poet does not appear in this version, so we may imagine him played by the shade of Norman Lloyd, who wasn't dead at the time of filming, just blacklisted. The crowd that Antony swells to riot with the last word of Caesar's corpse would have done it whether we see it or no.
This film isn't it, but its personal fatalism, its political cynicism, and its low-key mise-en-scène made me think that someone must have staged a noir Julius Caesar at least once in the last eight decades—Brutus compromised by his idealism and Cassius by his discontent, each of them persuaded by the other at the worst moments and bound to the bitter end, which here comes for Brutus not after further battle, but at the sight of Cassius folded over his own hilts. O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet! Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords in our own proper entrails. Hark thee, Clitus— A folie à deux with a body count isn't too far under the surface of Shakespeare. To be honest, Gielgud and Mason kind of play it, the one sinuous, relentless, and fragile, the other troubled and transparent, a romantic loser on a republican scale. It's not possible to picture Brando's Antony, who lays down his stylus over a table of proscriptions and coolly turns a bust of Caesar like a sunflower to his smile, softening enough to be credible for Cleopatra, but it never is. The point is, it is not necessary to endure a sub-optimal high school English class in order for this movie to hit the mark. It's eloquent and intelligent, a play from angles that only exist on film; the score by Miklós Rózsa is actually terrific, somber and martial and more like incidental music for a stage production than a wall-to-wall cinematic treatment. According to Houseman, even the sets and costumes were done in black and white even though the audience would never know it, exactly as they would have looked on the regular stage. It made TCM's 31 Days of Oscar for winning Best Art Direction – Black-and-White, a category which no longer exists as such. I love the business of Brutus with his book, an intellectual whose philosophies are about to become dangerously real. This spirit brought to you by my modest backers at Patreon.
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An exchange I saw on tumblr earlier today:
User 1: Caesar had it coming
User 2: Pop, six, squish, I am Cinna the poet, Cicero, Lipschitz?
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I didn't know until this second that there was a film of Ethan Frome, but I feel strongly that further showings should be prohibited by those laws about student discipline.
User 2: Pop, six, squish, I am Cinna the poet, Cicero, Lipschitz?
Yay!
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Oh, that's even worse.
I meant to say earlier: I love that "Cicero" works just as well for either canon.
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Nine
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It is like that; it's how I remembered loving it. Thank you.
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tumblr likes to celebrate the Ides of March bigtime, so while I'm sure you've seen this before, have one of those posts that entirely justifies tumblr's existence: https://heresmyfiddlestick.tumblr.com/post/685977994459840512/yet-brutus-says-he-was-problematic-and-brutus-is
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No! Everyone in it has a very good voice, but I would not suggest it as an audio-only experience to anyone who had the choice!
I do want to catch it properly some time, but in the meantime, I just rewatch the BBC one with David Collings and Richard Pasco not having enough money or time to reshoot things when it goes wrong. (I have priorities! XD)
Fair! I still need to see Collings' Cassius.
tumblr likes to celebrate the Ides of March bigtime, so while I'm sure you've seen this before, have one of those posts that entirely justifies tumblr's existence
"He hath brought many hot takes to my dash / Whose notifs did the general discourse fill . . ."
I love Tumblr's adoption of the Ides of March as an international holiday.
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No, although, in the category of films that would still work through my VHS player's final demise of normal audio through a snowstorm visual, a Shakespeare play that I already knew one version of quite well, with, as you say, some great voices in it, is not the worst choice either! I made it all the way through, lying on the sofa, listening. Occasionally, there was a picture. XD
Fair! I still need to see Collings' Cassius.
It is a production of awesome despite the BBC Shakespeare shortcomings. (This one in particular seems to have failed to have time to reshoot things: someone dies on top of David Collings the wrong way round and Richard Pasco has to stand there claiming he's lying the other way round when we can all see he isn't. Actor, you had one job, ok. One! lol.)
"He hath brought many hot takes to my dash / Whose notifs did the general discourse fill . . ."
"I speak not to start discourse with Brutus,
But just to provide some context on his call-out post."
:-D
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Otoh, child me did not know about the Mercury theatre and its Julius Caesar production, and even after reading Simon Callow's intense descriptions of it in his Orson Welles biography, I didn't make the John Houseman connection, and of course it is there, you're so right.
It's not possible to picture Brando's Antony, who lays down his stylus over a table of proscriptions and coolly turns a bust of Caesar like a sunflower to his smile, softening enough to be credible for Cleopatra, but it never is.
Welllllll, ages ago I saw Patrick Stewart as Antony to Harriet Walters' Cleopatra in Stratford, and I could believe this Antony having held the funeral speech in his younger days. But I agree that you can't imagine it of Brando.
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I had definitely read the play, because I remember being struck by line readings that I hadn't seen on the page. Some of them I had retained over the years, many not.
Because Mankiewicz actually copies himself/puts a homage to Julius Caesar in the staging of Caesar's assasination (which is the same in both so very different films, check it out, with the last turn towards Brutus and Brutus' physical response identical), I never imagined it happening any other way until decades later Rome did its own version.
In the fire! You're right. I can't remember if I recognized it as a self-quotation—I didn't remark on it at the time if so. I might have just thought it was the way the assassination of Caesar was supposed to look, too.
As you have seen Mankiewicz's Cleopatra more times than I have: do you see any other intertexts between the two films? There is a deliberately refused one in that we hear none of the funeral oration in Cleopatra.
Otoh, child me did not know about the Mercury theatre and its Julius Caesar production, and even after reading Simon Callow's intense descriptions of it in his Orson Welles biography, I didn't make the John Houseman connection, and of course it is there, you're so right.
I am glad to provide the info!
Patrick Stewart as Antony to Harriet Walters' Cleopatra in Stratford, and I could believe this Antony having held the funeral speech in his younger days.
That's neat to hear it can be done. The texts have always seemed in different canons to me.
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It's been at least a decade or more since my last watching, but I think that after Cleopatra's departure from Rome, we get a quick Philippi montage, and at the end we see Antony showing respect to Brutus' dead body (though not by speech as in Shakespeare's play, but with a gesture, I think putting a cloak on him, but I could be wrong).
here is a deliberately refused one in that we hear none of the funeral oration in Cleopatra.
Now that I always assumed to be for the same reason we don't get one in the tv series Rome - how can you, the scriptwriter, possibly compete with Shakespeare? I mean, granted, Joseph Mankiewiczs was one of the best scriptwriters in cinematic history, but still. That funeral oration is so good, so well known, so iconic, that providing an alternate version is setting yourself up for critical bashing and audience disappointment, so best not try.
This said, there's also the fact that Cleopatra's Antony doesn't come across as capable of pulling off something like the funeral oration. Mind you, Elizabeth Taylor more than once complained that a lot of the Antony characterisation scenes were cut with the result that instead of getting a decline and fall arc, you only see him in the declined state, so who knows, maybe the original script wrote him differently. But in the film as it exists, he's so the deliberate opposite of Caesar and Octavian, and also Cleopatra herself, all instinct and no calculation, that it would not work.
That's neat to hear it can be done. The texts have always seemed in different canons to me.
In most cases for me too. The reason why I could see them both in the same universe in that particular production is among other things that Patrick Stewart plays Antony as flirting with Octavian in the big banquet of the triumvirs scene just to mess with him. (Octavian wasn't the completely cold mastermind in the production, either, it worked to a degree and he wasn't just being political but extra incensed when Antony went back to Cleopatra for that reason.) Anyway, when I saw that scene, with Antony being manipulative for the hell of it, I thought, hang on, yes, I could see him being manipulative for politics and revenge some years back.
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You're welcome! And thank you. I would love to hear what you think when you do.
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Thank you.
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That's fantastic! Definitely worth the ditching. I never saw any of those people live.
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I think your interpretation is textually supported. ("I kill'd not thee with half so good a will.") We watched a library VHS, too. I'd love to see it someday on film.
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Someone needs to quote this bit to Tumblr, some denizens of which have turned the perfectly reasonable statement “Young people often think of the Civil Rights Era as incredibly remote, because we usually see the black-and-white newspaper reproductions of the photos, even though they were often originally taken on colour film,” into “The Powers That Be deliberately print the photos in black and white to make them seem long-ago and irrelevant.” Various commenters have attempted to debunk the latter, mainly by pointing out that until about twenty years ago, black-and-white photography was considered more Serious and Newsy than colour, which was for celebrity tabloids—but it’s hard to fight social-media intertia.
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Oh, good, because a conspiracy theory is always more believable when it makes less sense than the factual explanation.
Various commenters have attempted to debunk the latter, mainly by pointing out that until about twenty years ago, black-and-white photography was considered more Serious and Newsy than colour, which was for celebrity tabloids—but it’s hard to fight social-media inertia.
It is, although I applaud the commenters for trying. Can source the Houseman, too, if you would like.
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"I am Cinna the Poet, I am Cinna the Poet."
"Oh, cool, when's your book coming out?"
On the other hand, staying out of Rome entirely once the civil war started was disappointing. Perhaps Houseman wanted to focus on things he didn't in the Mercury production.
I would love to read a serious comparison of the two. Houseman offers frustratingly little.
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What did you read in eighth grade?
I tried to read it later and could not make sense of it at all, beyond the barest outline of what was happening. I have no idea why I have such a block, when I have read lots of other Shakespeare quite happily.
If you want to try to break it, I do recommend James Mason to do it with.
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I think it's really neat that in eighth grade you read R.U.R.
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SPOILERS HOW DARE
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I truly hope the programmer was proud of themselves.
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