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.

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.