There are shadows stretched long on the morning road

I think the time change has broken my already tenuous relationship with the concept of circadian rhythms: normally it's just tiring to lose an hour, but this year I have almost ceased to be able to fall or stay asleep and the results are predictable. I am disappointed in the third or fourth projected snowstorm this winter that arrived as rain and flurries melted by the next day. Have a couple of pictures from the neighborhood which I have been exploring.

( And if you can wait, there will be an hour to balance it. )

I am having a lot of trouble with the state of just about everything. I recognize it is not a unique or soluble problem.

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.