Lions, tigers and a cast of thousands
The commercial cinema had not been in existence very long before filmmakers realized that they had in their hand the power to re-create history, to re-live epic battles, rebuild the pyramids of Egypt, part the Red Sea, or engulf Pompeii in volcanic ash all over again. Sometimes, they have done so with an amazing vulgarity of style, a terrible – but often hilarious – jangling of anachronisms, and an insultingly low assessment of the intelligence of their audiences. But the best epics have been the work of men imbued with the power to create spectacle of breath-taking splendour in films of awesome conception.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Italians were the first to make epics’ With the ruins of Ancient Rome and Pompeii to inspire them, Italian film-makers looked to historical spectacle for their inspiration from the time they began making feature films. Arturo Ambrosio won international acclaim with the first of many versions of The Last Days of Pompeii in 1908, and Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis? (1912) achieved the splendour of a showing before King George V in London and a society premiere in New York. Despite its long list of epic delights, including the soon-to-be obligatory cast of thousands, a large number of lions and horses, and huge sets designed by Guazzoni himself, this Quo Vadis? was very static, and it took Giovanni Pastrone with Ca6;>ia (19 13), a story of the Punic Wars, to show the real potential ofthe epic form. Pastrone allowed his camera to move; his audience, instead of sitting in the stalls watching events passing across the screen as if on stage, went with the camera through palaces, into temples, across landscapes.
In America, D. W. Griffith went further and changed the shape of the movie screen from nearly square to a much more vertical shape to allow room for his great vistas of ancient temples and palaces. It was the Italian epic which inspired him to move from the small-scale, intimate viewpoint which characterized most of the hundreds of films he had made for Biograph to think big. All the techniques of editing, lighting and composition which Grittith had developed in these opposite Shermans march to the sea in Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation (1915). above
The high point of early Italian cinema; Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1913). right Cecil B. DeMille’s first version of The
Ten Commandments (1923). films, and which made him one of the greatest innovators in the history of the movies, were aUied to his splendid new vision of the cinema to create the first true epics.
After trying out the form in Judith of Bethulia (1913), Griffith made The Birth of a Nation (1915), which told the story of the American Civil War. His next film. Intolerance (1916), subtitled ‘Love’s Struggle Through the Ages’, looked at intolerance in four periods of history (Modern America, Judea in AD 27, sixteenth-century France, and Babylon). The film set standards of authenticity and moral purpose which no epic made since has bettered and which few have matched.
The Bible
The Bible has been the inspiration for many of the best epics. Hundreds of films have been based on stories from both Testaments, most of them involving some sort of spectacle, and some reaching epic proportions. A certain inhibition about depicting the figure of Christ meant that the main character in New Testament films until quite recently was often a misty figure, or even just a hand, or a voice, or just a reflection in the faces of onlookers. Such was the great Cecil B. DeMille’s reverence for his subject, that he would not allow the actors playing Christ and his Disciples in his King of Kings (1927) to drink or swear on set.
Little such reverence has stood in the way of the creators of Old Testament epics. DeMille’s approach to the Old Testament, via two versions of The Ten Commandments (1923 and 1956), The Sign of the Cross {19^2) and Samson and Delilah (1949), was on the grand scale. Most of his characters were cardboard, his lapses of taste legion, and his interpretation of such concepts as ‘decorum’ and ‘modesty’ questionable. But his films have the style and vigour born of super-confidence and remain splendid entertainment.
Among the films telling the stories of biblical figures like Ruth, Solomon and Sheba, Salome, David and Bathsheba, and Barabbas, or attempting to cover large sections of the Bible, like George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told (1964), Dino de Laurentiis’ production of The Bible (1966) stands out not so much for its epic qualities – it was in fact rather dull -as for the stupendous thinking behind it. De Laurentiis wanted to make a ninehour epic covering the first six books of the Old Testament, each book to be handled by a leading director: Welles, Fellini, or Bergman. In the end, John Huston directed the film, which covered only Genesis. The biblical epic to end all epics has still to find its maker.
The Epic Hero
The archetypal epic hero or heroine must be heroic, showing quahties of strength, endurance, beauty or power not given to ordinary mortals. Until David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), both of which featured heroes who were passive, thinking men forced into reluctant action, the epic had no room for the anti-hero. Everything must be in sharp black and white, and if the heroes or heroines of epics must die, they must do it with grandeur. There is probably no more splendid image in the epic genre than the last ride of El Cid- Charlton Heston as the dead Cid, bound upright in his horse’s saddle, galloping from our sight into glorious legend. It is a heart-stopping moment.
The heroes of epics have come from legend – Helen of Troy, Robin Hood, Hercules, or El Cid – and from history. Napoleon, the young General, was the hero of Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), and Napoleon, Emperor of the French, was the dominating character in two versions of War and Peace – King Vidor’s splendid 1956 version, and the Russian Sergei Bondarchuk’s seven-and-a-half- hours- long reconstruction of Tolstoy’s novel made between 1963 and 1967 -as well as the 1970 USSR/Italy co-production Waterloo. Ivan the Terrible, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Cromwell, General George Patton, and Winston Churchill have all been the subjects of films of epic proportions. Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, Serpent of the Nile, has inspired more films than most. From Melies in the 1890s to the Carry On team in the 1960s, Cleopatra has been a fascinating heroine.
The Fall of Rome
The Bible and the Hves of great men have been two major sources of the epic film. A third has been the crumbling of civilizations, the deaththroes of empires. It is the drama of the subject, rather than the spectacular visual effects achieved, which gives such strength to films like Eisenstein’s October, or to the many films about Ancient Rome.
The Roman Empire has inspired so many epics because its story has a two-fold theme: the crumbling of an empire contrasted with the rise of a new world religion, Christianity. It is a theme which has inspired some of the best epics, notably the two versions of Ben Hur, the silent version of 1926, starring Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman, and William Wyler’s 1959 CinemaScope version which starred Charlton Heston, as well as the several versions of Quo Vadis?, De- Mille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932), the many re-makes of The Last Days of Pompeii, The /?ofee (1953), Spartacus (i960), and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).
Epic Battles
Epic films have given the film-goer some of his most exciting moments when they have been re-creating battles. Among the great war scenes, the battle on the ice in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, the cavalry charges in the Polish The Ktiights of the Teutonic Order (i960, directed by Aleksander Ford), or the whistle of the arrows at Agincourt in Olivier’s Henry V, have pride of place.
As war has dominated the history of the twentieth century, so it has been a major theme of epics about the twentieth century. Not all of them have needed huge, expensive battle scenes to make their point: King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) had its important battle scenes, but its greatest effect was achieved through its concentration on incidents in the lives of ordinary soldiers. But in some of them, the batdes have been spectacular indeed : the storming of the Normandy beaches in The Longest Day (1962), the tank battles in the desert in Patton: Lust for Glory (1969) (even if, as the experts were quick to point out, they were the wrong tanks), the camel cavalry charges in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), or the re-creation of the aerial dog-fights in The Battle of Britain (1969).
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