The Gods Over the City

Charles George Gordon was a British officer whose list of seemingly impossible exploits occurred all over the world. He earned the commendation of the Emperor of China for putting down a rebellion and the love of the people in the Sudan for disrupting the slave trade. It all makes the events of 1966's Khartoum seem preposterous but I was surprised to read later how much of it was true. That said, the film has a lot of faults, generally coming off as a poor man's Lawrence of Arabia with its overuse of process shots, clear evidence of poor research, and some improbable plot contrivances. But the cast is great, including Charlton Heston as Gordon and Laurence Olivier as his opponent, the Mahdi, and Ralph Richardson is perfectly cast as a somewhat idealised version of the British Prime Minister William Gladstone.

In this version of history, Gladstone is secretly a strong supporter of Gordon's. Why he should keep it a secret when the public and Queen Victoria are passionately on Gordon's side is put down to the Parliament not liking the cost of Gordon's plan to defend the Sudanese town Khartoum; the Siege of Khartoum is the central subject of the story.

There are some terrific battle sequences in the film, though far from the best I've seen. There are too many shots of guys clutching their chests and falling over theatrically and too many times where the camera is misplaced, as when the front line of the Mahdi's troops rush directly at the camera moving backwards--the men run with obvious restraint to avoid colliding with the thing. But the biggest problem is that the film's stars, Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier, clearly spent very little time on location. We almost never see the latter--and almost always on soundstages when we do--and the former is lamely inserted with process shots that are particularly obtrusive in a night battle.

The film has two scenes where Gordon and the Mahdi meet in the Mahdi's tent; both scenes are somewhat preposterous poetic license and the idea that Gordon can safely drop in on the Mahdi is ridiculous even as the film makes a point of having characters remark on how dangerous it is. But apparently Gordon and the Mahdi really did correspond and the idea of having Heston and Olivier share scenes must have been too good to pass up, especially since the relationship between the two men ends up being the best part of the film.

It turns out, each sees something in the other similar to himself; each believes himself a key figure in the service of God. To the point where the implications of Gordon's defeat are troubling even to the Mahdi. The film spends a lot of time building up Gordon the point where you start to wonder if it's all to flatter Charlton Heston but it pays off in the end, giving the viewer an idea of what it's like when people have so much spiritual investment in their belief in one man.

There's a lot of brown-face in the film, really more than there needs to be, though personally I don't mind when its obviously someone as singular as Laurence Olivier. But the dozens of white actors playing Sudanese men shows just how little the production was willing to work with the location. Meanwhile, Charlton Heston's English accent seems almost okay in some scenes and then is completely absent in others. But otherwise he's good in the role and the film has some great visuals shot in Ultra Panavision.

Caesar in Dreams

All arguments between advocates for republics and enforcers of tyranny may be moot if all is controlled by capricious supernatural elements. The best part of Stuart Burge's 1970 adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is its sense of the dreamlike and the fantastic, the very palpable influence the stars really do have on mortal faults. But it's got a great cast, too, and despite cutting too much from the text I really don't think this one deserves its bad reputation.

Calpurnia's (Jill Bennett) dream sequence is terrific, for one thing, with pulsing fade ins and outs of footage of mobs, Caesar's bust actually bleeding in a dark void, and Christopher Lee as Artemidorus intoning his warning for Caesar about the conspirators. He never actually gets a chance to speak his warning in waking life in this version but it works a lot better as part of the dream. The echo effect on his voice and the soothsayer's ("Beware the Ides of March . . .!") reminds me of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland in a very positive way.

It really emphasises the incredible number of portents in this play where soothsayers, birds, the weather, and dreams are constantly trying to talk to the characters. If, as Cassius (Richard Johnson) says, the fault really is "not in our stars but in ourselves," it's not for lack of the stars trying.

That famous line is rarely quoted in full, "The fault (dear Brutus) is not in our Stars but in our Selves, that we are underlings." The reason Cassius is typically portrayed as a villain is that he, unlike Brutus, is motivated at least partially by his pride but he really doesn't deserve to be played like Snidely Whiplash, which Richard Johnson kind of does here. A lot of what he says makes sense in light of the fact that Caesar is becoming a dictator in what has long been a proud republic.

Why should that name be sounded more then yours
Write them together: Yours, is as faire a Name:
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well:
Weigh them, it is as heauy: Coniure with 'em,
Brutus will start a Spirit as soone as Caesar.
Now in the names of all the Gods at once,
Vpon what meate doth this our Caesar feede,
That he is growne so great? Age, thou art sham'd.
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of Noble Bloods.
When went there by an Age, since the great Flood,
But it was fam'd with more then with one man?

There's a television production with Peter Cushing as Cassius I'd dearly like to get my hands on.

There are several Hammer regulars in this production too, though. In addition to Christopher Lee, Andre Morell, my favourite Quatermass, plays Cicero, though if you blink you'll miss him. All of his dialogue was cut, you just see him walk past the screen in one shot, his role reduced to a curiously overcast cameo. In the play, he has dialogue with Casca about the weather, maybe Burge felt the storm effects worked well enough on their own. But Cicero's line, "But men may construe things after their fashion, clean from the purpose of the things themselves," is a nice thing to keep in mind while watching the play. It speaks to the conflicting motives of the conspirators which itself reflects the potential faults in decisions made by a group of people against a single clear vision like a Caesar's. The famous scene where Mark Antony sways the crowd after Brutus has spoken over Caesar's corpse shows just how much readier a crowd is to believe in a person than a principle.

Which makes Brutus' faith in a Roman love for republic so tragic. You might say it should've been obvious Antony would win the crowd over when the spectacle of Caesar's corpse is right there in front of them, but it only goes to show how much belief Brutus has in his own reasons and the capacity for other people to reason. He forgets how people might "construe things after their fashion".

Roger Ebert considered Jason Robards as Brutus to be a big weak point in the film, calling him "wooden". He's really no better or worse than he is in Once Upon a Time in the West or Melvin and Howard; I think the woodenness Ebert talks about is Robards' deliberate decision to make Brutus seem dispassionate. Here's a man who would murder a man he loves for a principle. The contrast between his performance and the others', though, may have a lot to do with the fact that he's an American in an otherwise almost entirely British cast who deliver their lines with the creativity of inflection and love of the language characteristic of traditional British stage actors. But there are other Americans in the cast who fit in better, including Robert Vaughn as Casca and Charlton Heston as Mark Antony.

While Robert Johnson maintains a straightforwardly villainous portrayal of Cassius, Heston takes the opportunity of playing Antony to deliver a more morally ambiguous character than he often had chance to at this stage of his career. His grief is sincere on beholding Caesar's corpse but he also luxuriates in an opulent picnic on the battlefield. It's one of those things that makes Antony seem like Charles II and Brutus like Oliver Cromwell by contrast and, indeed, I found myself thinking of the movie Cromwell which was released the same year. Alec Guinness' portrayal of Charles I is pretty restrained and Richard Harris is more more fiery than Robards here but obviously the story has a lot of philosophical similarities.

The cast of this Julius Caesar also includes Diana Rigg who's very memorable in a brief appearance as Portia; Michael Gough as one of the conspirators, making the most of only a couple lines; and John Gielgud plays Caesar himself, solid as always.

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In crimson steam the chain redeemed an eye.
For climbing rocks the newt awards a bike.
In circuits placid tigers eat the pie.
Through cloudy paints will thinner lightning strike.
A hollow hit resounds from golden bells.
But lucky storms return the ship to port.
An octopus contrives galactic Hells.
The snow returns to take the hidden fort.
The only legs support the speckled fawn.
Beneath the candy screen a movie plays.
Enchanted keys collect the doughnut dawn.
The bobbing frigate cleanly missed her stays.
A sinking flag was winking over waves.
The ocean rears a canny brace of knaves.