Derek Winnert

Julius Caesar **** (1953, John Gielgud, Marlon Brando, James Mason, Louis Calhern, Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr, Edmond O’Brien) – Classic Movie Review 2383

1

Joseph L Mankiewicz’s fine 1953 Hollywood film of Shakespeare’s Roman play Julius Caesar stars not only a grand line-up of movie stars, but also of real actors in John Gielgud, Marlon Brando, James Mason and Louis Calhern.

Writer-director Joseph L Mankiewicz’s fine 1953 Hollywood version of Shakespeare’s Roman scandals in 44BC Julius Caesar stars not only a grand line-up of movie stars, but also of real actors in John Gielgud, Marlon Brando, James Mason, Louis Calhern, Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr and Edmond O’Brien.

2

Gielgud plays the high-ranking Roman conspirator Cassius and also helped Brando with finessing his Shakespearean verse speaking so that he was able to confound the cynics and his critics and turn in an expert performance as Mark Antony, with a particularly memorable success in the ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ speech.

3

Among the other exceptional performances are Gielgud’s own as Cassius, James Mason as Brutus (the other chief conspirator) and Louis Calhern as the doomed Julius Caesar.

4

The rest of the credit lies at director-writer Mankiewicz’s door. He does full justice to William Shakespeare’s great language while emphasising that there is also a good yarn to communicate here. The women (Greer Garson as Calpurnia and Deborah Kerr as Portia) don’t have a very good time though.

8

With Hollywood in big-star Shakespeare mode, there was a big Oscar buzz. But unexpectedly, there was only a single Oscar: for Cedric Gibbons and Edward Carfagno’s art direction and Edwin B Willis, Hugh Hunt’s set decoration. Indeed, of the actors, only Brando was even nominated, out of a total of five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture for producer John Houseman. The actors did better at the 1954 Baftas, with Gielgud winning Best British Actor and Brando Best Foreign Actor.

The Oscar-nominated original music score is by Miklós Rózsa.

The film got great reviews and, astonishingly, was profitable – just! It cost just over $2 million and earned just under $4 million, apparently resulting in a profit of $116,000.

6

It was remade in 1970 as Julius Caesar with Charlton Heston, Jason Robards and John Gielgud again, this time as Caesar. And again for TV in 2002 as Julius Caesar with Jeremy Sisto, Richard Harris and Christopher Walken.

Charlton Heston also appeared in the 1950 film  Julius Caesar.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2383

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com

7

9

10

 

Comments are closed.

Recent articles

Recent comments