Julius Caesar (1953)
Brutus and Cassius whack Caesar, lose a war to Mark Antony, kill themselves.
Ah, our first Shakespeare adaptation! The question we’ll be asking of director Joseph L. Mankiewicz1 is how he seeks to elevate material that’s been done for over 400 years. If you’ve read the bard on the page, you know it can be a bit of a tiresome experience, what with the long monologues and the sparse stage directions. Seeing it performed, though, can bring the words to life. How does this adaptation of Julius Caesar do in this regard?
Well, the speechifying scenes at Caesar’s funeral, where Brutus attempts to justify his murder of Caesar2 or where Mark Antony tears down Brutus (this one is the “friends, Romans, countrymen” speech) are pretty great. But in the plotting scenes between Brutus and Cassius, the intrigue simply doesn’t feel vital. And then there’s Marlon Brando. His performance in Viva Zapata! was as bad as anything we’ve seen in this column, but here as Mark Antony, he’s serviceable. It all adds up to a functional experience.
Rating: 5/10, I'll lend exactly one ear.
Cast and Crew
Look, the marquee says that Marlon Brando is the star of this movie and he’s the one who was nominated for the Oscar, but Brutus, not Mark Antony, is clearly the lead in Julius Caesar. Brutus is played by James Mason, a British actor who found stardom playing in Gainsborough melodramas3, including 1943’s The Man in Grey. At the end of the ‘40s, he came to Hollywood and had a big hit with 1951’s The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel.4 Many of his most notable roles are coming up; we’ll catch up with him in 1954 when he snags his own Best Actor nomination.
Deborah Kerr, who plays Brutus’ wife Portia, is making her second 1953 appearance in this column after her role in the ensemble drama From Here to Eternity. She was a star of British movies early in the 1940s and made her first Hollywood appearance in the 1947 Clark Gable film The Hucksters. Her role in this film is a small, thankless one, but she's got plenty of meatier parts coming up.5
Something exciting that happens with this project is learning about a guy you’ve never heard of that’s a Big Deal. That Big Deal is John Gielgud, who plays Cassius and is someone we’ll get to see again and again into the ‘90s. With Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, Gielgud was recognized as part of the “great trinity of theatrical knights.”6 Brando asked Gielgud for help in performing Shakespeare, so I’m inclined to give Gielgud credit for getting Brando his third Oscar nomination.
You may remember Louis Calhern as the affable, intellectual Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. from 1950’s The Magnificent Yankee, but his role here is quite different. Calhern plays an imperious Julius Caesar, and even when he appears to Brutus as a Star Wars force ghost, he wields the power the role requires.
The Trivia
I mean, it’s Shakespeare, it’s Roman history…you need to know it all. Let’s first hit the (truncated) story of the real Julius Caesar. We’ll start with the First Triumvirate7, a political alliance between him, Pompey, and Crassus. After Crassus’ death8, a civil war breaks out between Pompey and Caesar when Caesar crosses the Rubicon river with his army (saying “the die is cast”). Caesar wins the war and becomes dictator in perpetuity, leading to the conspiracy where Brutus, Cassius, and the rest of the Liberators knock him off in the Theater of Pompey.
This leads to the events in Acts IV and V of “Julius Caesar.” The Second Triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus issue a number of proscriptions (i.e., banishments to death) for political enemies, then go to war with Brutus and Cassius, beating them at the Battle of Philippi. The triumvirs then divide the Roman world amongst themselves. Later, ex-BFFs Mark Antony and Octavian go to war with each other and, after the War of Actium, Octavian emerges victorious with a new title (Augustus Caesar) and the Roman Republic ends, replaced by an Empire.
As for what you should know about the play: well, beyond the story, it has a bunch of awesome quotes that you may recognize. You should know:
CASSIUS: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves (providing the title of John Green’s book “The Fault in our Stars”)
CASSIUS: Why, man, [Caesar] doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus
CAESAR: Cowards die many times before their deaths / The valiant never taste of death but once
CAESAR: Et tu, Brute?9 (Caesar says this after his 23rd stab comes from his bud Brutus)
MARK ANTONY: Cry ‘havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war (or, if you’re Marlon Brando, it’s cry HAAAAAAAVOC)
Another is the quote, “Beware the ides of March,” so let’s talk ides. The “ides” of a month were one of the three reference points in the Roman calendar10; the ides fell in the middle of the month. Also, the Roman calendar, designed by Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, initially only had ten months, starting in March. The time that would become January and February was just considered uncounted winter time; those final two months were added by Numa.11
Odds and Ends
Metellus refers to Caesar as “puissant”; that’s a word from the French for “powerful”...Cassius is described as “choleric”; that’s one of the four temperaments (with sanguine, melancholic, and phlegmatic) associated with the humors (yellow bile, blood, black bile, and phlegm, respectively)…the hat that looks like it has a broom on the top of it is called a “galea.”
We’re also not close to being done with Shakespeare. We’ll see his work again in 1955.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz, one of the two great screenwriting Mankiewicz brothers, wrote and directed Julius Caesar. He also pulled double duty on A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950), both of which won him Oscars for writing and directing.
This is where Brutus gives the dog-ate-my-homework-level excuse of “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.”
Gainsborough melodramas are named after Gainsborough Pictures, the British studio that made them. They were popular with women at a time when women were the main movie-going audience (because of, y’know, the war).
Unrelated: know Thomas Gainsborough’s Rococo painting “The Blue Boy” from 1770—and don’t mix him up with contemporaneous English portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds.
The Desert Fox helped create the “Rommel myth”—that Rommel was apolitical and was opposed to Nazi policies. I still don’t know why there was a market in 1951 for Rommel apologia since, c’mon, that dude was a Nazi.
Kerr was also in the 1951 ancient Roman epic Quo Vadis (based on the same-named novel by Polish Nobelist Henryk Sienkiewicz), whose old sets were used for Julius Caesar.
All three of these knights star in a film coming up soon in this column.
Apparently modern scholars don’t use the term “First Triumvirate,” since the alliance was informal and it makes it seem on par with the official alliance of the Second Triumvirate. Some modern scholars use “Big 3” instead. So…Caesar = LeBron James, Pompey = Dwyane Wade, Crassus = Chris Bosh? Yeah, actually, that looks okay.
We’re eliding a lot here, but one fun fact about Crassus’ death is that he has molten gold poured down his throat to mock him for his wealth.
More fun facts: Caesar’s not done talking after that famous line. After “et tu, Brute,” he says “then fall, Caesar.”
The other two were the kalends and nones.
This helps explain why October (prefix “oct,” 8), November (prefix “nov,” 9) and December (prefix “dec,” 10) are the 10th, 11th, and 12th months, respectively—it’s because we added two months right at the beginning of the year, shifting all the other ones forward.