Julius Caesar

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched Julius Caesar the 1953 production directed by Joseph Mankiewicz out of MGM.

The script is an adaptation of the play, I can’t say how much they left out, but I doubt they added more than a necessary line here and there. The cast is the usual Hollywood Shakespeare all-star lineup. Blessed are they with John Gielgud as Cassius, and James Mason does a fine turn as Brutus.

The chief oddity, or attraction, to the movie was casting Marlon Brando as Antony. Could mumble-mouth, t-shirt hunk handle the Bard’s immortal words?

Well, he does. He does well. Except, the ‘method’ acting does not allow for Brando to handle the big scene, his speech. This speech runs on for about 10, 12 minutes – it’s a huge piece of the play, where according to Gustav Freytag, the ‘counterplay’ or ‘counterforce’ arises, and begins to overtopple the player, the force, Brutus.

But Brando, in the ‘method’ manner, approaches the speech not as rhetoric (as the real Antony must have done, and surely Shakespeare intended) but rather as an honest outpouring of passion. The direction indicates indeed that Antony is only playing; there is a moment…

…But maybe I ought to sketch in the story first to refresh your memory:

Julius Caesar has just returned to Rome after defeating Pompey in the East (in Egypt he was given Pompey’s head). Now is Caesar the undisputed top dog in the city, and the senate declares him ‘dictator for life’ – but some want to give him even more: they want to crown him King. This is utterly unacceptable to old patriot Brutus, as well as some others whose relatives Caesar banished, or who aren’t making out so well under Caesar’s rule. (The actual politics of the situation are a lot more complicated, as I recall, but Shakespeare didn’t really know them, or at any rate put them aside to focus on the notion of ambition, patriotism, and so on.)

So Brutus and the others assassinate Caesar in order to maintain the Republic. Cassius is all for killing Marcus Antonius as well, but Brutus says no. Brutus goes so far as to allow Antony to speak at Caesar’s funeral after Brutus.

Brutus addresses the crowd, and gives reason for the assassination. The mob, at first outraged over the popular leader’s murder, quickly turns to support Brutus and the others. Then Brutus lets Antony speak, and leaves. Antony gives a speech which at first praises Brutus and the conspirators, but cleverly undermines this, and has the crowd turn completely against them.

At one moment in this speech, Antony turns away, overcome, he says, by his grief. Meanwhile the crowd works itself up. We get a CU of Antony’s face as he listens, opening his eyes slyly, not overcome at all. He judges the murmurs, and turns back to them when the moment is ripe. Therefore Mankiewicz intends that this scene be a clever ploy on Antony’s part.

Brando may have thought that, well, sure it’s a ploy, but the ploy works best if Antony is a good actor more than an orator, so he acts Antony acting as well as Brando would have acted if he were Antony – if you get what I mean.

The chief technical problem with this speech is that Brando very early on hits full volume. Then he has no place to go; the needle is pinned, he can’t turn the volume up to 11. He can only back down a little, briefly, before he goes full-roar again. So he is shouting through a lot of the speech, which is weaker than if he only shouted in about a tenth of it, and worked his way up to full-roar more gradually, slowly.

The production is a handsome one. This was made in the first big flush of the Hollywood craze for epics, and it’s odd that it was shot in black and white rather than technicolor. Maybe the gravity of the subject matter seemed to suit monochrome better. I have mixed feelings about this; it would look a lot better if shot in good color – the color that Kodak could have provided in the early 60s – but the over-saturated color of 1953 probably would have looked gaudy and too much. Plus, back then the DPs really hadn’t mastered color, and there are a lot of painted backdrops and effects shots. They pass, barely, in black and white, but in color, I bet they would just scream fake.

Though the play takes its title from Caesar, the protagonist is Brutus. Toward the end, I was thinking that Brutus was a dupe of Cassius and the others, the man who felt he was acting honorably, but in truth was only a tool manipulated by the schemers who had gold or power in mind. And yet at the end, Antony and Octavius both give the dead Brutus tribute, and since Antony is almost alone when he says the ‘noblest Roman of them all’ line, it doesn’t seem like a cynical saying. At any rate, Brando delivers these lines sincerely, whereas he might well have delivered them cynically, mockingly.

It’s funny, watching this, I’m aware of all the other choices. I’m thinking of how I might want to play the lines, or direct them. I’m even thinking of criticizing Gielgud in his big first speech to Brutus, trying to win Brutus to their cause. The classics can do that, I guess – I know how many other productions have been made of the play, how many other choices there are. It’s like a standard ballad sung by many singers. The ballad takes on an existence of its own and we are aware of it. Whereas something like 2001 is only the one movie, made by the one director, unthinkable as a D. W. Griffith version, or a Cecil B. DeMille version, or a Steven Spielberg version.

(23 March 2009)