Yet despite its close association with oral epic, as a film genre the epic movie has not enjoyed the same high cultural kudos bestowed on its literary cousin. Epic movies are customarily dismissed as vulgar and garish burlesque spectacles which trade on a crude sensationalism that is usually masked beneath turgid religious morality, a facet of the genre self-consciously explored by the undisputed master of the ancient-world epic, Cecil B. DeMille. Biblical sex and biblical spectacle were DeMille’s trademarks, and when it came to filming equal loads of moralizing and debauchery, he was the master showman, and audiences, safe in their understanding that they were going to see a film of high religious morality, actually flocked to his epics specifically for the sex and violence: “I am sometimes accused,” he said, “of gingering up the Bible with lavish infusions of sex and violence but I wish my accusers would read their Bible more closely, for in those pages are more violence and sex than I could ever portray on the screen” (DeMille 1960: 366). He apologized, however, for rewriting the Book of Judges in his Samson and Delilah (1949), but for Paul Rotha the film was merely “manna for illiterates,” while John Steinbeck recorded: “Saw the picture. Loved the book” (Tanitch 2000: 50). At the release of Robert Aldrich’s Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) the satirist Dougald B. MacEachen mocked the pseudo-morality of the biblical epic in his poem The Hollywood Bible, which begins “The Bible’s one huge girlie show, / As now all moviegoers know.”
The derogatory way in which the epic movie has traditionally been regarded still persists. The cultural historian Robert Rosenstone, for example, has argued that, “film is a disturbing symbol of an increasingly post-literate world in which people can read but won’t” (Rosenstone 1995: 46), and for many film critics and film historians (and many movie audiences too) the epic film lays at the nadir of the cinematic experience, condemned for its overtly elaborate decor and impoverished imagination, and its presentation of history in a mode that is both contemporary and provincial. Hollywood’s history films are often regarded are perverting history to the point that it becomes unrecognizable, a concern that has led Rosenstone to complain that, “the Hollywood historical drama. . . like all genres. . . locks both filmmaker and audience into a series of conventions whose demands - for a love interest, physical action, personal confrontation, movement towards a climax, and denouement - are almost guaranteed to leave the historian of the period crying foul” (Rosenstone 1995: 29, cf. Cooper 1991: 19 on Spartacus).
But does Hollywood have a responsibility, a duty, to educate? “There is nothing duller on the screen than being accurate but not dramatic,” argues Stephen Ambrose (1996: 239). Certainly film changes the rules for approaching history, insisting on its own sort of “truths” which arise from a visual and aural realm that is difficult to capture adequately in the written word. This engagement with the past on film is potentially much more complex and hazardous than it is via any written text: on the screen many “historical” things can occur simultaneously - images, sound, speech, even text - fundamentals that support or contradict each other to create a realm of engagement and understanding as different from written history as written history is from oral history. So different and so complete is our engagement with history on film that it forces us to acknowledge that cinema constitutes a seismic shift in consciousness about how we think about, and reinterpret, our past.
More immediately, some critics have suggested that, “Hollywood, by providing splendid entertainment, has sent people to the history shelves in their millions” (McDonald Fraser 1988: 19), a comment which can be endorsed not only by the meteoric rise of reception studies as a significant academic focus among historians, but also by the number of students regularly enrolled on cinema-and-history courses in universities worldwide. For Oliver Stone, “[There’s] only [one] answer to people who say that movies brainwash young minds: Movies are just the first draft. They raise questions and inspire students to find out more” (Stone cited in Carnes 1996: 306). Perhaps the most temperate approach to the thorny problem of film’s relationship to academic history is that offered by the film director Federico Fellini, himself no stranger to the historical movie, who notes that, “The essential question must be: ‘What is the director trying to do, and is he succeeding?’ If historical authenticity is part of what he is trying to achieve, then it must be brought into question; if not, then in all fairness dramatic criteria alone must be used” (Fellini cited in Solomon 2001: 23).
Certainly in general reviews of the epic genre historical veracity is of little consequence, and while one occasionally finds praise for historical accuracy, most of the enthusiasm is reserved for the epics’ extravagant generality and excess - in terms of sets, costumes, extras, stars, and spectacle, as well as the millions of dollars spent on making such lavish entertainment. Take for example a review of a video release of Quo Vadis: “Colossal is just one of the many superlatives trumpeting the size and scope of this mammoth drama about Romans, Christians, lions, pagan rites, rituals, and Nero. Roman soldier Robert Taylor loves and pursues Christian maiden Deborah Kerr. It’s Christians versus Nero and the lions in the eternal fight between good and evil. The sets, scenery, and crowd scenes are nearly overwhelming. Peter Ustinov as Nero is priceless” (Martin and Porter 1987: 674).
However, the epic film has traditionally been dismissed by auteur theorists as submerging the director’s voice beneath the rich panoply of the films’ visual needs (although some directors have managed to preserve something of their auteur voice in the melee: think of Ridley Scott and Gladiator or the Alexander of Oliver Stone; Cecil B. DeMille even represents the personification of the epic movie in the public perception). Unlike other popular Hollywood movie genres - the western, the gangster film, and the musical - the epic has proved to be less than congenial in its attitude towards directorial idiosyncrasy, mainly due to the size and cost of mounting such a vast project. While most movie genres have proved elastic enough to accommodate the off-beat styles of even the most subversive directors, the epic’s need to reach a wide audience so that it can reap in some profit over the huge production budget calls for restraint on originality. As a result, the epic is the most conservative of all Hollywood genres, and the flavorless high tone of lofty nobility that often classifies the epic in terms of storyline, characterization, dialogue, and design spurns novelty and innovation, and positively encourages self-referencing and repetition. Thus, Gore Vidal, the one-time script-writer on Ben Hur, noted that, “William Wyler studied not Roman history but other Roman movies in preparation for Ben Hur” (Vidal 1992: 84). When Ridley Scott regenerated the epic with Gladiator in 2000, he acknowledged its success being dependent on the winning format created by the big-budget Roman epics of the 1950s (Landau 2000: 22, 64-66). Likewise, Oliver Stone explained to the production team of Alexander that he had been deeply influenced by films such as Ben Hur and Intolerance, and that Alexander was to be part of the long epic film legacy (Lane Fox 2004: 124).
The self-reflection inherent in the epic genre has had a major cultural impact on how people envisage the past. Many Western audiences receive their principal contact with the ancient world through popular culture, so much so that “the Romes created in popular culture are so pervasive and entrenched in the contemporary imagination that television programs purporting to present the real Rome use clips from Hollywood’s historical epics to bring ancient Rome to life” (Joshel et al. 2001: l). Visions of antiquity are frequently generated from scenes in Hollywood movies (Toplin 2002: 198 and 203).
Ridley Scott and Oliver Stone devotedly modeled their twenty-first-century epics on 1950s patterns because they understood that the epics of the 1950s had major box-office appeal for the reason that they employed all the tricks of the Hollywood trade - big stars, thrilling spectacle, cohesive narrative - and that for the epic to survive in the more cynical 2000s, the exact same formula should to be applied (albeit with a slight contemporary angle in the theme of the movie). After all, the epic film, like the epic poem, must be immediately accessible to a broad popular audience.
Recent work on the Hollywood “History Films” of the 1950s has revealed that ancient history received notable attention from the film makers throughout the decade, and that between 1950 and 1959 some 16 films were set in the bc period, with another 11 set in the era ad 1-500, and a further 16 set between ad 500 and 1000 (Eldridge 2006: 12-13). When compared with only 29 movies set between 1865 and 1890 (the American Civil War and Reconstruction era), the 43 films set in antiquity (if we extend the term to encompass the very early middle ages) was a testimony to the mass appeal of the ancient world during the Cold War period. While the much-anticipated post-Gladiator appeal of ancient-history films has not materialized in any concrete form, the epic is far from defunct; new styles of film making, respectful of, but not dependent on, the 1950s models, are reinventing the genre for twenty-first-century audience demands. Zack Snyder’s film 300 (2007) has certainly moved the epic into a new realm and reinvigorated the mass appeal which Troy and Alexander mysteriously lacked.
The tyranny of the Hollywood studio system may have discouraged any radical approach to epic subject matter, yet it is important not to classify all epic films together; there have been many honorable, popularly conceived Hollywood epics which stand head and shoulders over the commonly perceived detritus of many epic movies: Intolerance, Spartacus, and even, arguably, Alexander have attained a dignity and magnitude worthy of the literary epic, and should not be dismissed merely because they inhabit the same genre-space as, say, the weak Esther and the King (dir. Walsh and Bava, 1960), The Prodigal (dir. Thorpe, 1955) or, more recently, Troy.
World History
