In this case, digitalized movies are retrieving Hollywood sword and toga epics popular in the 1950s and early 1960s, which culminated in such movies as Spartacus and 1959's Ben-Hur.
In recent times, we've had the mammoth Roman Colosseum in Ridley Scott's 2000 epic Gladiator, and this year's Troy, with its vast CGI panorama of ships and armies. Early in November Oliver Stone will release Alexander, in which the Macedonian conqueror will also command a horde conjured up by the computer.
There's a striking coincidence here. In one year, 1956, the world was given two epics by two respected Hollywood directors: Robert Wise's Helen Of Troy and Robert Rossen's Alexander The Great.
In 2004, we have, in effect, remakes of both movies. Neither of the 1950s movies was very successful. Helen Of Troy was preceded by a publicity campaign promising moviegoers the most handsome man in the world (Paris) and the most beautiful woman in the world (Helen), but the actors who played those roles, a Frenchman named Jacques Sernas and an Italian named Rossana Podestà, failed to live up to billing. For one thing, they spoke fractured English and their lines were dubbed. Poor Podestà, the most beautiful woman in the world, also had to compete with Brigitte Bardot, another cast member.
Alexander The Great had some good battle scenes, but when I saw it as a little boy I was bored, except for the scene where Fredric March, playing Alexander's father, Philip of Macedonia, dances on top of a mountain after slaughtering a bunch of people and chants, "Philip the Barbarian! Philip the Barbarian!"
I liked that scene because I thought Philip was a sissy name, and here was a positive role model.
Needless to say, this year's films stake a claim to artistic as well as technical advances on these old CinemaScope clunkers.
We haven't seen Oliver Stone's Alexander yet, but we know there are a lot of deep political thoughts whirling inside that head of his.
Sure enough, in a recent article, Stone has said he believes Alexander was assassinated — given a poisoned cup of wine — by reactionary Macedonians because of his racial liberalism. Alexander wanted, Stone writes, "to radically globalize the known world by, among other things, intermixing Macedonian and Oriental bloodlines." He was, like another Stone hero and film subject, John F. Kennedy, "increasingly calling for radical change on several fronts."
Wolfgang Peterson's Troy is also far more political than its predecessor. Of course, that's not saying much. What is surprising is that it's a good movie. It actually used the digital technology to appropriate effect.
I know this is right because I confirmed my impression with my old Classics professor, M. Owen Lee. (Father Lee, author of First Intermissions, a series of commentaries on opera, is as conversant with movies and operas as he is with Greek and Latin.)
"I liked the Homeric effect with the digitalized and aerial views of the battles," Lee said. "I thought those were wonderful. Homer has this Olympian view of what's going on in The Iliad, which is very much like watching a movie. He doesn't put himself in the middle of it. He watches from a distance. Everything is beautiful, as expressed in these great Homeric similes — the two armies clashing like waves in the sand, or flies around a milk pail."
But Homer is also master of the medium shot and the close-up, so to speak. In the middle of a battle he will switch focus from the big picture to these two men locked in mortal combat, and suddenly it's as if the rest of the battle has disappeared.
At those points, the spotlight often falls on Achilles, portrayed by Brad Pitt. Some snobby movie critics — not our Star critics, I might add — have sneered at Pitt, and it's true (Father Lee agrees) that Pitt is not always up to great scenes, like the indescribably poignant visit of King Priam to the tent of Achilles at night to beg for the body of his son, Hector. But Pitt's leaping and other athletic displays are graceful and convincing, his golden mane is true to Homer, who describes Achilles as having "lion-coloured hair," and even Philip the Barbarian would admit the guy's beautiful.
Peter O'Toole, who plays King Priam in the movie, was once himself a golden-haired, blue-eyed hero in a movie epic entitled Lawrence Of Arabia. Noel Coward said that if O'Toole were any more beautiful they would have had to call the movie Florence Of Arabia. Pitt is a little less delicate than O'Toole, but still. Any more male beauty in this film and the next step is a gay porn flick: The Boy Toy From Troy, or Achilles In The Lillies.
But Pitt is a lot better than the beefy Stanley Baker, the British actor who played Achilles in the 1956 movie. You can at least begin to imagine his character as the son of a goddess, and one favoured by the gods.
For the record, Homer explicitly denies the notion that Achilles and his great friend Patroclus were homosexual lovers. Father Lee tells me, however, that the dramatist Aeschylus wrote a play based on the theme that Achilles and Patroclus were, in fact, gay. Unfortunately, the play was lost.
The movie Troy, rather ludicrously, tries to explain the passionate attachment of the two men by making them cousins. "But he's my cousin!" Achilles cries out in grief and anguish at one point. So?
That Aeschylus would tamper with the great Homeric myth in such fashion reminds me of another point. Our snobbish critics were offended that Wolfgang Peterson would take liberties in this movie with The Iliad. But as Lee points out, the ancient Greeks who went to the theatre to see some treatment of Homeric myth were always wondering how Aeschylus or Euripides was going to change the story to make it relevant to their present concerns.
After the Athenians, in a famously brutal episode during the Peloponnesian War slaughtered the men and enslaved the women of the island of Melos, Euripides wrote his play, The Trojan Women, a searing portrayal of the sufferings of the vanquished. His audience didn't need a study guide to understand the play's connections with current affairs.
In the same way, Wolfgang Peterson makes the connections between Achilles's war and the current war in Iraq quite clear. When a Trojan temple is raided in the early part of the movie, we can easily feel the parallel with a destroyed mosque or looted antiquities. It is a movie that genuinely makes a viewer disgusted with war.
In that sense, it presents a promising example for future epics of its kind. [the whole thing]
