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Carry on classics

By Lisa Sabbage

Russell Crowe has a lot to answer for. When the actor starred as the avenging Maximus in Gladiator, he unleashed much more than his rippling muscles. It seems he also liberated a mass of classics upon the movie industry.

Indeed, since Gladiator whipped up US457.2 million dollars in box office receipts worldwide and took home the Oscar for best picture, Hollywood has been mining the works of Homer and Herodotus, Aeschylus and Euripides for inspiration.

Brad Pitt is now working on Troy, an adaptation of The Iliad focusing on the rivalry between Achilles (Pitt) and the Trojan prince Hector (Eric Bana) during the Trojan War. Colin Farrell is shortly to star as Alexander the Great, and action hero Vin Diesel is taking on Hannibal, the Carthaginian leader who crossed the Alps on elephant to attack Rome in 218BC. Meanwhile, rumours persist that director Michael Mann is planning a project about the Battle of Thermopylae, in which 300 Spartan warriors held off the Persian hordes for six days in 480BC.

Not since the golden age of the Hollywood studio system have we seen so many swords and sandals.

Yet this 21st century comeback of the classics is not as unlikely as it might initially appear. According to British film critic Mark Cousins, the movie-going public is searching for a new kind of masculinity - just as it did in the post-war years of the early silent era and again in the decade after World War II.

"As Schwarzenegger and Stallone age, there is the need for a new macho hero. It was something that started with Russell Crowe in Gladiator," says Cousins.

Historically, Hollywood also has a habit of using the classics to show off new innovations in the industry.

"Whenever there is a technological development, the movies turn to the classic stories," he says. "They did it with early silent movies, they did it with Cinemascope, and now they are doing it with digital."

In the 1950s, for instance, Hollywood was in crisis. Television sets had jumped from about a million in 1948 to 11 million by 1950, and the small screen had persuaded millions of people to stay at home to be entertained.

The studios were desperate for something big to tempt the public out of their living rooms and back into movie theatres.

They found the solution in Cinemascope - the wide screen technique that projected images on to screens twice the normal size and promised an added three-dimensional quality that TV could not hope to match. All the studios required next, was subject matter on an equally grand scale.

At Twentieth Century Fox, chief Darryl Zanuck decided to pair the new technique with a suitably epic theme. He chose The Robe, based on the novel by Lloyd C. Douglas about a Roman soldier who embarks on a journey toward faith after donning the discarded robe of the crucified Jesus.

"Hollywood will rise or fall on the success of The Robe," Zanuck promised Variety magazine.

In his own way, Zanuck was right. While the new technique failed to impress, the movie itself was a hit. It cleaned up at the box office and spawned a chariot load of imitators in the religious or classical mould - tales such as Demetrius and the Gladiators, David and Bathsheba, Land of the Pharaohs, The Egyptian, Daniel and the Women of Babylon, Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments, Julius Caesar, Spartacus, and MGM's remake of Ben Hur. Not to mention the slew of B-grade versions starring obscure body-builders turned actors, animated monsters and titans, and extras sporting wristwatches and fake tans.

Then, as now, the fact and fiction of the classical period had everything movie-makers could ask for: passion, conflict and action, youth, treachery and tragedy. What's more, the canon of myths and legends offered the gravitas that ailing Tinseltown was so desperate to confer upon itself.

"Classic stories, or stories that are just very ancient, gain the status of myths in their retelling," observes Professor Valentine Cunningham, of Oxford University. "They are stories that can be revivified. So they earn long life"

Rooted as they are in the distant past, the classics also give producers and directors a certain freedom to imagine and represent history as spectacle and romance.

In Spartacus, for instance, the producers spiced up the action by introducing the hero to Varinia, the beautiful love interest who never actually existed in real life. Similarly, it showed Caesar helping to suppress the slave revolt - great drama, but a historical falsehood.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, was Cecil B DeMille's motto. In The Ten Commandments, the coast and sand dunes of Guadalupe in California stood in for the Red Sea and the Egyptian desert, and he trucked in several specially made sphinxes from Los Angeles to stand at the gates of his imaginary Pharaoh's city (dismantling them on the way when they would not fit under inconvenient bridges).

"The other big location scene, the pursuit of the Israelites by Pharaoh's chariots," recalled DeMille in his 1959 autobiography, "was shot at Muroe Dry Lake. For this we had two groups of expert horsemen, cowboys with motion picture experience from Hollywood and a contingent of artillerymen from the regular army, lent us by their commanding general in San Francisco.

"Word got around that the artillerymen intended to ride down the Hollywood cowboys more thoroughly than the ancient Egyptians would have ridden down the Israelites if they had overtaken them.. Literally scared stiff, they refused to get into the melee with the artillery men."

In the end, already running spectacularly over budget, the director shot the scene with rather more Pharaoh's chariots than Israelites.

Indeed, it was the spiralling costs of these Hollywood epics that eventually brought about their downfall. In 1958, Twentieth Century Fox announced with great fanfare that it was making Cleopatra with a star-studded cast and a multi-million-dollar budget. Behind the scenes, however, things went wrong almost from the start.

There were arguments over everything from locations to set designs. Shooting some scenes at a studio in England, producer Walter Wanger discovered there was a shortage of construction material and builders. Props had to be designed and constructed from scratch - slow and expensive - and even the British hairdressers' union made his life difficult, protesting about his employment of an American stylist. Then came the infamous affair between stars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, adding yet more delays and costs to an already heaving budget.

Billed as "the motion picture the world has been waiting for", Cleopatra was not finished until 1962. By then, the story of the Egyptian queen and her doomed love triangle with Caesar and Mark Antony had cost US44 million dollars - about 268 million in today's dollars. Unfortunately for all concerned, it failed to earn back even a quarter of that at the box office.

"Surely Cleopatra will come to mark the end of a Hollywood era," wrote Fox's publicity manager Nathan Weiss. "I think with this film it can be seen that the whole system finally breaks down under its own weight."

And so it proved. Until the 21st century and the movie industry's search for fresh material with which to show off its digital technology, and the world's renewed concern with conquerors and the conquered.

"There will always be movies of course," prophesied Weiss, "and presumably better ones than there ever were before; and yet they won't quite be as grand, as foolish, as wonderful as they used to be."

Time, and Brad Pitt, will tell.

-Asia Features



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