JULIUS CAESAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 765, 19 March 1954, Page 20

JULIUS CAESAR

M.G.

M.

ILMGOERS, countrymen (I hope I may also call you friends), lend me your ears; I come not to bury Caesar, but to praise it. Here is stern, uncompromising Shakespeare; a producer unflustered by super-colossal imaginings, a director conscious of his responsibility to the text, and a cast dedicated to a high endeavour. If this is not the most exciting Shakespeare filmed -and I. think both Hefry V and Hamlet made my pulses beat a little faster-it is the truest to the word, There are accents which are not of Oxford, though some I would believe are closer to the tongue that Shakesp re. spake; there are no camera tri ‘so smart that the eye steals attention from the ear; there are cuts, but né-unkind ones. The lynching of Cinna the*poet (Act HI, Scene 3) has gone entirely (it: was a sop to the greundlings, anyway), and Octavius forfeits hig last _ word, but beyond that nothing of any consequence seems to have been lost. Nor, te my knowledge, has aught been added» The book, this time, is not "by William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Tay-lor"-to quote the credit-line which is

about all that is now remembered of The Taming of the Shrew. Full marks, then, for the scripting. The camera closely suits the image to the word. Both the director (Joseph L. Mankiewicz) and his director of photography (Joseph Ruttenbutg) have supoe the temptation — unresisted by Jlivier in Hamlet-to add the camera to the cast of characters. Here there are no swooping "dolly-shots" to leave the dialogue panting in the rear; the camera, like a good accompanist, is almast invariably unobtrusive, garrying the. words with it, And yet in this I found ‘Some cause for disappointment. I have a baseborn love of excitément, a thoroughly plebeian joy -in -the :dramatic’ picture. Because. of .it, I .could forgive Olivier and Alan Dent their wholesale cutting of Hamlet.. I can forget the loss’ of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when I remember the excitement ofthe throbbing heartbeat. end the dilating’ images — as Hamlet ‘climbed to meet: his father’s ghost. For the screen can re¢all: Shakespeare with advantages — advantages

that Shakespeare himself would revel in. Mankie- ‘ wicz" and his ‘producer (John Houseman) might have gone farther as Alm- ; makers and. (with care) ‘done no damage to Shakespeare: They «. certainly have not put us off with mean and ragged foils; they have given us Rome, but not quite room enough. Yet they have contrived ene superb moment that I will not forget; a dramatic stroke impossible outside the screen, Brutus is in the pulpit and the mob is almost in his hand -on the stage. eee pie be.. Then one : ; conseious "that: ee ‘are, lookin "not at Brutus. but:over ‘his. head.’ His oration peters éut-into:

Silence ~as":he, too; turrs* areuntl. Then the camera swings round ‘and up, *and we. see--not "Antony and . Others,.. with ‘Caesar’s: body". "(as the Stage. direction _has- it), but Antony along, with the: led corpse of Caesar im hig ‘atm, St standing atthe top of the ‘Senate | ‘steps. tif qa .awagnificent entry. ‘Whde ver dévised-it; and the slow omincus Ahat ‘icllows, deserves a laurel for that alone.

‘ petulant for one who felt he .was master of the world. But. there is justification in Shakespeare for it, He died well. Edmond O'Brien made a.good Casca (apparently to the surprise of some people). I did not expect too much of Mason’s Brutus. You can’t make a brooding Hamlet out of Brutus and Mason seemed to me infirm of purpose. What he did do, I thought, was to strip some of the specious nobility from off

On the other hand, the last scene of all seemed skimped. The. film ends with Antony’s noble -oration over the hody of Brutus-a far nobler hic iacet, I now feel (having seen the film and re-read the play with older and more disillusioned eyes), than the subject deserved. But the camera no more rises to the occasion than Brutus does. Even melodrama, when it involves the choice and "master ‘spirits of an’ age, desérves some pomp in its climax, but the corpse lies unimpressively in the foreground as the screen slowly dims out. What of the actors? Cathern’s Caesar is a shade overblown, sometimes just a thought too