The Fall of the Roman Empire

Marcus Aurelius is dying at a frontier camp and considering leaving the empire not to his son Commodus but to a general, Livius. The document vanishes, Commodus takes the throne, and the decline begins. Anthony Mann directs, with Alec Guinness as Marcus Aurelius, Christopher Plummer as Commodus, Stephen Boyd as Livius, Sophia Loren as Lucilla and James Mason as the Greek philosopher Timonides. The real event here is not the screenplay. It is the set. Producer Samuel Bronston had the Roman Forum built at close to full scale at Las Matas outside Madrid: some 55,000 square metres, 350 statues, hundreds of columns. It was the largest outdoor film set ever constructed, and it is still cited as such. Commercially it was a catastrophe. The roughly 19 million dollar budget never came back, Bronston's operation collapsed, and Hollywood's appetite for the historical epic died with it. Together with Cleopatra it is usually named as the film that closed the genre. It did leave one strange legacy. Gladiator begins from this story: the same historical hinge, the same two men, the same disputed succession. Who it is for: anyone curious about pre digital spectacle, and about a Rome that was actually built rather than rendered. Who it is not for: it runs close to three hours, moves slowly, and gives its debates far more screen time than its battles.