Beware the Ides of March

I didn't intend to blog about multiple movies with Julius Caesar as a character in close succession, but the movies all showed up on one or another movie channel a few weeks apart, so we get a third film featuring Caesar: the 1953 MGM adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, tomorrow at 11:45 AM. (Yes, tomorrow is March 16, and the Ides of March are traditionally on the 15th. But because the 31 Days of Oscar grouping of movies by decade, as a 50s movie it had to air on a Wednesday.)

According to the Wikipedia article, this is a fairly close adaptation of the Shakespeare play, but I was in the academic track in high school that did a different selection of Shakespeare plays, so I got Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth instead. The movie opens not long (history suggests a year, but time is telescoped to make it seem like a couple of days) before the Ides of March on which Caesar (Louis Calhern) would be killed. He's just killed some of his biggest rivals for power in battle, and the braying mob in Rome wants him made king/dictator; as we saw in Cleopatra the idea of anybody being a king was supposed to be horrifying to republican Rome. But Marc Antony (Marlon Brando) seems to be encouraging Caesar to take the crown.

This obviously terrifies any number of Caesar's other rivals. Some of them just want power for themselves, probably recognizing that the Republic had been fatally wounded for several decades already. This notably includes Cassius (John Gielgud) and Casca (Edmond O'Brien), although not so much Brutus (James Mason) at first. Brutus is less after power than concerned about the Republic being preserved, leading to a reluctance to join a conspiracy against Caesar. But Cassius and Casca aren't stupid. They know how to manipulate people, and so make it look as though there are quite a few Romans who want Caesar to be stopped before he gets too much power. Ultimately, after a lot of soul-searching, Brutus agrees to take part in the conspiracy.

Caesar, depsite having heard the warning to beware the Ides of March, and much to the chagrin of his wife Calpurnia (Greer Garson, in a one-scene role), goes to the Senate, where he gets killed, stabbed first by Casca and then the other conspirators, before Brutus has to deliver the coup de grace that leads Caesar to utter "Et tu, Brute".

All of this occurs inside the Senate, but waiting outside is another braying mob. Brutus, the intellectual, gives an eminently logical speech about Caesar, while Marc Antony, the one person not a part of the conspiracy, knows how to whip up that mob to the point they'll turn on the people who killed Caesar. The conspirators are going to have to flee rome, but even then they're not going to be safe, as Marc Antony and the other members of the triumvirate hunt them down.

This version of Julius Caesar is probably best-known for the fact that Marlon Brando was cast as Antony. Brando is one actor who was decidedly not known for being a Shakespearean actor, unlike those British members of the cast, notably Gielgud. (James Mason had also done a fair amount of Shakespeare before becoming a movie star.) Brando was also known at the time for his less-than-stellar diction. To be honest, Brando's diction is not particularly a problem, although there are times where his delivery devolves into something like his character from The Wild One.

Unsurprisingly, Mason and especially Gielgud handle the dialog well; somewhat more surprising is Edmond O'Brien, whom I wouldn't have thought of as being adept at Shakespeare. Louis Calhern dies halfway through and gets a relatively small number of scenes, and the female roles are small and an excuse cast big names. In addition to the aforementioned Garson there's Deborah Kerr as Brutus' wife.

Overall, Julius Caesar is the sort of movie MGM was very good at producing, and the quality shines through in pretty much every scene, other than possibly the battle scenes looking more like southern California than Italy. But there wasn't much that could be done about it without busting the budget. This version of Julius Caesar is definitely worth a watch.