Epics/Historical

Vintage Cinema presents

Epic film

Throughout film history, epic films have played an important role in expanding the aesthetic and narrative potentials of film and fostering a unique spectatorial relationship with the past.

Epic films are a style of filmmaking with large scale, sweeping scope, and spectacle. The usage of the term has shifted over time, sometimes designating a film genre and at other times simply synonymous with big-budget filmmaking. Like epics in the classical literary sense it is often focused on a heroic character. An epic's ambitious nature helps to set it apart from other types of film such as the period piece or adventure film.

Ben Hur (1907) by Sidney Olcott and Frank Oakes Rose

The Historical genre in film productions was called the Historical Epics.

Historical Epics films would usually take a historical or a mythical event and add an extravagant setting and lavish costumes, accompanied by an expansive musical score with an ensemble cast, which would make them among the most expensive of films to produce. The most common subjects of epic films are royalty, and important figures from various periods in world history.

Epics, costume dramas, historical dramas, war film epics, medieval romps, or 'period pictures' are tales that often cover a large expanse of time set against a vast, panoramic backdrop. In an episodic manner, they follow the continuing adventures of the hero(s), who are presented in the context of great historical events of the past.

Historical Epics films are expensive to produce, because they require elaborate and panoramic settings, on-location filming, authentic period costumes, inflated action on a massive scale and large casts of characters. Biopic (biographical) films are often less lavish versions of the epic film.

Epics often rewrite history, suffering from inauthenticity, fictitious recreations, excessive religiosity, hard-to-follow details and characters, romantic dreamworlds, ostentatious vulgarity, political correctness, and leaden scripts.

Along with Enrico Guazzoni's epic Quo Vadis? (1912, It.) - often considered the first successful feature-length motion picture and one of the first films with over two hours running time, the influential three-hour Italian silent film from Giovanni Pastrone, Cabiria (1914, It.), was an early example of spectacular and monumental epic film-making. It laid the pattern and groundwork for future big-budget feature-length films (by the likes of D.W. Griffith - for his Judith of Bethulia (1914),  The Birth of a Nation (1915), and later his Babylonian sequences in  Intolerance (1916) - and Cecil B. DeMille). Its story of 3rd century BC Ancient Rome included sequences of the eruption of Mt. Etna and Hannibal's crossing of the Alps with elephants. The landmark film was shot on location in North Africa, Sicily and the Italian Alps. It was also the first film to be screened at the White House.

Silent Era Epics:

Director Fred Niblo spent millions and two years to create the most expensive film of its time - MGM's silent-era Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1926), that starred Ramon Novarro and Francis Bushman as rivals Ben-Hur and Messala, respectively. The film included two colossal sequences: the sea galley battle with pirates and the famous chariot-race. Rex Ingram's anti-war film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), a star-making vehicle for Rudolph Valentino, was about two Argentinian brothers who ended up fighting on different sides in WWI. A non-Biblical epic of the silent era was Erich Von Stroheim's monumental masterpiece titled  Greed (1924), a severely-edited tale about the corruptive influences of avarice on a San Francisco dentist, his wife and an associate.

Raoul Walsh's imaginative Arabian Nights fantasy The Thief of Bagdad (1924) starred Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. with magical special effects and lavish production values including flying carpets and a giant genie. King Vidor's epic war film The Big Parade (1925) told the heart-wrenching tale of the love between a French peasant girl and an American doughboy fighting WWI in Europe. Russian director Sergei Eisenstein's silent masterpiece The Battleship Potemkin (1925) portrayed the 1905 revolution through a microcosmic view of a mutinous uprising aboard a Russian battleship. Its pioneering montage/editing sequences in the bloody Odessa Steps sequence changed filmmaking forever.

In the mid-1930s, MGM won the Best Picture with its adapted version of Charles Nordhoff's and James Norman Hall's historical non-fiction novel, the sea-adventure epic Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). It featured on-location shooting in Tahiti, and Charles Laughton as the definitive Captain Bligh and Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian. It was MGM's most expensive film production since their Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1926). Soon after, MGM produced the epic The Good Earth (1937), the last film of legendary producer Irving Thalberg - it was also an adaptation - of the Pearl S. Buck novel about Chinese peasants who faced, among other things, a devastating locust plague.

During the 40s, epics didn't fare very well, due to the scarcity of the war years. One exception was the British Shakespearean film from Laurence Olivier, Henry V (1944), with an American release in 1946. Best Picture and Best Actor-nominated Olivier won a special Academy Award for "his outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director in bringing Henry V to the screen."

In the 50s, the sound era brought more Biblical, historical, or Grecian/Roman times epics, alongside the development of colorful wide-screen CinemaScope to lure viewers away from their home televisions with free programming. Mervyn LeRoy's and MGM's full-scale, big-budget Quo Vadis? (1951) with Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr, told the tale of Emperor Nero's (Peter Ustinov) times and Christian persecution, and included great spectacle, costumes, romance, and action. Using sets left-over from Quo Vadis? (1951), MGM followed with Joseph L. Mankiewicz's hit Julius Caesar (1953), a star-studded, faithful Shakespearean adaptation with James Mason, John Gielgud, Louis Calhern (as Julius Caesar) and Marlon Brando (as Marc Antony). In the same year, Columbia produced the opulent, non-widescreen historical/religious epic Salome (1953) with Rita Hayworth as the title character Princess and Charles Laughton as King Herod.

Director Henry Koster's and 20th Century Fox's The Robe (1953) was the first widescreen CinemaScope feature film. The landmark film starred Richard Burton as young Roman tribune Marcellus Gallio whose life was affected by Jesus' robe, Victor Mature as his converted slave Demetrius, and Jean Simmons as Diana. Its success spurred the development of a sequel of sorts, Delmer Daves' Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), again with Victor Mature and also Susan Hayward. Mature, one of the mainstays of the ancient epic, also starred in Fox's intelligent film about 14th century BC Egypt in the same year - The Egyptian (1954), with supporting roles from Gene Tierney, Jean Simmons, and Peter Ustinov. It also included a score from Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann. Douglas Sirk's first Cinemascope film was the uncharacteristic 'sword and sandal' historical costume adventure The Sign of the Pagan (1954). It starred Jeff Chandler as a Roman centurion battling the forces of long-haired Attila the Hun (Jack Palance!) with a Fu Manchu mustache.

Former bodybuilder Steve Reeves starred as the mighty-muscle-bound Hercules, the Greek mythological hero, in two films, Hercules (1958) - a big hit when released internationally in 1959, and its rushed-into-production sequel Hercules Unchained (1959).

By the mid-50s and for the decade afterwards, many of these kinds of epics were typecasting various players, such as Victor Mature, Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Richard Burton, Jean Simmons, Peter Ustinov, and Stephen Boyd. Richard Burton starred as the title character in writer-director-producer Robert Rossen's Cinemascopic epic Alexander the Great (1956).

William Wyler's and MGM's beautifully framed, eleven Oscar-winning blockbuster film  Ben-Hur (1959), derived from Major General Lew Wallace's A Tale of the Christ, was a remake of the earlier classic silent film of the same title with Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman. This newer version, a $15 million three and a half-hour remake, starred Charlton Heston as the title character, and Stephen Boyd as his childhood friend/Roman enemy Messala, and included the same exciting slave galley battle scene and memorable chariot race.

The 1960s opened with Stanley Kubrick's intelligent gladiator-revolt epic Spartacus (1960) - the saga was based on Howard Fast's novel about an aborted Roman slave uprising in 73 B.C. Its original director Anthony Mann was fired two weeks into production - the opening shots of the film remain from his work. Spartacus was the first film to list a black-listed writer's name on the screen.

Epic star Charlton Heston portrayed legendary 11th-century medieval Spanish hero/warrior Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar (El Cid) who united the Moors and Christians under one King, with Sophia Loren in Anthony Mann's spectacular and handsome-looking El Cid (1961), an adaptation from French playwright Pierre Corneille's work. Nicholas Ray reprised the intelligently-told King of Kings (1961), another tale of the life of Christ starring Jeffrey Hunter and narrated by Orson Welles. Dino De Laurentis produced Barabbas (1962) which starred Anthony Quinn as the murderous thief who was haunted for life after being freed by Pilate and exchanged for Jesus. Another Biblical epic, director Robert Aldrich's Italian-made Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) depicted the destruction of the two sinful cities with expensive production values.

The Historical Epics genre reached a peak of popularity in the early 1960s, when Hollywood frequently collaborated with foreign film studios (such as Rome's Cinecittà) to use relatively exotic locations in Spain, Morocco, and elsewhere for the production of epic films such as El Cid (1961) or Lawrence of Arabia (1962). This boom period of international co-productions is generally considered to have ended with Cleopatra (1963), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Nevertheless, films in this genre continued to appear, with one notable example being War and Peace, which was released in the former Soviet Union during 1967-1968 and, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, and said to be the most expensive film ever made.

The Historical Epics genre films vanished from Hollywood’s production during the early 1970s and late 1980s. They were still popular when they were featured on Television but they had become an exhausted market for mass production. This was not because of the decreased demand of the audience, nor the consumption, but instead, the expensive and grandeur nature of producing and distributing such Epic films that were unprofitable. An example was the film, Cleopatra (1963) that had been costly to produce, and even though it was the highest grossing film of that year, it made no profit due to the film’s overproduction.

It was not until 1997 with the popularity of James Cameron’s Titanic that brought back the Historical Epic to mass productions.

Then in 2000, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator became a success that inspired another wave of Historical Epics to the cinema, similar to those during the 1950s to the 60s. For example, in 2004 films such as Troy, The Passion of the Christ and Alexander were released to the market and had brought back the success of the Historical Epics with ancient world settings. The distribution of modern day advertising helped the genre’s popularity.

Epic films continue to be produced, although since the development of CGI they typically use computer effects instead of an actual cast of thousands.