David R. Eastwood 2008-12-07
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Despite its full title, Shakespeare's THE TRAGEDY OF JULIUS CAESAR has long been recognized as centering on the tragedy of Marcus Brutus. For one thing, Caesar dies before the play is even half over; for another, Brutus is a good man who brings about his own downfall by his own mistakes. Shakespeare's script contains numerous scenes that provide direct and indirect evidence that Brutus is worthy of the audience's respect and admiration. In most productions, therefore, it has been crucial that the actor playing Brutus do so in a manner that holds the audience's attention and causes the audience care deeply about the misfortune he is bringing down upon himself.
This 1970 film, JULIUS CAESAR, is fairly well cast in all its parts but the key one--Jason Robards as Brutus. Two actors with very minor parts are noteworthy for their skills--Lawrence Harrington as the Carpenter and Ron Pembler as the Cobbler--at the opening of the play. Of the main characters, John Gielgud as Caesar and Richard Johnson as Cassius are both excellent. Diana Rigg as Brutus's beautiful and faithful wife Portia, Robert Vaughn as an ironic eye-rolling Casca, and Richard Chamberlain as a calculating Octavius are more than adequate. And Charlton Heston does a reasonably good job as Mark Antony, although director Stuart Burge often seems more concerned with displaying Heston's "Roman-nose" profile and his semi-clad physique (in a G-string in one scene) than with his histrionic talents.
Robards is virtually sleepwalking throughout most of the film, usually sounding as if he has no understanding of the words he is speaking and often stumbling through them the way some high school freshman might if suddenly told to read Elizabethan blank verse for the first time in his life. In only a few of the later scenes does Robards seem to come half to life. The effect of his exceedingly weak performance is to shift the audience's attention, by default, onto Mark Antony (whom Robards often calls "Mark Anthony")--and Shakespeare's play is almost morphed into a kind of Victory-of-Antony celebration. It is as if, as the old cliché runs, "the tail is wagging the dog." (The only comparable misconstruing of a major Shakespearian tragedy that I can recall was when, in a 1970 "Hallmark Hall of Fame" TV production, Richard Chamberlain played Hamlet as such a pitifully and dangerously out-of-control maniac that the actor Richard Johnson, playing Hamlet's uncle/stepfather as a calm, brave, and rational man, often gained most of the audience's sympathy--and the play almost became "The Tragedy of King Claudius.")
It appears that once this film was completed, Republic Entertainment's marketing division decided to focus primarily on Heston as Mark Antony, reinforcing the impression that Robards' Brutus is indeed a subordinate character. Posters and virtually every box containing videos and DVDs of this production feature pictures of either Heston's face alone or Heston's face four times larger than the faces of Robards, Guelgud, Chamberlain, and Diana Rigg--as well as giving Heston's name top billing.
I titled my review "Chiefly Useful to Would-Be Actors" because I believe that some novice actors might learn how to speak Shakespeare's lines properly by hearing how NOT to do so from Robards' terrible example. Except for diehard fans of Heston, Richard Chamberlain, Diana Rigg, etc., most other viewers would do far better buying/renting Joseph L. Mankiewicz's much better 1953 film of JULIUS CAESAR--which also has Guelgud as Caesar, and has Marlon Brando as Antony and James Mason as Brutus.
