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Mason and Gielgud confront Brando in Hollywood's faithful Shakespeare adaptation Julius Caesar |
It’s hard now to really understand the hesitancy (and
outright snobbery) from many about the very idea of Brando doing Shakespeare.
This was the mumbling Stanislavsky-trained star of Streetcar, the
earthy, T-shirt wearing slab of muscle that yelled “Stella!” – who on Earth did
he think he was? Shakespeare is for plummy accents, focused on poetry. Brando
took a huge risk taking this role on. But, today, his performance feels fresh,
vivid and in many places strikingly modern.
Brando bought a more relaxed, natural style – and, yes he
also affected a slightly plummy Brit accent – and bought a emotional realism to
the most exhibitionist of Shakespeare’s great roles. (Let’s not forget, most of
Antony’s part is a massive public speech). Brando creates an Antony who is
passionate, loyal, committed – but also cunning, manipulative and very aware of
the effect he is attempting to generate in that famous speech. He delivers the
speech with aplomb, but concentrated as much on the emotion of what he
was saying as the poetry of how he said it. It makes for an excellent
marriage between two different styles of theatre, and Brando’s powerhouse
delivery (Oscar nominated) carries real energy and dynamism.
It sits within a very traditional production, carefully
shepparded to the screen by Joseph L Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz was a two-time
Oscar winner for Best Director – but his reputation was largely formed on his
mastery with dialogue and actors, rather than any visual sensibility. Julius
Caesar is intelligently and faithfully bought to the screen – albeit with
little cinematic flourish – shot with a moody black-and-white (designed to ape
newsreal footage and add further dramatic urgency to the action) on sets that
were leftover at the studio from Quo Vadis. (Some of the busts are
hilariously out of place – pretty sure Brutus has a bust of the Emperor Hadrian
in his home, quite something seeing as he died 160 years before Hadrian was
born.)
Mankiewicz by and large lets the play speak for itself. What Shakespeare wrote, he largely says, and
there is little in the way of message in a play that has been reversioned to
almost any oppressive regime you can imagine. A few flourishes diverge from the
text. He radically simplifies Acts 4 and 5 of the play (particularly the Battle
of Philippi and the consecutive suicides of Brutus and Cassius), reducing these
down to little more than half an hour. Wisely he focuses on the more dramatic
Acts 1-3. The scheming is tense and moody, the assassination swift and brutal.
The crowd scenes in Rome bustle with an immediacy and vibrancy – the camera
often sits among the plebians during the speeches, encouraging us to share
their feelings and reactions to the speeches. Antony is made a calculating and
cunning figure – consciously waiting for certain reactions: he even, in one
directorial flourish, enters bearing Caesar’s corpse during Brutus oration.
Mankiewicz’s main strength is in working with actors.
Although Brando claimed the plaudits, the play is actually centred around
Brutus, the intellectual of good intentions drawn into a conspiracy for the
best intentions who finds principles and coups make for impossible bedfellows. The
film’s finest performance is from the simply superb Mason, who was born to play
tortured decent patricians like this and creates a Brutus stuffed with doubt,
pride, arrogance, uncertainty and a little touch of fear. His patrician voice
is perfect for this “most honourable of all the Romans”, and he sets about
murder as the deeply unpleasant task it is, guided by his assumption that
he-knows-best. The little moments are brilliantly done: from his petrified nerves
at the assassination to his pious sermons on morality to Cassius to his
tenderness and care for his wife and servants. It’s a wonderful performance.
To complement him, Mankiewicz recruited one of the greatest
Shakespearean actors living as Cassius. Gielgud hadn’t done a film for over ten
years (he always felt the cinema to be a minor art), and Julius Caesar
was the only opportunity he had to capture one of his great Shakespearean
performances on film until Prospero’s Books nearly 40 years later. It’s
fascinating to watch a film where the old school (in Gielgud) and new school of
acting (in Brando), both bring their own approaches to Shakespeare. This is
Gielgud’s finest Shakespearean performance on camera – he must surely have
learned more about acting on camera from Mason and Brando – the first time his
style moved away from ‘singing the verse’ towards something more emotional, his
Cassius a bitter, manipulative man who starts the film holding all the cards
and ends up with none of them.
Watching these three powerhouse performers work is a treat –
and also to see their styles merging and playing off each other. Mason is the
perfect fusion of the realism of Brando and theatricality of Gielgud. Brando
learned huge amounts from Gielgud, frequently consulting him on delivery.
Gielgud surely took as much from Brando on adding greater emotion and realism
into his screen performances, shirking the declamatory style that often makes
him grand but unconnectable. The other actors around them offer versions of
these styles: O’Brien stands out best as a shrewd and cunning Casca, Calhern
tries a little too hard to be grand as Caesar, Kerr and Garson are a bit too
theatrical in thankless parts as “the wives”.
Julius Caesar as a whole though is a lean, pacey and
intelligent staging of the play, directed unobtrusively but professionally,
very well acted by the cast. While Mankiewicz does nothing radical here – look at
Orson Welles Othello and there you’ll see how the language of cinema can
add a whole new perspective to Shakespeare, in a way this film never does. But while
not radical, it focuses on story and character really well. The set-piece
moments – the speeches, the murder, the plotting – are staged with urgency,
energy and drama. Mainstream Hollywood still wasn’t ready for radical reworking
of Shakespeare (this got lots of Oscar noms, Welles Othello was a flop),
still seeing him as someone best cast in marble – but with Julius Caesar
Hollywood took baby steps towards suggesting there could be a different future.
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