What makes a story big? We often use the term “epic” as shorthand for a film’s running time – and, having spent roughly 16 hours watching this month’s films, I can see why – but runtime alone isn’t quite enough for a film to be truly epic.
This month, I watched Gone with the Wind (1939), Ben-Hur (1959), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Cleopatra (1963), and was struck by what each film was trying to do, each quite different from the last.
An epic may be enormous in scope, geographical scale, emotional ambition, visual spectacle or simply in the sheer scale of its production.
These weren’t just films, they were occasions – films designed to make the audience feel that they were seeing something that could only be experienced on the cinema screen.
That mattered particularly during Hollywood’s great studio era. Going to see one of these films was an event. There was no streaming, no home cinema and no possibility of casually dipping in and out of viewing. A major epic might have an overture, an intermission, a lavish premiere and months of publicity before audiences ever sat down to watch it.
Anticipation was high, and the films would be one of the most talked-about topics of the moment. I can’t think of many modern films that manage quite the same level of engagement or interest on such a wide scale.
Watching them now, of course, is a rather different experience. We can pause, make a cup of tea and come back tomorrow.
And, while I can appreciate the circumstances in which they were made, I have to admit that all four of these films could have benefitted from a more judicious pair of scissors.
Gone with the Wind – the epic as cultural event
The earliest of the four, Gone with the Wind, perhaps best demonstrates what an epic meant to Hollywood in 1939. Adapted from Margaret Mitchell’s hugely successful novel, it attempts to encompass not only a love story but the American Civil War, the destruction of the antebellum South and the upheaval of Reconstruction. At nearly four hours, it feels less like a film than an afternoon’s occupation.
It also really needed a script editor.
The central story is actually remarkably straightforward: Scarlett O’Hara wants Ashley Wilkes, Ashley doesn’t want Scarlett; Rhett Butler wants Scarlett but Scarlett doesn’t want Rhett, until she does, but by then it’s too late. In amongst all the romantic back and forth, Scarlett spends the rest of the film surviving one catastrophe after another.
The difficulty is that the film is determined to take us through almost every stage of her journey, every relationship and every change in her circumstances, no matter how huge – the loss of her home – or small.
Fortunately, Scarlett is fascinating. She is vain, selfish, manipulative and frequently quite horrible – but she is also intelligent, resourceful and almost pathologically determined to survive. One of the greatest strengths of the film is that Vivien Leigh doesn’t try to make her likeable. Even this early in Hollywood history, a female protagonist didn’t necessarily have to be morally admirable for a film to ask us to spend four hours with her.
At nearly four hours, it feels less like a film than an afternoon’s occupation
And then there is Clark Gable, who is simply wonderful. Every scene he enters seems to acquire a little electricity. Rhett is cynical, amused and completely aware of the absurdity of the society around him, and Gable plays him with an effortless confidence that makes it easy to understand why he was such a star. The only issue with Gable’s performance is that he makes Butler so clearly better than Ashley in every way, that it’s a mystery as to why Scarlett seems unable to see it.
Setting aside the politics of the film, which have been discussed at length in plenty of other places, it’s undeniable that the film’s cultural impact was enormous. The experience of going to see Gone with the Wind was itself part of the phenomenon. It is telling that, decades later, in The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, the Ya-Yas dressing up and going into town to see the film can function as shorthand for a whole kind of Southern cultural ritual.
The film had become more than a story: it had become an event, and eventually it became a cultural reference point. It is still, almost ninety years later, the highest-grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation.
Ben-Hur – the epic perfected
Made some twenty years later, Ben-Hur represents a more polished version of the same idea. If Gone with the Wind is sprawling, Ben-Hur is remarkably disciplined by comparison. It is still more than three hours long (not including the overture and intermission), but its narrative has a much clearer spine: Jewish noble Judah Ben-Hur is betrayed by his childhood friend, the Roman Messala, condemned to slavery, survives against the odds and eventually confronts him in a spectacular and deadly chariot race. In the background, Jesus is preaching to the faithful and the crucifixion looms.
Charlton Heston is almost impossibly well suited to this kind of cinema. He has the physical presence, the deep voice and the slightly formal dignity of a man who appears to have been carved specifically for the epic genre. But Judah is not simply an action hero; his story is also one of revenge, suffering and, ultimately, forgiveness.
The Christian story runs alongside his without ever quite taking over. Perhaps the film’s most interesting choice is its treatment of Jesus, whose face is largely kept from us. We see him from behind, in profile or at a distance, and he becomes less a conventional character than a mysterious presence moving through Judah’s life.
It’s particularly effective because the film asks us to experience Jesus through Judah’s encounters with him, rather than presenting him as another Hollywood leading man. That decision becomes rather less successful in the judgement sequence, where his obscured face begins to draw attention to the filmmaking device itself.
Charlton Heston is almost impossibly well suited to this kind of cinema
And then there is the chariot race.
It is still astonishing. The physical scale of it, the horses, the arena and the sense of genuine danger are reminders of what Hollywood was capable of long before digital effects.
More importantly, the race works dramatically: Judah and Messala’s entire relationship has been building towards this confrontation. The problem, of course, is that it feels like the end of the film, but it isn’t. There is still about an hour to go.
This is perhaps where modern viewers run into the greatest difficulty with the classical epic. The chariot race is the climax of the revenge story, but the film still has to complete the religious story. I found myself thinking that another twenty minutes would do it, but of course that wasn’t enough for the filmmakers, so I settled in for the final hour.
Watching Ben-Hur through modern eyes also makes it easy to imagine how differently the film might be constructed today. The long establishment of Judah’s family life and friendship with Messala, for example, could be compressed or revealed through flashbacks, allowing the film to begin closer to the central conflict.
But that would also change the experience. Classical Hollywood generally wanted to establish its worlds thoroughly, while modern cinema is much more comfortable withholding information and expecting the audience to catch up.
Lawrence of Arabia – the epic turns inward
Just three years later, Lawrence of Arabia shows the epic form becoming something stranger and more psychologically ambitious.
The film begins with Lawrence’s death and only then takes us back to the events that made him famous. It is an unusually sophisticated structure for a film of this period because we meet Lawrence first as a legend and only afterwards as a man. The question isn’t whether he will survive the events of the film – we already know that he will. Instead, the film asks how this eccentric young officer became the extraordinary and controversial figure whose death we have just witnessed.
Peter O’Toole’s performance is central to this idea. His Lawrence is beautiful, vain, theatrical, sexually ambiguous and fascinated by his own transformation into a myth. The robes, the poses and the flamboyant gestures all contribute to the sense that Lawrence is constructing a version of himself as he goes along.
At times I found that fascinating. At other times, I found it rather too artificial
At times I found that fascinating. At other times, I found it rather too artificial. There were moments when I became conscious of Peter O’Toole performing Lawrence rather than simply watching Lawrence. That made him less emotionally gripping for me, even while I could appreciate what the performance was attempting.
The film’s real subject, though, is not the Arab Revolt so much as the man who emerges from it. The desert is not simply spectacular scenery: its vastness becomes psychological. Lawrence becomes increasingly difficult for both the British and Arab characters around him to understand, and eventually perhaps even for himself.
It’s a very different kind of epic from Ben-Hur: the scale is still enormous, but the real subject is an individual consciousness. This is the epic turned inward.
Cleopatra – when the epic becomes too much
And then we arrive at Cleopatra, which feels both like the culmination of the great Hollywood epic and the point at which the whole concept of an epic begins to collapse under its own weight.
It is spectacular. Truly spectacular. The costumes alone are extraordinary, while the sets, processions, ships, crowds and sheer quantity of gold outshine even the chariot race from Ben-Hur in terms of ambition, if not danger.
Cleopatra’s arrival in Rome made me wish I was watching it on a big screen instead of at home; there’s a sense of fun within all the spectacle – an exuberance, perhaps, even when the film is being serious – that makes it even more entertaining.
For me, Cleopatra was, by far, the most enjoyable of the four films.
That’s partly because Elizabeth Taylor is riveting. She completely dominates the screen, making Cleopatra an unusually compelling combination of political intelligence, sexuality and sheer force of personality. Rex Harrison’s Caesar is equally enjoyable in a completely different way – wry, dry and faintly amused by the absurdity of everyone around him. Roddy McDowall’s Octavian, meanwhile, becomes increasingly chilling as the film progresses. When he talks about Cleopatra’s second procession into Rome outshining her first, the threat is almost more frightening because he delivers it so calmly.
It is spectacular. Truly spectacular
But Cleopatra has a structural problem that is difficult to ignore: it is essentially two films. The first is the story of Cleopatra and Caesar, while the second is the story of Cleopatra and Antony. Each has its own political conflict, romance, climax and historical trajectory. The result is disjointed, and it turns out that this isn’t simply a problem I’ve invented as a modern viewer – director Joseph L. Mankiewicz actually conceived the material as two films.
That makes the four-hour version particularly fascinating. What we’re watching is, in effect, two epic stories that have been compressed into one enormous spectacle.
And yet in some ways it just doesn’t matter. Taylor and Richard Burton are magnetic together, and the fact that they were conducting their own very public, scandalous affair during production adds another layer of chemistry to the film. Cleopatra also belongs to a fascinating moment in Hollywood history. Released in 1963, it was still technically made under the Production Code, but its sensuality already feels like a sign of the rules beginning to buckle.
The film’s enormous production became almost a symbol of the limits of the old studio system. It cost an extraordinary amount of money, endured a famously troubled production and took years to complete.
It wasn’t simply a film that happened to be expensive. It was the kind of film that the studio system itself had evolved to make – and increasingly could not afford to keep making.
It’s been described as a flop, but Cleopatra was actually the highest-grossing film of 1963 in the United States. The problem was that it had cost so much to make that even enormous box-office receipts initially weren’t enough to cover its costs. It wasn’t a box-office failure so much as an extraordinary example of how expensive a hit could become.
Watching the epic now
There is something slightly unfair about judging these films solely by modern standards. Nowadays, we watch these films under completely different circumstances from the audiences for whom they were made. A 1939 audience attending Gone with the Wind, or a 1959 audience sitting down for Ben-Hur, wasn’t expecting to fit the film around dinner, emails and the school run. The cinema was the event.
That doesn’t mean we have to pretend that every minute was necessary. I remain convinced that all four could have been considerably shorter, without losing anything vital. However, their length was part of an aesthetic and commercial proposition that has largely disappeared.
These films wanted to overwhelm us – with time, scale, landscape, crowds, costumes, music and sheer spectacle, and there’s something rather wonderful about being overwhelmed by analogue filmmaking rather than incredible CGI.
Perhaps that’s why Cleopatra makes such a fitting endpoint. The epic had reached a point where it could seemingly contain anything, until eventually there was simply too much of everything. The film is enormous in every conceivable sense, and yet its very excess helped expose the limits of the model.
The epic didn’t disappear completely, of course. Cinema still produces enormous historical dramas, fantasy adventures and spectacles, albeit more often in trilogy or sequel format than as standalone films. But the particular combination of lavish studio production, star power, enormous physical sets and the idea of a film as a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic event was beginning to fade.
And Cleopatra offers one final connection to the changing Hollywood around it. Its frank sensuality is remarkable when we remember that the Production Code was still officially in force. The old rules hadn’t quite disappeared, but they were becoming increasingly difficult to enforce, and filmmakers were discovering just how much they could get away with.
So next month, we’ll step away from the epic and look at the rules that had governed Hollywood for more than three decades – and the increasingly inventive ways filmmakers found to break them.