Epic Films

FROM THE DEPRESSION TO THEPOSTWAR ERA

With the advent of the Great Depression in 1929, Hollywood companies cut back on expensive productions and road shows. These practices were revived in the early 1930s, establishing a cross-generic trend toward what Tino Balio calls "prestige pictures" (pp. 179–211). However, although many prestige pictures were top-ofthe-range costume films of one kind or another (adaptations of classic literature, biopics, swashbucklers, and the like), very few were made and road shown on the scale of the silent superspecial. Fewer still were biblical films and films with ancient-world settings. Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959), who had produced and directed The Ten Commandments and The King of Kings in the silent era, produced and directed The Sign of the Cross (1932) and Cleopatra (1934). But along with The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), which was produced by Merian C. Cooper (1893–1973) and directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack (1893–1979), these productions were the only biblical and ancient-world productions made between 1928 and 1949. All three may be interpreted as films that engage the Depression and its moral implications in various ways. Toward the end of the 1930s, David O. Selznick (1902–1965) explicitly appealed to the traditions of the silent road shown superspecial when producing and planning the distribution of Gone with the Wind . He went on to produce Since You Went Away (1944), an epic home-front drama, and Duel in the Sun (1946), an epic western. DeMille, meanwhile, sought to revive the biblical epic by re-releasing The Sign of the

Cross in 1944 and producing and directing Samson and Delilah in 1949.

By 1949, Hollywood was undergoing a long-term process of change. Audiences, ticket sales, and profits were in decline; the ownership of theater chains by major studios was declared illegal; competition from television, domestic leisure pursuits, and other forms of entertainment were on the rise; and at a time when income from overseas markets was more important to Hollywood companies, a number of European countries were taking steps to protect their domestic economies, to stimulate domestic film production, and hence to limit the earnings Hollywood companies could take out of these countries each year. At the same time, the Cold War, nationalist and anti-imperial struggles, the superpower status of the United States, the marked increase in church-going, and the prevalence of religious discourse in the US itself provided a set of contexts and reference points for many of the films, in particular the big-budget road shown epics Hollywood was to produce, co-fund, or distribute during the course of the next two decades.

The postwar growth in epic production was the result of a decision to spend more money on enhancing the cinema's capacity for spectacle through the use of stereophonic sound and new widescreen, large-screen, and large-gauge technologies and on an increasing number of what were beginning to be called "blockbuster" productions—productions that, in road show form in particular, could be used to justify higher prices and generate high profits in a shrinking market. MGM led the way in road showing remakes of silent spectacles and in using income held abroad to fund the use of overseas facilities, locations, and production personnel with Quo Vadis in 1951. Two years later, Twentieth Century Fox pioneered the use of CinemaScope and stereophonic sound with its adaptation of Lloyd C. Douglas's bestselling novel The Robe . In 1956, DeMille released a four-hour remake of The Ten Commandments , which used Paramount's new VistaVision process, was shot in Egypt, Sinai, and Hollywood, and cost over $13 million. The film made more than $30 million on its initial release in the US and Canada alone. The following year, Columbia released The Bridge on the River Kwai , one of the first in a series of road shown epic war films. And in 1960, the road show release of Cimarron and The Alamo , the latter filmed in Todd-AO, helped cement a trend toward epic Westerns.

The Bridge on the River Kwai was produced by Sam Spiegel (1901–1985), an internationally based independent producer. Along with Lawrence of Arabia (1962), it was one of a series of epics he made with British director David Lean (1908–1991). The Bridge on the River Kwai was filmed in Ceylon using a mix of British, American, Japanese, and Ceylonese actors, stars, and production personnel. Ceylon was a British colony, and The Bridge on the River Kwai was registered as a British film in order to take advantage of British subsidies. Although credited to the French writer Pierre Boulle (who wrote the novel on which it was based), its script actually was written by Carl Foreman and extensively revised by Michael Wilson, both of them blacklisted US Communists.

The national identity of a film like The Bridgeon the River Kwai is thus hard to pin down. This was an era of increasing independent production, in which funding for films was increasingly obtained on a one-off basis from a variety of international sources and international settings, locations, and casts were becoming the norm for big-budget productions. Blacklisted writers, whether officially credited or not, were hired to write or co-write scripts for epic productions such as Exodus , Spartacus (1960), El Cid , The Guns of Navarone (1961), Lawrence of Arabia , Sodom and Gomorrah (1962), 55 Days at Peking , and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), and cut-price Italian "peplums" (toga films) such as Hercules (1958) and Hercules Unchained

(1959) proved popular at the box office in the US as well as in Europe.

Hence the ideological characteristics of postwar epics are difficult to categorize. While the prologue to The Ten Commandments explicitly declares its anti-Communist agenda, Quo Vadis , The Robe , Spartacus , and The Fall of the Roman Empire are anti-fascist. Most of the remainder, even some of the westerns, are hostile to imperialism and to the brutal, cynical, and dictatorial exercise of political and military power. But they are often compromised by their focus on white ethnic characters. And their displays of male heroism, sometimes in stark contradiction to an apparent concern with the ethics of war, add a further layer of ideological complication. Only in films like The Egyptian (1954), King of Kings (1961), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) are male heroism, male ambition, and the options of political and military engagement explicitly qualified, eschewed, or rejected.