Beard of the Week LXXXVI: Fall of the Roman Empire
it's been awhile, far too long really, but I'm back with more beards of interest, at least to me. This week's handsome granite-colored beard belongs to British actor Anthony Quayle (1918–1989). I saw him a few night ago, looking as he does in this photograph, when we spent a snowed-in evening watching the film "The Fall of the Roman Empire". I would have said that's the first time I'd seen him but I find that he played Cardinal Wolsey in "Anne of the Thousand Days", a film I saw many years ago, so technically I saw him then.
Wikipedia tells me that Quayle was a friend of Alec Guinness, who was also in this film as Marcus Aurelius. One didn't have to be very astute to deduce that George Lucas had seen the film; there was a notable scene with Guinness dressed in a hooded cape, delivering lines very much as an archetypal Obi-Wan Kenobi.
"The Fall of the Roman Empire" was released in 1964, produced by Samuel Bronston, famous for having produced "El Cid". It's a super-epic, three hours long, with a list of stars as long as your arm. There were tens of thousands of extras (sources disagree) and the cost of the film staggered everyone. It was shot largely in Spain, and Bronstron had a set built that recreated a full-sized Roman forum.
The Wikipedia article for the film sums up our reactions pretty well:
It is believed that though the film was highly spectacular and considered intelligently scripted, its failure was partly attributable to what was considered the wooden performance of Stephen Boyd as the loyal general Livius (a fictitious character). In contrast, the performance of Christopher Plummer as the unstable Commodus was considered highly charismatic. As a fledgling motion picture performer—The Fall of the Roman Empire was only his third appearance on film—he began to emerge as a major Hollywood star.
The part of Marcus Aurelius was considered to be well portrayed by Alec Guinness, notably in a long soliloquy that was largely quotations from the emperor's own philosophical work The Meditations. The composer Dimitri Tiomkin said he found it impossible to write any music for this soliloquy.
Plummer was brilliant and eccentric as Commodus (this just prior to his playing Captain von Trapp in "The Sound of Music"), and Guinness makes acting look easy with great performances like his Marcus Aurelius. And it's tough to beat the sheer epicness of 20,000 real extras in a battle scene no matter how good is one's CGI. Also, Tiomkin's score was huge, appropriate, but unique.
Still, despite all that–maybe even because of it–the total effect seemed a bit flat to us. The whole thing just didn't quite pull together into a story that we really, really cared about.
On the other hand, Anthony Quayle, not to mention tens of thousands of other actors, looked great in their beards. That's nothing to sneeze at, particularly in Super Panavision.