Page 113 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

102 / Shakespeare in the Movies

1908, Giovanni Pastrone, who would initiate the Italian spectacle
genre with Cabiria (1914), mounted his own one-reel Caesar; another
variation on the story, Brutus, was produced in Italy in 1910 by
Enrico Guazzoni, with expanded settings and fuller narrative. Amer-
ican Charles Urban may have attempted an early color Caesar in
1911; that same year, G. W. Jones filmed a stage play directed by
Frank Benson at the Stratford Memorial Theatre in England.

An Idealization of Revenge
Julius Caesar
Avon Productions, 1952; David Bradley

Independent filmmaker David Bradley shot a full-length Julius
Caesar in and around the vicinity of Northwestern University. The
black-and-white ninety-minute "feature" (total budget, $15,000)
tread a delicate balance between advanced amateur and Poverty Row
professional, earning high marks from critics for sheer audacity, if
not technical quality. As Bosley Crowther of the New York Times
delicately put it, "This company of earnest collegians has given a
firm pictorial character to the sombre and severe old drama of
intrigue and political violence." Otis L. Guernsey Jr. of the New
York Herald Tribune politely added that "it has the strength of a
fresh, intense and ambitious piece of work" while also noting the
"rough handling of the spoken poetry," which was delivered, by
aspiring young actors, with "brute force rather than with a gentle
touch of understanding," leading to "a general weakness in the
acting."
With one notable exception. Former drama student Charlton
Heston, who had earlier created costumes for Bradley's Macbeth and
starred in his silent Peer Gynt, portrayed Antony. This was a role
Heston, now a New York professional working in the live golden
age of televion, would have relished performing in Franklin
Schaffner's Studio One CBS production (March 6, 1949); he had been
awarded the small part of Cinna. Catching his former collaborator's
scene-stealing work, Bradley rang up Heston, insisting he should
have been Antony, a concept Heston did not disagree with. Bradley
then offered to pay him fifty dollars a week if the budding star would
return to Chicago. (The camerman was the film's only other salaried