Spartacus and his army from <em>Spartacus</em>

Epics

Big History

The battlefield is cold at dawn. Horses whinny. The armor of a thousand soldiers shimmers as the sun rises… revealing the enemy’s encampment, ten times as many men on the opposing side. To still the soldier’s nerves, the general rides up and down the line, barking out a stirring speech, The soldiers’ swords wave high in a rallying cry for glory, and a thousand men ride out toward the ten thousand below the hill, a long, bloody day about to begin…

Army outside a castle from <em>El Cid</em>

The Name of the Game is Scale

Epic movies as we know them today didn’t really spring up until the 1950s. Hollywood found itself struggling in this decade with the rise of its first competitor for the world’s eyes and ears: television.

Needing to draw people back to theaters, studio heads experimented with such gimmicks as 3-D, Smell-o-Vision, and sense-o-round… all of which fell flat with audiences and ended up relegated to low-budget, tawdry horror and thriller movies. But the one new invention that landed was widescreen.

Wider aspect ratios provided broader canvases for directors and cinematographers to compose upon… and what better to fill an incredibly wide screen with than a cast of thousands upon thousands? This particular gimmick worked. Sword-and-sandal epics are still going strong today, and an argument can be made that they saved Hollywood during its most precarious era by luring huge audiences back to the box office.

Style and Influences

The idea of “cast of thousands” movies originated at the dawn of cinema, with films such as D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and Cecil B DeMille’s Cleopatra in the silent era, and 1935’s A Tale of Two Cities, to name a few early classics. But with a wider format to work with, directors were able to tackle large-scale battle sequences in a similar way to the choreography of a Busby Berkely musical, using large numbers of extras in coordinated poses like massive shapes composed across the screen. Costume colors were kept bright and bold.

The stories for this vein of film rarely came from original screenplays. Historical events and the Bible were the main sources of inspiration. Tales from these bygone ages afforded directors and designers the ability to create opulent sets, detailed costumes, and overall rich visual designs, making the spectacle the main draw even as the plotlines themselves tended to be overstuffed and too slowly paced.

Did You Know?

Cecil B. DeMille directed two versions of The Ten Commandments: a silent version in 1923 and a widescreen color version in 1956?

Stanley Kubrick was not the original director of Spartacus? Actor and producer Kirk Douglas clashed with original director Anthony Mann and eventually fired him early in production, hiring Kubrick on a Friday and giving him only the weekend to get up to speed on the project.

American Humane became responsible for monitoring animal treatment in Hollywood films in 1940, after outcry over the treatment of horses in period war films and westerns?

Peter O'Toole in <em>Lawrence of Arabia<em>

Dubious History

For all of the expense poured into the Hollywood epics of the 1950s and early 1960s, historical accuracy often fell by the wayside in favor of clean colors and melodrama. There are, of course, a few exceptions which tackled their respective historical periods with a degree of realism, but as we discussed above, the main selling point of this genre was spectacle. The goal of the films was to immerse the viewer in the world of the story, even if that world was more fiction that fact, and then awe the audience with a sense of size and scope they simply could not get from the small television screen in their living rooms.