Julius Caesar

Synopsis: A feature film which grew out of Stuart Burge’s experience in directing a BBC television version of the play in 1959, as well as a subsequent London stage production. The pedestrian production was critically savaged on both sides of the Atlantic as reviewers warmed to their themes of bad acting, poor casting, shabby sets, and school play costumes.
Language: English
Country: Great Britain
Medium: Film; Video
Technical information: Colour / Sound
Year of release: 1970
Duration: 114 mins; 4,133 feet
Availability: Hire (film - Glenbuck) Sale (video - retail)

Production type: Fiction Films
Historical period: Ancient Rome
Plays: Julius Caesar
Subjects: Drama; Shakespeare
Keywords: Caesar, Julius; Rome; Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)
Related items: Film Night Special: Caesar’s the Name of the Game; Julius Caesar; Julius Caesar

Notes: Budget $1.4m
General: Rosenthal, Daniel. 100 Shakespeare Films (p.76) believes the film to have been ‘hamstrung by disastrous trans-Atlantic casting’ where Robert Vaughn’s (Casca) ‘English’ accent made him sound like ‘a shifty Cary Grant’.
Reviews: Crowl, Samuel ‘A World Elsewhere: the Roman Plays on Film and Television’ in Davies, Anthony & Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and the Moving Image: the Plays on Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp 146-62.
[Examines the stylistic progression from the experiments of David Bradley’s Julius Caesar (1949) through the formalism of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1953) to the postmodernism of Stuart Burge’s version].

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