Julius Caesar
by Joseph Mankiewicz
List Price:
Our Price: $7.40
You Save: $12.57 (63%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $7.30 (click here)
Category: DVD
See more DVD releases
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
DVD Cover Information
Actor: Calhern Louis, James Mason, John Gielgud, Marlon BrandoDirector: Joseph Mankiewicz
Brand: Warner Brothers
Producer: John Houseman
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Subtitled
Picture Format: Academy Ratio, 1.33:1
Running Time: 121 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-11-07
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Model: 65918
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- Film adaptation of Shakespeare's play chronicling the aftermath of Caesar's assassination at the hands of Marc Anthony, Cassius and Brutus.Running Time: 121 min. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR Age: 012569659186 UPC: 012569659186 Manufacturer No: 65918
Movie Reviews of Julius Caesar
Movie Review: Definitely not "The Ten Commandments"!
Summary: 5 Stars
A lot of people don't like Shakespeare much. Maybe they're intimidated by the language or the complicated plots. It's understandable. The Bard came up with some real clunkers: "Comedy of Errors," "Love's Labour Lost." And it's hard to read the plays in the raw because you're liable to understand one word out of every three, and lose most of the topical references. If anybody's going to read the things, they ought to use the Signet paperbacks that have footnotes on every page explaining the more arcane content.
But good performances of the better plays are different, and this is a good performance of a better play. The dialog itself is sometimes lifted wholesale from Plutarch's "Lives..." but WS put them together well. Caesar is full of lines that have entered our everyday vocabularies, even if often corrupted. "Beware the Ides of March." "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves." "The coward dies a thousand deaths, the valiant die but once." "Et tu, Brute?" "The most unkindest cut of all." "It was all Greek to me." And (fanfare here, please), the famous, "Friends, Romans, countrymen -- lend me your ears." Reminds me of the story of the woman who left a performance of "Hamlet" unimpressed, saying, "I don't know what's supposed to be so good about it. It's all made up of old quotations."
At that, this version of "Julius Caesar" is chopped down a bit to make it shorter and eliminate some redundancies and other infelicities. In the play, Brutus hears the clocks chime, whereas all the Romans had for clocks were water wheels. And Brutus is twice told of his wife Portia's death, and each time reacts with surprise and Stoicism. (He really WAS a stoic, which is a nice philosophy if you can actually believe it.)
The performances are uniformly delightful for one reason or another. John Guilgud, of course, is superb, born for the part of Cassius. In fact all the UK actors come across as fitting the roles very comfortably. Something about those impressive Brit accents. Even Greer Garson, who hams it up shamelessly as Calpurnia. What makes this film such a fascinating experience is that the cast list is filled with people from the MGM stable whom we would never associate with Shakespeare. Okay, George MacReady is there, but he always sounded vaguely British anyway. But Edmund O'Brien as Casca? And doing a good job too? Tom Powers as one of the assassins? (He's the old grouch who got murdered in "Double Indemnity.") And the Senator who talks Caesar into going forth and then stabs him? He played in a Twilight Zone episode, "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" He was the Martian with THREE ARMS. Yet he's good too. And the guy who acts as Mark Antony's messenger to the assassins? He's the stupid hillbilly from Tennessee who helps snare Robert Ryan in "Crossfire." Even Ned Glass is in here as a cobbler. And Michael Pate and Michael Ansara who played gangsters or Indians. Brando is in a league of his own. His Brit accent comes and goes but he's never less than wily and impressive, as opposed to James Mason's rational and honorable Brutus. The key to the plot lies in Mason's and Brando's speeches to the crowd after the murder. Mason is apologetic, logical. Brando, on the other hand, is a really phony and manipulative SOB. What a rabble rouser. He fakes tears, appeals to the mob's greed instead of their brains, and every time he refers to Brutus as "an honorable man" his voice grows more sarcastic and angry. What an admirable piece of work.
It's well mounted too, on stylized sets, not pretending to much realism. If they did it today it would cost four hundred billion dollars. This is probably one of the two or three easiest and best-paced versions of a Shakespeare play I've ever seen, and the one I enjoy the most. Yeah, it's a curiosity (Douglas Dumbrille, the black-hatted Western villain, in Julius Caesar?) but it's gripping and it's a grown-up story in the sense that nobody is truly evil or entirely good. This isn't on TV very often, but if you have a chance, do catch it. Highly recommended.
Summary of Julius Caesar
JULIUS CAESAR - DVD MovieAn examination of the relationship between political power and personal conscience, Joseph Mankiewicz's traditional Julius Caesar (1953) is a veritable master class for aspiring thespians. As the opportunistic Marc Antony, Marlon Brando delivers the famous funeral speech with pure conviction, elsewhere casting an intense physicality that recalls his work in A Streetcar Named Desire. James Mason suggests a latent Hamlet in his turn as the honorable Brutus, while John Gielgud is positively serpentine as the lean, hungry Cassius. Louis Calhern invests Caesar with intelligence and edgy noir echoes, and director Mankiewicz astutely balances the Renaissance view of Caesar as a power-obsessed, corrupt tyrant destined for punishment with modern suggestions that his murder may have been ill advised. The director's scrupulous pacing is supported in no small measure by Miklós Rósza's stunning score. At film's end, power itself is without a master, and the spirit of Caesar has been left unrevived: and to Mankiewicz's credit, the latter is revealed to be the true tragedy of Julius Caesar. --Kevin Mulhall
Similar DVD Movies
Great Performances: MacbethPBS; Release date: 2011-01-11; DVD
Best price: $9.90
Price in other shops:
Richard IIISony; Release date: 2000-03-28; Published: 2000-03-01; DVD
Best price: $7.21
Price in other shops:
William Shakespeare's Hamlet (Two-Disc Special Edition)BRANAGH,KENNETH; Release date: 2007-08-14; DVD
Best price: $9.49
Price in other shops:
Macbeth / McKellen, Dench (Thames Shakespeare Collection)A and E Home Video; Release date: 2004-11-16; DVD
Best price: $6.28
Price in other shops:
Twelfth NightImage Entertainment; Release date: 2005-08-30; DVD
Best price: $4.89
Price in other shops:
The Taming of the ShrewTaylor; Release date: 1999-10-26; DVD
Best price: $4.81
Price in other shops:
King Lear (Royal Shakespeare Company)PBS; Release date: 2009-04-21; DVD
Best price: $13.10
Price in other shops:
William Shakespeare's The Merchant of VeniceWilliam; Release date: 2005-05-10; DVD
Best price: $6.91
Price in other shops:
Antony & CleopatraWHV; Release date: 2011-03-29; DVD
Best price: $4.71
Price in other shops:
Julius CaesarLions Gate; Release date: 2007-02-20; DVD
Best price: $4.21
Price in other shops: