![]() Film actor Edmond O'Brien is great as the ambitious and untrustworthy Casca, but unfortunately the women have little to do. Of course, John Gielgud as Cassius is volatile and very rooted in the British thespian tradition which doesn't lend itself easily to film in my opinion. ![]() His unfathomable half-smile turns up again near the end, and it speaks volumes. There are layers in Brando's performance that warrants more than one viewing, just the tolerant half-smile when he is playing the rabble for suckers. "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now" indeed. "They are honourable men", he says, and the discrete colouring of the adjective makes it obvious how Mark Anthony really feels about it. How elegantly, deftly he speaks treason against Brutus and the new would-be rulers. His speech gradually builds in momentum, and the sheer excitement of watching Brando's performance today is reason enough to watch the film. Then Brando takes the floor, speaking up for his benefactor, the slain Caesar: "Friend, Romans and countrymen, lend me your ear", he says, having carried the bloodied corpse out in his arms. It was "not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more", and he sways the crowd with his rhetoric. The rabble has gathered at the Capitol to hear Brutus explain himself, and James Mason, in a refreshingly un-actorish way, beautifully defends Brutus the well-intentioned butcher, laying bare the dilemma of the noble assassin. Of course the key scene of the film and Shakespeare's play, takes place right after Caesar's assassination. ![]() Will history frown upon them? Or applaud their act? "That we shall die, we know", all else is uncertain. But it is in his directing of the actors that he excels, the way that he shows the fragile dynamics in the crowd of conspirators before and after their stabbing of Caesar even more than in the famous monologues. Mankiewicz doesn't strive to open up the play and make it naturalistic, but he does allow his camera to roam freely, creating space around his characters. With Mankiewicz dialogue is all, and it is a source of endless fascination to me how he manages to make this a uniformly brilliantly acted film. 50 years after the fact, the most interesting angle on Mankiewicz' 'Julius Caesar' is perhaps the blend of acting styles that characterizes it. ![]()
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