Swords and Sandals and CGI, Oh My!

[continued from Monday’s ramble]

So Gladiator was a real good movie. Gladiator II is a real bad movie. Let’s look back and see how Hollyweird used to tease out a sequel for a popular sword and sandal movie. First, there was The Robe. Then there was Demetrius and the Gladiators. The contrast between them and the recent Gladiaterz movies couldn’t be starker.

It’s easy to overlook the influence of The Robe on American life from our vantage point of 75 years later. It’s a bit of a slog, compared to Demetrius. It was a big budget spectacle, the first movie to use CinemaScope to fill up a wide screen. Richard Burton plays the angry young (Ro)man who has trouble coming to grips with his feelings of regret for nailing the son of God to a tree. He’s lost in the part, though, and the love story between Marcellus (Burton) and Diana (Jean Simmons) gets kinda lost in the sword and sandal sauce. The fight scenes are rather lame, as Burton really didn’t have the frame to project real force.

But the movie isn’t bad, and was a smash hit. Jay Robinson as a mincing, freaked-out Caligula was a hoot. He was easily the creepiest thing ever set to celluloid at the time, and even managed to take it up a notch and break the knob off when he returned in Demetetrius. Until Frank Thring showed up a few years later with his Saturnine Deputy Dawg face, Robinson set the standard for off-brand villains.

The Robe made 36 million on a 4 million budget, and numbers like that turned Hollywood into a Biblical epic factory. They made Demetrius at the same time as The Robe, and released it a year later, and it was even more popular than the first movie. We’re all too young to remember any of this in real time, but we’re generation-adjacent enough to observe certain facts. Why do you think Blutarksy is dressed in a toga in the basement of the Animal House?

The Robe did that. It spawned a cottage industry of biblical and biblical-abutting entertainment that dwarfs today’s Marvel movie industry. High school clubs built their own chariots and had races with their track teams pulling them around the football fields. Pretty soon moms were wearing diaphanous Greco-Roman muu-muus around the house, and their daughters all wanted their hair in a Jean Simmons ponytail. Why do you think that old crone behind the counter at the Department of Motor Vehicles still wears garish blue Cleopatra eyeshadow? Chess clubs and Radio clubs in high schools were later joined by God Squads, impressionable kids who decided going to church dressed as hippies was cool again. They eventually made a fertile pool of victims for all the Jay Robinson priests who decided that the church was suddenly cool, too.

But The Robe isn’t great entertainment. Screenwriter Philip Dunne really knew his business, but the script became a bit of a hash as it went through a lot of hands, including the execrable Leonard Maltz, the kind of people who wanted their “subtext” to be printed long form right on the movie posters. Dunne wrote Demetrius by himself, and while it has a wide scope, it’s a missile of a story line. It’s still a blast to watch.

In Gladiator 2, the gladiatorial scenes aren’t just stupid; they’re ridiculous. They’ve got gladiators fighting CGI monkeys that look like a cross between pit bulls and leftover props from Scott’s Alien movies. They leap around like Spiderman wannabees. I half expected a second set of teeth to pop out of their mouths. Then they have a guy, get this, riding, riding, mind you, a giant rhinoceros into the arena. A rhino that had more than a hint of The Banana Splits in its appearance.

Let’s review. Back in the mid-fifties, they had no access to special effects like they do now, or even the same kind of money for costumes and props. But they built a real arena, and a real guy wrestled real tigers in it, poking them a bit with his rubber knife. It’s still kinda awesome to watch it. Director Ridley Scott didn’t screw up his first picture with CGI Snuffleupagus rhinos. He copied the original and kept the real tigers, and even took the hand to hand fighting up a notch or two:

Man, that’s great stuff there, and reason enough to watch Gladiator every once in a while. You won’t watch Gladiator II twice. If you make it all the way through the first time, I mean.

Back to the fifties: The first scene in Demetrius is just the last scene of The Robe. Dunne puts you right up to speed with that reference, and basically ignores The Robe after that.

Poor Ridley doesn’t have that kind of sense, or that able a writing staff. They keep trotting out stuff from Gladiator into Gladiator2, over and over, trying to explain the inexplicable, and simply reminding anyone who’s paying attention that the first movie was great, and the sequel isn’t even a middling muddle compared to it. In writing drama, stuff like two people talking about what a third person was doing is called exposition, and is to be avoided at all costs. Apparently a $310 million budget isn’t enough to count as “all costs” these days, and the constant flashback balogna highlights the paucity of the fresh material.

It’s funny, but the modern movies are desperate to shoehorn black actors into weird places, but it’s Demetrius that has the only fully-formed, non-totem, well-played, believable black character in these movies. William Marshall plays Glycon, a gladiator who is eventually freed from the arena, and then freed from mental bondage by the words of Christ. And holy cow, compared to the nancy boys popular as action stars today, the guy was a unit. He was 6′-5″, handsome as hell, and had a basso voice that made James Earl Jones sound like Tiny Tim. He saves Demetrius from the other gladiators, and Demetrius eventually returns the favor. But when Demetrius loses his shit, rejects Christ, and starts humping Susan Hayward’s leg like a great Dane, Saint Peter can’t make any headway with him. It’s Glycon that has the stones to stand up to him, and shame him into considering larger issues again.

Victor Mature was a great, big, lovable clown. He had a good sense of humor about himself, and was easy in front of the camera. I heard a funny  story about him. He was a good golfer, and tried to join a tony country club near Hollywood. They told him they didn’t allow actors to join. He answered that he wasn’t an actor, and had 42 movies he could show them to prove it.

But you know, Mature really did look like he could hold his own in an arena. And like Susan Hayward would dump the future emperor of Rome for him, because he exuded a boyish fun. And Victor always did his best when he was working. His look of rage when he stops being a Christian and decides that the other gladiators got something coming for molesting his girlfriend in the slave quarters is quite believable, and more than a little scary.

So the story of The Robe, and especially Demetrius, has a direction that makes sense. It starts out somewhere, and ends up somewhere else. The Gladiator movies wander around, looking for a reason for all the mayhem, and never sniffing it out, because it’s in their blind spots and they can never acknowledge it. The Pauline Christian church was the answer to the degenerate Roman hierarchy, and the only thing that could bring any real meaning to their empire. Once they adopted (co-opted) it, the Empire had another 1,000 year run or so until the Ottomans curbstomped Constantinople.

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. It was the answer to everything, that The Robe and Demetrius and the Gladiators discovered, and that the Gladiator movies didn’t even have the sense to look for.