It is hard to imagine that circumstances will ever again combine to make a more spectacular, expensive, and - yes - splendid movie. And "War and Peace" is the definitive epic of all time. Money isn't everything, but you can't make an epic without it. Dolittle"), then perhaps you shouldn't make it at all.įor this reason, among many others, the Russian version of "War and Peace" is a magnificently unique film. What other nation had the means to spend $44,000,000 on "Cleopatra" - even if it was a flop? What happened, though, was that "Cleopatra" brought an end to the epic budget race. Like Westerns and gangster movies, epics were almost always made by Hollywood. There were the pioneering epics, like "Birth of a Nation" and " Gone With the Wind." There were the epics that made it, like " Spartacus" and the ones that didn't, like "Cleopatra." There was blood and thunder in " Ben-Hur," beauty and romance in " Doctor Zhivago," Charlton Heston in half of them, Peter Ustinov in the rest, Rome falling daily, slaves rising weekly, wars won at least once a month, and several miracles a year from Cecil B. It would take a film historian to evaluate the dozens - hundreds? - of times when Hollywood has marshaled casts of thousands and budgets of millions to create yet another epoch-shattering spectacular.
No other medium, except literature, is so well suited to the epic form. It is impossible to think of gangsters or cowboys without thinking of the movies and perhaps epics also belong on the list of genres that are uniquely cinematic. The movies have done a lot of borrowing during their long climb to the status of an art form, but they've also invented an approach or two.
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