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Category:    Home > Reviews > Drama > Religious > Biblical Epic > Large Frame Format > History > Empire > British TV > Mini-Series > Poe > Demetrius & The Gladiators (1954/Fox/Twilight Time Blu-ray)/I, Claudius: 35th Anniversary Edition (1976/Acorn DVD Set)/The Song Of Lunch (2010/BBC DVD)/The Tempest (2011/Disney Blu-ray)

Demetrius & The Gladiators (1954/Fox/Twilight Time Blu-ray)/I, Claudius: 35th Anniversary Edition (1976/Acorn DVD Set)/The Song Of Lunch (2010/BBC DVD)/The Tempest (2011/Disney Blu-ray)

 

Picture: B-/C/C/B-     Sound: B-/C+/C+/B-     Extras: C+/B/D/C+     Main Programs: C+/B/C+/C+

 

 

PLEASE NOTE:  The Demetrius & The Gladiators Blu-ray is limited to 3,000 copies and is available exclusively at the Screen Archives website which can be reached at the link at the end of this review.

 

 

 

One of the great ironies of telling great stories of the past is that you can get all “literatured out” and still come up with an upscale drama, Biblical tale, action story and/or sexploitation film.  This struck me as I watched the latest set of upscale productions.

 

 

A sequel to the massively successful The Robe (1953, reviewed on Blu-ray elsewhere on this site with the 1951 Quo Vadis also on Blu-ray), Delmer Davies’ Demetrius & The Gladiators (1954) has been issued as a limited edition Blu-ray by Fox to Twilight Time who recently issued another Fox Biblical epic, The Egyptian, also as a limited edition Blu-ray.  This one repeats the final minutes of the previous film as Caligula (Jay Robinson, later TV’s Dr. Shrinker and a great all around actor) is banishing the leads form the previous film and then has the title character (Victor Mature) to take on for this film.

 

Not a fan of the first film, I think this is a better motion picture overall and Robinson steals every scene effectively playing the role with even more zeal than previously.  I am not a fan of any of the Fox Biblical films, save the 1966 John Huston Bible (also reviewed on Blu-ray on this site) but this has its moments and is as good as the original cycle got.  Caligula wants Christ’s robe and the Christians who know better must stop him.

 

As is usually the case, the casting is more interesting than the screenplay, this time including Susan Hayward, Michael Rennie, Debra Paget, a young Anne Bancroft, Richard Egan, Charles Evans, an uncredited Julie Newmar as a dancer, Barry Jones as Claudius and Ernest Borgnine.  However, with the influx of action films set in the time or around it, plus Ridley Scott’s Gladiator being a huge success, this new cycle (as bad (very bad) as moist of its has been), looks that much older and dated, though not phonier as most of the new cycle has awful dated-on-arrival (and usually sloppy) digital visual effects that are beyond lame.

 

Still, that cannot save this film, but the money and effort can still be seen on the screen and like other early CinemaScope films, it has the wider 2.55 vs. later 2.35 widescreen image making it more unique and more meant for a big screen.  It also shows how when Hollywood really wants to make something work, they will.  This is one of the hits that helped make scope filmmaking permanent and not just a gimmick.

 

Extras include a color booklet with illustrations and text, while the actual disc adds the Original Theatrical Trailer and an isolated music track of the score by Franz Waxman that helped save this film.

 

 

A more serious film about Claudius, Caligula and company was first attempted in 1937 in England by Josef von Sternberg with Charles Laughton based on a major book by Robert Graves which translates a surviving autobiography of the real man of the title.  Fortunately in 1976, the BBC took on the book in the new form known as the TV mini-series and the resulting I, Claudius was a huge, tremendous commercial and critical success on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

Celebrating its 35th Anniversary, Acorn has issued the series on DVD with a nice set of extras and what seem to be the best transfers we are going to get for a show shot on color PAL video in its early years.  Sir Derek Jacobi is Claudius in a career-defining role, playing him in later decades and reflecting in flashback in his final days.  We see his past of not being taken seriously, his sudden, shocking rise to power to hold the republic together when Caligula (John Hurt) has gone so mad that he has to be eliminated and the new plots against him and others against each other.

 

Acting is top rate, though this was somewhat graphic for its time, even more so for PBS in the U.S. than even the BBC, but it holds up spectacularly well and is as engrossing as I remembered it.  Also helping is its great cast including Brian Blessed, George Baker, a young Patrick Stewart, Sian Phillips, James Faulkner, Patricia Quinn, Fiona Walker, John Cater, Moira Redmond, John Rhys-Davies, Peter Bowles as Caractacus, Christopher Biggins as a goofy Nero, Barbara Young as Agrippinilla and Ian Ogilvy among a truly great cast.

 

Somehow, many of the sets look more authentic than some in Fox’s early Biblical films and this shows how powerful British TV could be in its last golden age.  If you have never seen this mini-series, it is a must-see and you must get this set ASAP.  If that is not enough, this has a great set of extras including a 1967 film about the 1937 film noted above that was never finished, extended versions of the first two episodes (so no cheating here), I Claudius: A Television Epic featurette (74 minutes) from about 10 years ago, 36 minutes of favorite scenes by the cast and underrated Director Herbert Wise, a new 12 minutes interview with Jacobi and an 8-page booklet inside the DVD case.

 

 

Alan Richman and Emma Thompson have more than their share of solid dramatic work under their belts, including costume epics and Shakespeare.  Niall MacCormick’s The Song Of Lunch (2010) is a much newer BBC production, trying to do a dramatized realization of a poem by Christopher Reid.  Each actor tells their story in mostly voiceover, even though there is some dialogue.  An interesting experiment of sorts, but I thought it was to limited and coincidentally similar to a recent independent film I saw about two isolated people (Sidewalls from 2011) and that did not work either.  Ambitious it may be, but it simply did not stay with me, though it is the only one of the releases here set in modern time.  There are no extras.

 

 

Finally we have Shakespeare in the form of a new version of The Tempest (2011) directed by a troubled Julie Taymor, surviving her ordeals with her horrible Beatles film (Across The Universe) being a dud and her Broadway Spider-Man musical fiasco still a wreck that is only making money now that she left and it has become such a curio.  We have dealt with the material before in two previous adaptations (excluding Sci-Fi classic Forbidden Planet), including Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991, from an import DVD box of Greenaway’s films) that is more successfully alternative than this version and an underrated Paul Mazursky version set in 1982, the year of that film’s release with the same title we covered at this link:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/5122/The+Tempest+(1982/Paul+Mazursky)

 

 

The twist here is that the great Helen Mirren is a female Prospero (Prospera) and that is not a problem, nor is a fine cast that includes Djimon Hounsou, Felicity Jones, David Strathairn, Tom Conti, Alan Cumming, Chris Cooper, Ben Whishaw or Alfred Molina.  The three problems are too many visual effects, Russell Brand not meshing with the rest of the cast or project and Taymor not in her usual Shakespearean top form.  The result is not always memorable and I was not too impressed.  At least it is ambitious and not made to pander to being commercial.  It is also one of the last Miramax/Disney films.  See it for yourself and see what I mean.

 

Brands Rehearsals, a Music Video, an animated Shakespeare segment, Los Angeles rehearsals, Raising The Tempest featurette and intelligent feature length audio commentary by Taymor are the extras.

 

 

 

The 1080p 2.55 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Demetrius and 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Tempest both have issues, but are the best looking of the releases her as expected.  Demetrius was shot in CinemaScope as noted  but is one of the only early such productions by Fox to be produced and issued in 35mm dye-transfer, three-strip Technicolor prints.  Optical printing notwithstanding, this is a grainier presentation than expected, though you can still see some color range.  The film needs some restoration work and I thought hard on what to rate it, but the color range of Technicolor can be seen often enough in the work of Director of Photography Milton R. Krasner (Scarlet Street, All About Eve, The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop, Beneath The Planet Of The Apes) uses the very widescreen frame in ways that started to break up the static sense of said wide frame so the film flowed better and he became a groundbreaker in the use of the format.

 

On Tempest, Director of Photography Stuart Dryburgh, A.S.C., (Once Were Warriors, The Piano) does deliver a good set of visuals, even with all the digital going on and this was shot on 35mm film.  However, it can be softer than you might expect. 

 

The 1.33 X 1 image on Claudius is soft and there is a disclaimer by Acorn that it might be, but I was abler to adjust to it, yet there is no excuse for Lunch in its anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 frame and as a new shoot to be as soft with more motion blur and detail issues than expected.

 

Both Blu-rays offer DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) lossless mixes, but Demetrius is a 4.0 mix based on the original 4-track magnetic stereo sound design with traveling dialogue and sound effects, so it is going to show its age but I liked how the original sound mix was heeded.  Though it is listed as having only lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, Tempest has a DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix, yet it lacks surrounds and a consistent soundfield more often than it should.  That leaves Lunch with lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo that is simple at best and Claudius with lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono that sounds better for its age than you might expect.

 

 

Read more about The Robe at this link:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/8413/Quo+Vadis+(1951/Warner+Blu-ray)

 

 

As noted above, Demetrius & The Gladiators can be ordered while supplies last at:

 

www.screenarchives.com

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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