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In contrast to earlier epics like Quo Vadis (1951) and Ben-Hur, whose
plots were based on nineteenth-century religious novels, Mann drew on
Gibbon’s secular scholarship to cloak his film in historical authenticity.
The director also employed the British historian Will Durant as an academic
consultant, whose professorial voice speaks the opening narration:
“Two of the greatest problems in history are how to account for the rise of
Rome, and how to account for her fall.” In focusing on the deep tensions
and oppositions at work in Roman culture, Mann’s innovative cinematic
strategy was “not to make just another epic in which Christianity was
shown as the sole exponent of the social message of racial harmony and
freedom from persecution but, instead, to examine Roman thought at its
most civilized peak, at a time when the empire was a still manageable
instrument for the dissemination of ideas, rather than dwelling solely on
its violent, oppressive and supposedly antipathetic qualities” (Elley, 105).
Despite its inventive thematic approach and veneer of historicity, however,
The Fall failed to attract contemporary audiences to the theater and
effectively sealed the fate of the Roman epic genre. “After its commercial
and critical failure, The Fall of the Roman Empire has since become synonymous
in cinema history with the fall of the Hollywood film industry’s
own empire of Roman films” (Wyke, 188). The arena would remain empty
for three and a half decades.
Gladiator must first be assessed in terms of its relationship to those
Roman epic movies made in Hollywood in the golden era of the 1950s
and early 1960s (Cyrino, 125–7). Why was the long-defunct genre revived
in the year 2000? One review headline smugly observed: “Ben-Hur, done
that” (The Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2000). Like those earlier toga
movies, Gladiator engaged in the reinvention of ancient Rome, city of
power and intrigue, cruelty and lust, the ultimate symbol of glory and
corruption. In the spirit of the mid-century epics, Gladiator recreated and
adapted onscreen “the myth of Rome” (Bondanella, 1) in order to express
contemporary social and political concerns. Yet thirty-six years after the
last Roman spectacular, Gladiator, with its unexpected popularity and
profitability, presented a very different kind of film. Gladiator was more
overtly aware of its involvement in manipulating and retelling the “myth
of Rome.” When Cassius, the emcee at the Colosseum, says, “On this day
we reach back to hallowed antiquity to bring you a recreation of the
second fall of mighty Carthage,” his statement serves to highlight the
allegorical activity in which the film is engaged. New computer-imaging
technology allowed the creators of Gladiator an unprecedented scale and
detail for their display of the once-buried metaphors of Roman spectacle.
224 GLADIATOR (2000)