Et Tu, Brando?

Last week Director Joe Mankiewicz (All About Eve, A Letter to Three Wives) finished shooting a $2,000,000 picture that takes a calculated risk of being a box-office flop. Julius Caesar is the first effort by M-G-M to film Shakespeare since Romeo and Juliet lost more than a quarter of a million dollars in 1936. Shakespeare is supposed to be box-office poison, but Mankiewicz and Producer John Houseman think they have a sure-fire script. Says Mankiewicz: "It's a good, rip-snorting piece of blood & thunder coupled with eternally new and true-for-today character studies."

The topnotch cast, most of whom worked for less than their regular salaries to be identified with such a big "prestige" picture: Marlon Brando (Mark Antony), Louis Calhern (Caesar), James Mason (Brutus), John Gielgud (Cassius), Deborah Kerr (Portia), Greer Garson (Calpurnia). The screenplay, reportedly all Shakespeare, contains no "additional dialogue." Says Producer Houseman: "We kept it in black-and-white because there are certain parallels between this play and modern times. People associate dictators with black-and-white newsreel shots of them haranguing the crowds . . . Mussolini on the balcony, that sort of thing. With color, you lose that reality and the show becomes a mere spectacle."

Most interesting question: How will Marlon Brando, whose Hollywood fame (The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire) is based on muttering and grumbling his lines in a Polish accent, sound reading the funeral oration?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.