Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire was released in 1964, ran for nearly three hours, cost twenty million dollars, and was such a catastrophic commercial failure that it effectively ended the sword-and-sandal epic as a Hollywood genre for a generation. It also happens to be a substantially better film than its reputation suggests, more historically serious than most of its contemporaries, and in certain respects a more honest engagement with the period it depicts than the celebrated Gladiator that covered similar ground thirty-six years later.