The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964): The Film Nobody Saw
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.
The film covers the end of Marcus Aurelius’s reign and the beginning of Commodus’s, focusing on the transition from the philosopher-emperor’s considered government to his son’s increasingly erratic autocracy. Alec Guinness plays Marcus Aurelius with the quiet authority the role requires — a man who knows the empire is being handed to someone unworthy of it and who is too principled or too exhausted to change the outcome. Stephen Boyd’s Livius fills the Maximus role that Gladiator would later assign to Russell Crowe, the loyal general who serves Rome rather than the emperor and who pays for that distinction. Christopher Plummer’s Commodus is the film’s most interesting performance — not the operatic villain of Gladiator but something more recognizably dangerous: an intelligent man whose judgment has been distorted by a lifetime of imperial position and paternal disappointment.
The historical engagement is more serious than Hollywood epics of the period typically attempted. The film addresses Rome’s economic decline, the increasing militarization of the frontier, the political crisis of succession, and the relationship between Roman administrative capacity and barbarian pressure in ways that reflect genuine engagement with the historiography available in 1964. The Danube frontier sequences — the Marcus Aurelius campaign that opens the film — are expensive and competent, less stylized than comparable sequences in later productions, more interested in the logistics of frontier warfare than in individual heroism.
What the film cannot escape is the narrative convention of the period: the romance between Livius and Lucilla (Sophia Loren), the personal vendetta that substitutes for political complexity in the final act, the resolution of historical forces through individual conflict. These were requirements of the genre, not failures of the filmmakers, and they constrain the film’s ability to follow its historical intelligence to its logical conclusions. The Fall of the Roman Empire understood that Rome fell for structural reasons — fiscal, demographic, administrative — and could not quite make that understanding dramatically compelling within the conventions it was required to observe.
The film’s commercial failure was attributed at the time to its length, its ambition, and its refusal to deliver the straightforward heroic narrative that audiences expected from the genre. It bankrupted the producer Samuel Bronston. It contributed to the genre’s collapse. The irony is that Gladiator — which is in many ways a remake of this film with a more conventional narrative — succeeded enormously where The Fall of the Roman Empire failed, partly because it had learned from the earlier film’s mistakes and partly because the audience of 2000 had different expectations than the audience of 1964.
The film deserves better than its reputation. It is available on streaming services, largely unwatched, and it repays the attention of anyone interested in how Hollywood engaged with Roman history at the height of the epic genre’s commercial ambition. Its limitations are the genre’s limitations. Its qualities are its own.