C.B. would be proud

Rating: 10/10 (21 November 2006)

It's a shame Cecil B. DeMille is no longer with us. If he were alive today he would be gratified to see that the type of movies he loved to make are popular again: "Gladiator," "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl" and "The Passion of the Christ" are all the kinds of movies DeMille made; all of them are movies he would have made if the screenplays had been around in his day. "Gladiator" is a gloriously retro sword-and-sandal epic, a cross-pollination of "Spartacus," "Ben Hur," and "The Fall of the Roman Empire"; director Ridley Scott uses modern CGI technology to make the kind of movie they don't make any more. Although not 100% historically accurate, it's irresistible drama. Russell Crowe is one of the few actors today who can pull off this kind of heroic role; he has the gravitas despite his bad-boy reputation in real life that blond pretty boys like Brad Pitt and Colin Farrell can never hope to approach. Connie Nielsen is a sensuous presence as Lucilla; River Phoenix as Commodus is the creepiest villain since Ralph Fiennes' Amos Goetz in "Schindler's List"; and the supporting cast is full of stand out performances. It's good to see "I Claudius"'s Derek Jacobi back in toga; what's an epic without Richard Harris? and of course Oliver Reed as the lovably irascible slave-trader Proximo, who proves not to be such a bad guy after all. The film completely ignores the persecution of Christians under the otherwise humane Marcus Aurelius; but then, "Pirates of the Caribbean" ignores the presence of slavery in the eighteenth-century West Indies.