You have to admire Robert Krasker's fine, sombre Ultra-Panavision (whatever that is) photography. What part of Spain is this chilly-looking region? (It's the Sierra de Guadarrama in Segovia, not a million miles from Madrid). And Dimitri Tiomkin's score is also rather wonderful.
Old films on this scale are impressive - the attention to detail in the costumes, the 1500 horses that had to be looked after, made to behave etc. But despite the incredible recreation of Ancient Rome, watching an army parade into it is not dramatically interesting. (The set was at Las Matas, used again in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and apparently then torn down. What a fucking waste. The feeling of standing in it must have been fantastic (it was exactly to scale with the real city) and could have been a great tourist attraction.) The 'thinking man's epic' is actually quite dull.
Stephen Boyd is lacking. Alec Guinness is brilliant as usual (e.g. scene where he bargains with Death). Christopher Plummer (at times looking oddly like Joaquin Phoenix, who played the same character in Gladiator), James Mason, Sophia Loren, Anthony Quayle, Mel Ferrer, John Ireland (in ridiculous 'barbarian' makeup).
What was Rome doing in England? Why bother?
The battle scene in the forest which I remember so clearly as a youngster wasn't that impressive - showing actually that pulling off a complex big-scale battle scene like this is not an easy thing to do, but the resultant chariot race between Boyd and Plummer is expertly staged, no doubt thanks to the direction of former stuntman Yakima Canutt - it's the best bit in the film.
You can't help feeling there's something a bit gay about the relationship between Boyd and Plummer.
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