NR
Length: 185 minutes

Widescreen 2.35:1 Color (Anamorphic)

ENGLISH: Dolby Digital 5.1

English, Spanish

It's toward the end of Rome's illustrious hold of power and a dying Caesar privately decides that his heir should be his best and most faithful leader of his army as opposed to his son (yes, this sounds like Gladiator largely due to the fact that it's the same people in history but the stories are not the same). This information is not made public prior to his death so the son becomes Caesar and decides that the country needs to be run differently than how his father was running it (might over diplomacy).

First and foremost major kudos has to go out to the people that made and designed the costumes, weapons, armor and sets. Thousands of people had to be outfitted, one fight scene included over 8,000 people with 1,200 of them being on horseback, and they went to the effort to actually outfit them in a historically correct way. Then they added an all-star cast of actors including Alex Guiness (most remembered for as Obi-Wan; the role he most despised), Sophia Loren, James Mason, Omar Sharif, and Christopher Plummer.

This was written and filmed to be an epic and just ended up being a good film in large part due to it's length. It's hard to really stay involved with a movie that has so many long breaks in the dialogue showing soldiers marching/fighting, parades through the city, the emperor individually greeting the leaders of multiple countries, etc. I could easily trim forty minutes from this film and the sad thing is, they had trimmed that much just to get it down to this length.

• Audio Commentary with Bill Bronston (son of producer Samuel Bronston) and Mel Martin (biographer of Samuel Bronston)
• Rome in Madrid: 1964 Promotional Film
• "The Rise and Fall of an Epic Production": The Making of the Film
• "The Rise and Fall of an Empire": An Historical Look at the Real Roman Empire
• "Hollywood vs History": An Historical Analysis
• "Dimitri Tiomkin": Scoring the Roman Empire
• Filmographies
• Still Galleries
• Original Theatrical Trailer

This is a good movie about the start of the Roman Empire's demise; this is not a great movie. Is it worth the three hour runtime, yes (but only once in awhile). :-)

Anthony Mann   [El Cid]

Stephen Boyd - Livius

[Ben-Hur]

Finlay Currie - Senator

[Ben-Hur, Ivanhoe]

Mel Ferrer - Cleander

Alec Guinness - Marcus Aurelius

[The Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, Star Wars: Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope/Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back/Episode VI - Return of the Jedi]

John Ireland - Ballomar

[Spartacus]

Andrew Keir - Polybius

[Cleopatra (1963), Mary Queen of Scots]

Sophia Loren - Lucilla

[El Cid, Grumpier Old Men]

James Mason - Timonides

[20000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Blue Max, The Boys from Brazil, Cross of Iron, The Desert Fox, The Desert Rats, Julius Caesar, North by Northwest, Salem's Lot]

George Murcell - Victorinus

Christopher Plummer - Commodus

[A Beautiful Mind, Alexander, The Battle of Britain, The Insider, Malcolm X, National Treasure, Nuremberg]

Eric Porter - Julianus

Anthony Quayle - Verulus

[The Eagle Has Landed, The Guns of Navarone, Lawrence of Arabia]

Omar Sharif - Sohamus

[The 13th Warrior, Hidalgo, Lawrence of Arabia, Top Secret!]

Douglas Wilmer - Niger

[El Cid, Revenge of the Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark]

Norman Wooland - Virgilianus

[Ivanhoe]