Was the Last Days of the Roman Empire Too Innovative for Its Own Good or Not Innovative Enough?

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Was the Last Days of The Roman Empire too Innovative for its own good or not Innovative Enough? According to Wyke the release of Fall of the Roman Empire coincided with a time when appreciation for films about antiquity was waning. The once great, guaranteed money making scheme of a film about the Ancient world, was failing. The Robe, 1953; Ben Hur, 1959; and Spartacus, 1960; were all films that had been spectaculars, celebrating the long ago past, glorifying it, however the mass production of something that was supposed to be special and unique meant that the success of such films could no longer be sustained. The huge failure of Cleopatra meant that Twentieth Century Fox was bankrupt, and it showed that the audience no longer connected with what was put on the widescreen. The younger audience of the 1960s now found films like Cleopatra out-dated, and at odds with the violent, sexual and youthful world that had not existed in the 1950s. The production of Fall of the Roman Empire was a final attempt to make a claim for Hollywood’s vision of Rome. It was an exploitation of classic cinema devices, which challenge and draw upon the conventions of Hollywood style according to Wyke. The opening scenes are classic as they have a voiceover explaining what the audience are to expect, however the sequence also places a distance between the film itself and the previous cold war narratives of Christianity. It is also showcased in the traditional style of grand Hollywood Roman epics, as an attempt to sell it as a creditable, innovative development of the genre, a ‘Spectacular lavish box office magnet’. The film claims to have an improved level of authenticity as it uses eighteenth century history books, such as Edward Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’ written 1776 – 1788, and due to the book’s influence the date of the Empire’s decline was placed about 180 AD. The apparently
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