Some movies are just too big for a mere 90 minutes.
“I saw Gone With the Wind (1939), Ben Hur (1959), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003) so I know epic.”
First of all, thank you for not referencing Gladiator (2000). I agree. Spartacus (1960) is the far superior film. Next, while it is always something to feel well-versed in a genre one can always become well-versedier. Most people would be familiar with Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments) and David Lean (Doctor Zhivago) and their epics are nothing to sneeze at, but how many Americans are familiar with František Vláčil?
There are so many fantastic foreign epics that it would be impossible to name them all. The silent era saw many immortal epic classics born like Abel Gance’s frenetic and hypersymbolic Napoleon (1927) and Fritz Lang had Metropolis (1927) and Die Nibelungen: Siegried and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924). If you think silent films are boring and slow you have not seen the opening snowball fight in Napoleon. Similar to Napoleon—in that it was meant to be multiple films but was never truly finished (but still a hearty 330 minutes)—Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin) made two installments of what would have been a trilogy—had Stalin not noticed the political commentary—with Ivan the Terrible (1944 and 1958). For more contemporary political epics you must check out Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Iron (1981). All of these films are directed by brilliant auteurs and come highly recommended if you can find them…but there are still hundreds more, but the subject of today’s article is, quite arbitrarily, four foreign epics from the 1960s you might have missed.
The 1950s and 1960s indeed saw many grand and sweeping epics (How the West Was Won, El Cid, and so on). The onslaught of Hollywood epics is indeed impressive but folks in other countries were doing things just as big and sometimes quite different. Let us start off with a familiar name. Akira Kurosawa is renown as one of the world’s great directors, and for good reason. The man responsible for such iconic films as Rashômon (1950), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), Kagemusha (1980), and Ran (1985) was no stranger to the monstrous period epic, but for some odd reason Kurosawa’s 185 minute long epic about a 19th century country doctor and his irascible mentor (played by Kurosawa favorite, Toshiro Mifune) gets missed by a lot of American audiences. Red Beard (1965) sounds like it should be a pirate movie, not an intimate drama about students of Japanese medicine. There is one scene of pretty solid action (Mifune goes to town on some goons in a brothel) but this is more a quiet film with much historical detail, subtlety, ideological conflicts, and character drama. In addition to Mifune, Kyōko Kagawa (Tokyo Story) also gives a fantastic performance as a deranged woman patient called “The Mantis.” Reflecting back on it I must say it is indeed a shame more people have not seen this amazing movie.
Rather than expound too much on these great epics I will keep my opinions brief and just tell you to see them for yourself. Red Beard is a great movie that more people need to see in the west. Another too often missed Kurosawa epic is his Russian film Dersu Uzala (1975) which just might be one of my personal favorites of his.
Also in 1965 was Wojciech Has’s (The Hour-Glass Sanatorium) epic Polish masterpiece The Saragossa Manuscript. This is a fascinating one for many reasons. It has your standard elaborate costumes, long run-time (182 minutes), and shifting 18th century scenery, but it has a witty and surreal attitude that I find incredibly appealing. It’s a squirrelly and unpredictable film with stories within stories within stories ad infinitum. It’s beautifully shot and actually pretty funny…in a subversive sly sort of way. Featuring satire, magic, horror, drama, comedy, and surrealism, The Saragossa Manuscript is an unforgettable movie experience. In many ways it might as well be a time-travel movie or an anthology picture. If my endorsement isn’t enough here’s a few other people who loved it: Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather), Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver), Jerry Garcia (of The Grateful Dead), and Luis Buñuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie). You have never seen a movie like this one. Enough talk. Go watch it. It is extremely awesome.
Here’s another more familiar name you ought to know. Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky (Ivan’s Childhood, Solaris, Stalker, The Sacrifice) is famous for being very slow, meticulous, lugubrious, and confoundingly enigmatic, but always with great beauty in his films. Andrei Rublev (1966) is no exception and clocking in at around 205 minutes, it will try the patience of many. Many, however, shall be rewarded. In general it is the story of a famous 15th century Russian iconographer, but it is far more bizarre than that. Events happen and Andrei Rublev is not always present nor is he consistently the center of attention. It is more a bottling of the time period. There are amazing and horrific battles, acts of whimsy and bravery, and (as always) gorgeous cinematography. Tarkovsky manages to be both intimate and distant in this grand spectacle. While Andrei Rublev might not be the place to start with Tarkovsky it is definitely one that should not be missed. His work is cinematic poetry of the highest order.
Lastly comes a film I only recently stumbled upon. It is František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1967) and what a find it was. Apparently the Czechs have known about it all along, even going so far as to label it the greatest Czech film of all time. Who knew? From the opening sequence of wolves speckling a frigid snowscape like sinister chess pieces, and the snow fight with the beggars and the men on horseback, I was hooked. Although I found the film a little difficult to follow at times there is no denying how much I truly was enamored by it. Set in the Middle Ages it flows in a series of almost unrelated chapters. Characters randomly appear amidst other characters’ narratives in the background and everything seems to be somewhat interlocked. It’s beautiful, tragic, haunting, and amazing. Most synopses seem to minimize the plot to “feudal lord’s daughter kidnapped by robbers but she falls in love with one of them,” but there really is a lot more at work here. Religion, class, and government all play a part in this seemingly lawless world. It is a dense film (162 minutes) but one that I think most people will have a hard time denying how great it is.
Still think you know epic? Go find some more then. I love film because it always strikes me as a sort of bottomless well…as with all the arts. You pull back the dusty curtain and keep discovering more sumptuous treasures. There is no end in sight to the vast amounts of films I have not heard of yet. One of my wishes for folks who peruse this site is that they see a name or a title they have not encountered before and they become inspired to dig and discover more and more in this magical and ever-changing medium. God speed.
