BBC4 is currently repeating the wonderful 1976 dramatisation of Robert Graves' I, Claudius on Wednesday evenings, three episodes at at time. The first six are now up on iPlayer.
I've been staying up to watch them because they are so good and also because watching them now reminds me of watching them when I was a teenager. It's a way of pretending I'm still young.
Yesterday I discovered a video called The Epic That Never Was. It's a 1965 documentary about an earlier, abortive attempt to adapt I, Claudius for the screen. This was a British film that began shooting in 1937, but was never completed.
People rave about the 1976 cast, but the 1937 one looks enticing too: Charles Laughton, Flora Robson, Merle Oberon, Emlyn Williams, Robert Newton.
The Epic That Never Was includes substantial selections from the rushes, interviews with cast members and on-screen narration by Dirk Bogarde. There are also glimpses of Denham Studios in decay - this is where Carol Reed, David Lean and Powell and Pressburger made many of their great films of the 1940s.
Wikipedia quotes Roger Greenspun's verdict on this documentary:
Something in the controlled modelling of light over the faces of Merle Oberon and Emlyn Williams suggests that this might have been a superb film and that its loss is real and very sad. …
By an admirable trick of fate the 1937 von Sternberg footage has ascended into timeless light, while the style of the surrounding 1965 documentary has dated like crazy. If you have to lose your best project, maybe this is the way to do it.
I watched EP1. It felt more like a pantomime than anything serious. Brian Blessed as Baron Hardup, Livia as the wicked stepmother (boo) etc.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to look for this - I haven't seen it advertised on the BBC website. The documentary is an extra on the DVD boxset; the clips do look great, but I do wonder what the overall film would have been like.
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