Charlton Heston does a solid turn as Marc Antony (although in his journals he admits that's not such a big trick, since, in his view, if you can't do Marc Antony, you probably shouldn't be doing The Bard in the first place). Gielgud appears here in the title role, and he does a superlative job. For this go-around at JULIUS CAESAR, the film is helmed by English director Stuart Burge, who did a yeoman adaptation of the Bard's OTHELLO in 1965, with Robert Furnival faithfully adapting the play to good effect. Still, the play is the thing, as the old saying goes. Indeed, many consider this film wildly erratic for various reasons, including one quixotic bit of casting that didn't come off. The result was, by all accounts, one that arguably fell into the shadow of Mankiewicz's version, which after all had Marlon Brando as Marc Antony Louis Calhern as Caesar and Sir John Gielgud as Cassisus, one of the conspirators. And then in 1969, an enterprising and young Canadian producer named Peter Snell decided to mount a new adaptation of this work.
The 1953 version, adapted for the screen and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, was and still is considered one of the best of the Bard's adaptations ever to make it to the screen. And then there's the political/historical tragedy that is JULIUS CAESAR. And much more controversially, there is director Roman Polanski's extremely violent 1971 take on MACBETH, which was as close as The Bard came to outright horror. In general, Orson Welles and Lord Laurence Olivier (but call him Larry) are the two men most identified with successes at the Bard's work, on both sides of the camera then there's Franco Zeffirelli (especially with his classic 1968 film version of ROMEO AND JULIET), and the later adaptations of Kenneth Branagh.
When it comes to cinematically pulling anything off that has its basis in the world of William Shakespeare, the task can frequently be enormous.
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