Hello!

The epic films of Samuel Bronston come to mind every once in a while; they’ve been slow arriving on disc in remastered presentations. That’s why the tip-off from advisor-reviewer ‘B’ of their availability streaming got my attention.

All four of the films that stayed in the Bronston corral can now be seen on Amazon Prime. We wandered over and sampled three of them. Anthony Mann’s impressive  El Cid Stars Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren. It is a little weak on color but looks better than my old DVD; it’s much better than the 70mm theatrical restoration from 1993. Although its history is slanted and its politics are conservative, this is the best of the four movies, very strongly felt. The knights-in-armor action is up there with Ivanhoe.

Nicholas Ray’s  55 Days at Peking has always looked good; I picked it up on a European Blu-ray some years back, and it might be available domestically by now. Topping the Bill again is Charlton Heston, with Ava Gardner. It’s strong suit is the colossal production, with the huge city set built just outside Madrid. Everything else is a strange pro-colonial political jumble that today’s history teachers wouldn’t endorse.

The relative rarity is 1965’s  Circus World, the all-star bore with John Wayne and Claudia Cardinale. I only watched the first few minutes, most of which looked okay. Not the script … it’s terrible.

The biggest super-epic of all is 1964’s  The Fall of the Roman Empire — it has a cast-of-thousands grandiosity that today’s CGI cannot match; all it needed was a more charismatic star than Stephen Boyd. We have a so-so DVD and have seen a not-bad European Blu-ray. The other three Bronstons are ‘included with Prime’ but Roman Empire is not, so we didn’t pay to sample it.

The last I heard, the Bronston films were owned by Disney (please correct me on that) so I wouldn’t be holding my breath for handsome remasters and disc releases. The best book on the Samuel Bronston empire is still Mel Martin’s  The Magnificent Showman, from 2016.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson