I’ve just finished *El Cid * and I have The Greatest Story Ever Told, **Ben * * Hur, and *Lawrence of Arabia * on my netflix que. What do you consider to be some of the other great epics?
Exodus…the founding of the State of Israel.
Gone With the Wind.
Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus is worth a look. Not great Kubrick, but it’s certainly watchable.
Point Break.
…by which I meant The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly . Honest mistake.
Dr. Zhivago The script is little more than glorified soap opera, but the cinematography is spectacular.
The Godfather, Part I & II. (Good thing they never made a third one.)
Gettysburg is quite good, as is Patton.
It’s overdone and people are going to roll their eyes, but Citizen Kane is still seminal.
Does The Great Escape count as epic?
Stranger
Ran
Titanic (I know it gets a lot of flak, but overall, it’s a vastly entertaining epic).
Red River
Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, Emir Kusturica’s Underground, Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, Buster Keaton’s The General, Mikheil Kalatozishvili’s I Am Cuba, Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes, and Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans for starters.
DW Griffith’s **Intolerance ** is pretty good, considering that it was released in 1916.
You can’t tell me Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” wasn’t epic!
and yeah “The Great Escape” was epic, at least in faithfulness to source material, and in number of good actors involved.
Intolerance (1916), Napoleon (1927), The King of Kings (1927), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), The Good Earth (1937), San Francisco (1937), In Old Chicago (1937), Henry V (1944), Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II (1944-46), Quo Vadis (1951), The Ten Commandments (1956), The Longest Day (1962), Cleopatra (1963), Andrei Rublev (1966), The Bible … In the Beginning (1966) (not great as whole, but the Creation, the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, and Noah’s Ark are memorable segments), Hawaii (1966), Doctor Dolittle (1967), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988).
Citizen Kane is an epic? Where are the crowd scenes?
I was thinking more of the time period over which it takes and the scope of Kane’s life. YMMV.
But now I realize that I’ve entirely neglected several great directors, particularly one of my favorites, Akira Kurosawa. Kumonosu jô (Throne of Blood), Kagemusha, and his ultimate masterpiece, Ran.
Sergi Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin), Oktyabr, Aleksandr Nevskiy, and his double film, Ivan Groznyy (Ivan the Terrible) I & II are great films.
You’ll not find them in any video store or (most likely) on Netflix, but Leni Reifenstahl’s Olympiad and A Triumph of Will are groundbreaking “documentaries” that used an epic scope since widely emulated in film and advertising.
Stranger
A lot of my potential suggestions have already been mentioned in this thread, so I’ll just name the ones that haven’t been mentioned yet.
Gandhi. Ben Kingsley is simply outstanding in the title role.
Apocalypse Now. I’m actually quite partial to the “redux” version that was released a few years ago.
Henry V. The Lawrence Olivier version was mentioned earlier in this thread. I’m gonna mention the Kenneth Branagh version here, which I think is just an excellent adaptation of the Shakespeare play.
2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe not epic in the sense of having huge quantities of people on screen, but certainly epic in time and space.
Having those Japanese and Russian titles is handy for those video stores that alphabetize in Japanese and Russian.
Man, I’m going to be bashed for this one, but when I watched Superman: the Movie recently, I was surprised how epic it felt. Especially the first half - the Krypton scenes and the growing up years in Smallville. It falls apart in the second half when Christopher Reeve shows up. It’s still enjoyable but a little too cartoony for my tastes. When you look at what Mario Puzo was trying to do with the first movie and Superman 2 (which I don’t care for at all, Richard Lester? What the hell?!?) it feels incredibly epic-like. Too bad they couldn’t sustain what they accomplished in the first hour.
There aren’t better war epics than Glory.
Henry V, (Brannagh’s version), is excelent.
Spartacus gets an honorable mention