Do young Caesar. People (including Shakespeare and Shaw) always do older Caesar. There’s practically nothing on young Caesar and how he was abducted by pirates and became queen of Bithynia. 
Yes, I know. Even so, he’s world famous conqueror up there with Caesar and Napoleon.
It does explain the 4 entries from India, they can look back on being the only ones to stop his advance. Similar to Germany successfully stopping the Roman advance in the Teutoburg Forest.
No-one has any help to offer regarding where to find this DVD? Most of the other Indian films/series are available with English subtitles but this one remains so fecking elusive!
Bah, I’m sure audiences can deal just fine with some man-on-man action if we give them a chance. I think it’s way past time that we stopped underestimating them. People have been fascinated by Alexander since basically forever, and they still are. It’s not a problem.
I do fear that he blew his chance for a while with the 2004 Alexander, though. Which is a shame. It’s really rather mind-boggling how forgettable that movie turned out.
I am cringing just thinking about that combination of actors…
But the thing is, that goes for all of them. William Shatner as Alexander the Great? Not his finest moment.
The best one is probably even the one from India from 1941?!?
I to some extent agree with the last sentence, but in this modern age I think Alexander’s fluid sexuality would be a lesser issue with a realistic treament. Romance is at least a positiveish-seeming plot point to hang dramas on. The bigger problem was that he was a vicious drunkard of a megalomaniac who may well have met his end by being poisoned by his rightfully nervous officers :). He was basically a massive anti-hero and you’d need a youngish actor of considerable ability and natural charisma to pull off his contradictory traits.
ETA: Actually in that context a film of something like The Persian Boy where the main character is an intimate of Alexander rather than the man himself might work better. Then you can show a lot of the ugliness ( as well as the brilliance ) without getting bogged down in the likeable protagonist issue.
You know, I’m not even sure if “contradictory” is the right term. Pardon me while I have a strange interlude: It’s tricky to get into Alexander’s head, but no matter which way I try looking at things, there’s not really anything at all about him that I find particularly likeable. He was a jackass with a massive ego, just like Caesar, and just like Napoleon. Characters with that kind of personality have been worshiped as cultural heroes by plenty of people at various times, but if one of those guys showed up today, I suspect they’d be the subject of more Pit threads than Trump in no time flat.
I’m not really sure who to compare him to. Although, in one of my weirder moments, I once compared Caesar to Lance Armstrong. Sounds slightly bonkers, but I still think it sort of works. When you boil it down, he’s just a jackass who thinks the rules don’t apply to him, and the people who are on his side are simply thugs. There’s nothing heroic about the guy, stop idolizing him. Did the founding fathers dig Caesar? Heck no. They were founding a republic. To them, he was a tyrant. But for some reason, now we seem to like him again. I’m not even sure if it makes sense.
I don’t think that works so well for Alexander. But I wonder if the real challenge is to portray him a way that isn’t sympathetic. Maybe he’s not actually that conflicted or contradictory. Maybe we’re the ones who are conflicted and contradictory. There’s a cognitive dissonance going on, when all the hero-worshiping of centuries meets the brutal facts of conquest just for the sake of conquest. We expect Alexander to be a hero by default, and the problem arises when he never does anything very heroic or particularly admirable. Maybe that’s why the 2004 *Alexander *Alexander feels so off to me. He’s just so nice, you know? Look at those puppy eyes. But I don’t think there’s anything particularly nice about the historical Alexander.
Makes sense, Tamerlane. Certainly Alexander fails to fit the ‘traditional hero’ stereotype in most ways, other than the Conquering the Known World one.
The novel came out 45 years ago (!), and you’d think someone would have tried to film it by now, but apparently not.
I have the same problem. As a sometimes student of military history he looms as such a brilliant figure, but what little view we can get of his personality is largely repellent. Honestly I think I find Napoleon or Casesar far more relateable. Caesar may have been a back-stabbing bastard, but he far, far less likely to skewer you over dinner with a spear in a fit of drunken pique ;).
The best I can say about Alexander was:
1.) He seemed to have been a romantic in a certain sense of the word. He apparently good-naturedly fond of his brain-damaged brother and others in his family. And his devotion to Hephastion seems real. He loved grand displays, both positive and negative. It sorta fed into his megalomania ( Achilles and Patroclus reborn and all that ), but Alexander seems to have been more an emotional hothead rather than a genuine sociopath. Which is something, I guess ;).
2.) He wasn’t a xenophobe. Again, megalomania plays into this as the Persians/Babylonians/Egyptians appealed more to his vanity than the more roughly egalitarian traditional Macedonian kingship, but it appears he had none of the normal Macedonian Greek contempt for other cultures. Much to his army’s disgust. I think of the many senior Diadochi married off to foreign brides only Peucestes proved the exception to the rule by keeping his after Alexander’s death.
Other than that all his positives boil down to, apparently, an intense personal charisma that allowed him to motivate those around him and sheer military genius. And one can argue if those are truly positives from a character POV. Otherwise he was a total asshole.
Well, if we’re talking Great World Conquerors (and Caesar only really conquered Gaul, otherwise he just took over an empire already in the final stages of assembly), then in my “Powerball Winner’s Folly” bucket would be avenging the ridiculous Hollywood job done upon Temüjin.
But yeah, especially for the American pop cultural market, Alexander somehow fails to ping their Ancient Conqueror radar. And as has been mentioned, you *could *do him as a complex, fatally-flawed protagonist. He’s got going that “27 Club” thing of self destructiveness while at the peak of his powers, you could play off that.
However…
Here at the SDMB, this particular reinterpretation resulted in an awesome review/pitting back in early '04.
True. Although, I just had a strange and maybe slightly disturbing thought. I’m flying by the seat of my pants a bit here, but stay with me. Alexander wasn’t a xenophobe, but I think maybe we are. And by “we”, I mean Western audiences. And I think maybe this is part of the problem of being unable to see Alexander as anything but a hero. We don’t really have this problem with, say, Philip II, or later with the Diadochi. It’s easier to be more clear-eyed about those guys, and think of them more pragmatically, as it were. More in terms of realpolitik. When they’re ruthless bastards, they’re ruthless bastards, and it’s fine. But Alexander is a Westerner who goes East. And I think the whole “clash of civilizations” thing kicks in for us, in a way that seems to run deep, more so than I personally feel comfortable with. Who are we rooting for in that scenario? I think it’s oh so very hard for us not to cheer on the Westerner.
I’ll demonstrate, yeah? I just watched some bits from the 2004 *Alexander *on YouTube. Specifically, Guagamela. Sure, there are other clues as well to tell you who to the good guys are supposed to be. The score, the cinematography, and so forth. But even if you take away those, who are you, almost intuitively, cheering for? Isn’t it the guys who don’t resemble Middle Easterners?
Sorry about double posting, but I think I’ll actually expand on that a little bit. This adds another element of interestingness to the old thought experiment about what would happen if you saved Alexander’s life and pointed him in the direction of Italy, where he would run into the Romans at around the time of the Samnite Wars. Well, who are you rooting for *then? *Suddenly, it becomes a bit easier to see him in a different light, doesn’t it? Especially if the Romans pull out a rabbit and kick his butt. Now, he suddenly looks rather different, I think, more like a Pyrrhus of Epirus on steroids, which may even be closer to some kind of truth. Just a dickhead with a phalanx.
Wait, we don’t generally cheer for the Romans. They are cool but that’s because they are the bad guys. Think about it. It’s only in the Shakespearean things that we identify with them. Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Gladiator: Romans bad. Hero good. Emperor bad, and sexual deviant.
Well, that’s true. And when Crassus goes East and gets his butt kicked by the Parthians, it hilarious. Everyone loves Parthians, and everyone sure hates Crassus. Although, I dunno. I think it’s more complex. I think we’ll cheer for whoever depending on the context, and sometimes it gets weird. When Caesar is under assault at Alesia, who are you cheering for? Are you really saying it’s not Caesar? Then (spoiler alert) he wins. Cut to a closeup of Vercingetorix’s face. And now you’re all conflicted. I swear, history is like watching Breaking Bad a lot of the time.
So with more sexual innuendo and harder travel bans against Medes and Persians, he would stand a better chance of winning the cinematic popular vote?
That can be tricky, since one man’s Mede is another man’s Persian.
Pity. The world really needed that one.
You can buy the pilot, or see it without buying. 
Incorrect. 1964–65. Before Batman, before Star Trek. Oddly enough, churned out by the same company that produced Combat!
I’ve seen this, and it is a hoot! You think Shatner chewed the scenery in TOS, his performance here is even more … uninhibited! :smack:
Incorrect incorrect: It’s in fact 1963.
I guess 1968 is the date it eventually premiered on television. By that time it would have been a total non-starter because the toga craze had completely died.