1942 – Michael Curtiz – The sense of place that most epics seek to achieve is accomplished in this studio-bound film less through creating a realistic sense of Casablanca than by exploring the international states of mind that characterize Rick's place. The opening narration tells us that the refugee trail of monied and desperate exiles leads to Casablanca, where they wait an…
1990 – Jean-Paul Rappeneau – Edmond Rostand's 1898 play about the famous hero that translator Anthony Burgess described in an apt phrase as “big-nosed, big-voiced, big-souled” was labeled by its author an heroic comedy. One of the most expensive French productions ever made, this film version is the first really to capture the heroic side of the story, and it ma…
1965 – David Lean – Doctor Zhivago is a romantic, war-time epic that captures the emotions of the people caught up in the Russian Revolution. The story of Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) is told in a flashback by his half-brother Yevgraf (Alec Guinness), and most of the movie occurs during winter amid many beautifully photographed locations backed with memorable music. A newly married ph…
1996 – Anthony Minghella – The English Patient is a romantic epic that explores love, loss, and healing. Based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje and filmed in Italy and Tunisia, the film pieces together the life of a dying man with no memory of his past. The movie covers a span of eight years of Count Laszlo Almasy's (Ralph Fiennes) life through a series of flashbacks. Directo…
1992 – Ron Howard – Ron Howard may be one of the most imaginative and inspiring filmmakers of our time. When he is coupled with one of the great masters of movie music, John Williams, the result is a movie that not only looks like an epic, but sounds like one too. This is a story about a most unlikely romance between Joseph Donnelly (Tom Cruise) and Shannon Christie (Nicole Kidman).…
1967 – John Schlesinger – Far From the Madding Crowd is an ambitious but slack romantic epic that chronicles the life of a beautiful young woman, her relationships with the three men who love her and how their love changes her life. The movie is based on Thomas Hardy's classic 19th century novel. A poor farmer, Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates), is smitten early on by the beautiful Ba…
1993 – Chen Kaige – Perhaps everyone at some point has believed that he or she was delivered into this world for some particular purpose. Fate. Fortune. Destiny. Whatever it is called, it is a major theme in Farewell My Concubine. For some of the film's characters, the acceptance of fate is as natural as breathing; for others it is a lifelong struggle, but for all it is the f…
1953 – Fred Zinnemann – What other film better illustrates brilliant casting than this one, based on James Jones' blockbuster novel, tracing the interactions of assorted people at Pearl Harbor during the six months preceding the Japanese attack? Frank Sinatra's career revived when he convinced studio-head Harry Cohn that he could play the nonsinging part of Angelo Magg…
1939 – Victor Fleming – Based on the runaway best-selling novel by Margaret Mitchell, this story follows Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) as she braves the years during and after the Civil War. Armed with nothing but beauty and self-confidence, Scarlett goes through many tribulations as she moves from one husband to the next, flees from the Yankees, and saves her…
1952 – Cecil B. De Mille – One of the interesting things about the success of Titanic is the showmanship connected with the film, the way this megahit has created excitement about moviegoing itself that previous box-office champs like Jurassic Park did not. Cecil B. De Mille's famous film about a circus flaunts its showmanship too, and did it so well that it convinced Oscar-v…
1998 – Robert Redford – Based on Nicholas Evans' best-selling novel, The Horse Whisperer unfolds through most of its near-three-hour length a bit uncertainly, like a young cowhand tiptoeing atop a fence beam. On the one side is the ripeness of the corral, on the other the soft safety of tall grasses. Ultimately, Robert Redford's film maintains its footing fairly well, …
1952 – Richard Thorpe – “The man with the perfect profile,” as Robert Taylor was once known, suits well this story of Saxon and Norman strife during the exile of King Richard the Lionheart (Norman Wooland). Richard languishes as the prisoner of Leopold of Austria. Taylor's Ivanhoe travels, sometimes in disguise, to help restore Richard to his throne even if it c…
1992 – Michael Mann – The Last of the Mohicans is an epic adventure with passion and romance set in 1757 in the frontier west of the Hudson River. From the opening scene of three men running gracefully through a forest in pursuit of a deer to the beautiful music of Randy Edelman (Beethoven, Come See the Paradise) and Trevor Jones (Excalibur; The Dark Crystal), the audience is captiv…
1985 – Sydney Pollack – With beautiful cinematography, a grand musical score, and acting that cleverly portrays the complex Danish writer Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) and British hunter Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford), Sydney Pollack's award-winning film Out of Africa exquisitely captures the spirit of Africa, its natives, and the foreigners that attempt to call it home. T…
1970 – David Lean – Filmed along the coast of Ireland's Dingle Peninsula, Ryan's Daughter is the story of a young girl's struggles with love and politics in the midst of the 1916 western Irish uprising against the British. Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles), married to schoolteacher Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum), has a torrid love affair with Doryan (Christopher Jon…
1975 – Francois Truffaut – The Story of Adele H. is the sad but true tale of Adele Hugo, the second daughter of French writer and political activist Victor Hugo. Overshadowed all her life by her famous father and her family's favorite sister who drowned, Adele (Isabelle Adjani) uses a ream of paper a week to write her fragmented diary as she follows the object of her obsessive…
1975 – John Milius – Director John Milius opens this tale of desert adventure with Arabian horses pounding through the surf, sabers glistening, and robes flying. The Wind and The Lion tells of the early twentieth-century struggle between Teddy Roosevelt (Brian Keith) and the Ruffian chief Raisuli (Sean Connery). Set in the Moroccan desert and the city of Tangier, this epic is loosely…
In addition to those epics with a strong romantic element (like Reds) included in other chapters, additional epics that emphasize romance would include The Thorn Birds, the 1983 mini-series from the novel by Colleen McCul-lough featuring one of the last performances by Barbara Stanwyck and one of the first by Rachel Ward. The 486-minute series is a dynastic story set in the Australian outback, Rom…