Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar is a 1970 British adaptation of William Shakespeare's play about the conspiracy against the Roman dictator. In Rome, a group of senators fears that Caesar's accumulation of power will end in tyranny. Cassius and Casca draw Brutus, a man close to Caesar, into their plot, and the conspirators carry out the assassination on the Ides of March. Mark Antony survives and turns the political mood against the killers, setting off a struggle between the two camps.

Stuart Burge directed the film, working from a screenplay by Robert Furnival and produced by Peter Snell for Commonwealth United Entertainment. It runs 117 minutes. The cast includes Charlton Heston as Marc Antony, Jason Robards as Marcus Brutus, John Gielgud as Julius Caesar, Robert Vaughn as Servilius Casca, Richard Chamberlain as Octavius Caesar and Christopher Lee as Artemidorus, among 23 credited performers. The film sits within a run of Shakespeare adaptations Burge made for cinema in this period, following his earlier work on the same playwright's material.

Audience response has been modest, with the film holding an IMDb rating of 6.1 from around 2,300 votes and a TMDB rating of 5.9 from a much smaller group of 41. The two figures are close, suggesting a consistent if unenthusiastic reception.