Cinema: Foul Play in the Forum

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The Fall of the Roman Empire. Chopped into five or six half-hour parts, this movie could serve for that all but vanished art form, the Saturday afternoon serial. It might not top Tarzan of the Apes, but as a Child's Garden of Gibbon it obstreperously fills the bill. There are poisonings, chariot races, hairbreadth escapes, and slaughtered barbarians enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty ten-year-old.

More discriminating moviegoers will see at once that this 2nd century Rome is really that special, insular world of the cinema spectacular, a mise en scene now as familiar as Main Street. Producer Samuel Bronston constructed a mammoth Roman fortress and filled 250 acres of a Spanish plain with a full-scale reproduction of the Roman Forum as it existed circa A.D. 180. Bronston's Rome is patently too fabulous to have been built in a day, but it doesn't look lived-in either. Director Anthony Mann makes it a picture-book setting aswarm with extras behaving like extras and movie stars all dressed up to face posterity in spanking new tunics, togas and armor. Among the luminaries are Sophia Loren, Stephen Boyd, Alec Guinness, Christopher Plummer, James Mason and Omar Sharif.

In his monumental history, Gibbon described the decline of Rome as "the natural and inevitable effect of immod erate greatness." To this fifth of the Bronston spectaculars (which include 55 Days at Peking and El Cid), the same charge might be applied.