Conclusions

The changes between the two versions of The Arena outlined above all point to one central fundamental difference; where the earlier film was a light-hearted frolic, whose only serious element was a reference to racial tension, the later movie has a clear anti-imperialist message. Where the Romans are portrayed without malice in 1973, by 2001 they have become an evil, oppressive nation with a clear agenda of crushing the rest of the world, and to oppose them is to become a freedom fighter. With this shift, the whole tone of the film becomes far more serious, and the humour and warmth disappears to leave a grim world of struggle againt a brutal dictatorship. As Martin Winkler has shown, this is hardly a new presentation; thus were the Romans portrayed throughout the nineteen fifties and sixties.¹ Similarly, the Roman superpower is so depicted in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator of 2000. What is striking then is rather the mild portrayal of the Corman’s earlier version of The Arena, and also the graphic and extreme depiction of a commonplace theme in the second version.

I would suggest that the reason for this first element can be understood by placing the film in its historical context, both from the point of view of movie history and that of the wider backdrop of American history. By the seventies, as is well known, there was a dearth of films set in the ancient world; as a setting it was boring and hackneyed, and the only way in which it became relevant was as a setting for a sexploitation movie, where titillation rather than social commentary was the aim. In the wider historical context, this film was made during the Vietnam War. It could be expected that this war, conducted as it was on foreign soil, and by 1973 vastly unpopular, would have led to a demonisation of the very idea of an imperialist power. This is not the case, however. Even the films that depict this war (e.g., Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter) do not take this approach, focussing instead on the futility and brutality of the war rather than viewing the involvement of the United States in the war from the point of view of imperialism.

In contrast, the later military operations in which America was involved were viewed both at home and abroad rather differently. Operation Desert Storm of 1990 and the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved very unpopular with the American public, and the criticism most often levelled is that these actions demonstrate dangerous imperialist tendencies. While there are a host of reasons for the rebirth of the ancient epic movie in the form of Gladiator, it is surely no coincidence that then traditional imperialist power of the big screen has returned to prominence at the same time that imperialism has become an issue of central importance in the new globalism of the second millenium. The Romans are evil imperialist brutes in the 2001 movie because imperialism has become a dirty word in contemporary society; and the Romans have become popular precisely because, in part at least, they are easily portrayed in this way. Thus, so widespread is the opposition to imperialism that it has affected even low-budget, second-rate movies such as The Arena, so that the remake of the film is as much a product of its time as the earlier version was a product of its own.

¹M. Winkler, "The Roman Empire in American Cinema", in Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture, (John Hopkins 2001), 50-76.