The epic film is not a genre, so much as a class of movie, defined by its length and, to a lesser degree, its general subject matter. Epic films can deal with war, generational conflicts, Biblical events, religious strife, historical figures, or even -- in at least one instance--intellectual conflicts. Their main defining characteristics are the breadth of their stories and action, and the grandeur of their director's approach--thus, Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp is an epic, because it covers its title character's entire life story as much as because of its three hour running time, while John Ford's My Darling Clementine is not, due to its more modest scope, even though both movies hook around the same historical figures and events.

The epic film had its beginnings in Europe early in the twentieth century where, during the first decade, filmmakers were already making movies on Biblical subjects of up to an hour in length, in an era when American films typically ran for 20 minutes or less. The European epic reached a height of sorts in 1914 with Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria, a 148 minute account of a Sicilian slave girl and her life during the Second Punic War. Among the American film-makers impressed with Cabiria was D.W. Griffith, who work up to that time was largely limited to the making of two-reel comedies. Griffith initially had difficulty persuading American producers of the validity of making movies of greater than two reels (about 20-30 minutes) running time. He made his first relatively long-form film, an Old Testament drama called Judith of Bethulia, without telling his employers at Biograph Studios precisely what he was doing, and was fired after delivering his 42 minute film. But he immediately set to work preparing The Birth of a Nation, a tale of two families before, during, and after the War Between the States which, with its grand action scenes, huge canvas and scope, and 185 minute running time, defined the American epic and permanently altered the vision of American producers and directors. Within less than a year after its 1915 release, feature films had become the main focus of the movie industry, and two reelers were being pushed to the sidelines (although some producers, such as Hal Roach, making short films with the likes of Laurel and Hardy, the Little Rascals--also known as the Our Gang comedies--Charlie Chase, and Thelma Todd, would continue to see great success well into the 1930's).

Griffith defined the early epic cinema with films such as Intolerance and Hearts of the World--these were stories set against the backdrop of grand historical pageant or the great events of the day, such as the First World War in the case of Hearts of the World, their action framed within vast, outsized sets or monumental conflicts with large numbers of extras.

The 1920's saw the defining of the Biblical epic, through the parallel work of Cecil B. DeMille and Metro (later Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) Studios. DeMille's King of Kings purported to tell the story of Jesus Christ--who was played by H.B. Warner-although it did have some lapses in historical scholarship, as when Mary Magdelene commands one of her servants, "Harness my zebras!" MGM's Ben Hur(subtitled "A Story of the Christ"), released in 1926 after several agonizing years of production that nearly bankrupted the studio, covered the same historical/Biblical material, seen from the point-of-view of two fictional characters created by the novelist General Lew Wallace, the Judean prince Judah Ben-Hur Ramon Novarro) and the ambitious Roman officer Messala (Francis X. Bushman), who play out their death struggle concurrent with the life and death of Jesus.

The transitional period from silent films to talkies left behind one major religious epic, Noah's Ark (1929), in which the Old Testament story was paralleled with a tale of World War I tragedy, but this movie was considered "lost" until very recently, and has only lately resurfaced for television presentation (by Turner Entertainment). Fox Studios (later 20th Century-Fox) weighed into the epic sweepstakes in 1930 with a western genre picture, The Big Trail directed by Raoul Walsh, which told of settlers going west by covered wagon, and starring a young John Wayne. The Big Trail failed at the box office, despite its presentation in an early version of the widescreen 70mm format--indeed, its failure may partly be attributed to the extra expense and difficulty involved in showing the film in this format; most theater owners, having only recently gone through the huge expense of converting to sound, didn't want to know about 70mm projectors.

RKO saw great success with its 1930 two hour and 10 minute western epic Cimarron, based on Edna Ferber's novel and starring Richard Dix and Irene Dunne, which not only cleaned up at the box office (unsaddled by the exotic format of The Big Trail) but won the Oscar for Best Picture and earned nominations for most of its principals. In 1933, RKO also released one of the great Biblical/historical epics of the decade, The Last Days of Pompeii, starring Preston Foster and Basil Rathbone--this movie, which managed to intertwine the life and death of Jesus with the celebrated eruption of Mount Vesuvius through the life of a fictional blacksmith-turned-gladiator (Foster), concluded with a special effect tour-de-force depicting the destruction of the city of Pompeii.

The middle and late 1930's saw Hollywood producers gravitate increasingly toward the making of movies based on major bestsellers which, not infrequently, included epic subject matter. Warner Bros.' adaptation of Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse was typical, an adventure tale about a young man's life in 19th century America, starring Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland. Sometimes filmmakers would even invent novels as the supposed source of their screen epics -- 20th Century-Fox's publicity for the sprawling historical drama In Old Chicago (which concludes with the great Chicago fire) attributed its source to a "novel" by Niven Busch that was, in reality, more of a 50 page screen treatment.

Gone With the Wind, based on Margaret Mitchell's bestseller, was the ultimate Hollywood epic treatment of a contemporary novel, and the 220 minute film holds a special place in the hearts of many movie-goers over 50 years later. The approach of World War II, and the development of commercial television once the war was over, however, seemed to bring an end to filmmaking on quite so lavish a scale -- certainly, there were to be no further Civil War stories of its kind, although M-G-M tried gamely near the end of the 1950's with Raintree County, starring Elizabeth Taylor.

Producer David O. Selznick, who'd made Gone With the Wind, was the sole exception. For a time during the early 1940's, it seemed as though every picture that Selznick made was destined to run well over two hours. The most notable of these was Duel In the Sun, Selznick's attempt to do a western Gone With the Wind, based on a novel by Niven Busch. Curiously, the movie was sold more on the overheated sexuality of the half-breed girl played by Jennifer Jones, rather than upon its sprawling story of the opening of the west. For a fascinating contrast in styles, incidentally, viewers should examine the movie that Busch produced as an "answer" to Selznick's outsized adaptation of his own book--Pursued (1946), directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Robert Mitchum, is every bit as intimate and closely focused a drama as Duel In the Sun is vast and broad, and has a very similar story line.

The 1950's saw a renewed interest in Hollywood in the Biblical epic, mostly spawned by the introduction of widescreen formats such as CinemaScope. 20th Century-Fox's The Robe introduced the widescreen format, but it seems rather clunky and overblown today. Much more interesting is its sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators. MGM's Quo Vadis was made before the introduction of CinemaScope, but its success established the viability of a good early Christian era drama, even if it wasn't terribly good (Robert Taylor is all wrong in the lead, although Peter Ustinov is fun as Nero).

In 1959, however, MGM was to release the greatest Biblical epic of them all, Ben Hur, starring Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd in a remake of the 1926 classic. In between the release of Quo Vadis and Ben Hur, the Biblical sweepstakes were dominated by Cecil D. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, which is the most entertaining but also perhaps the most overrated film of its kind, its audience having been built up from fairly substantial beginnings by annual network television showings.

Ben Hur took in hundreds of millions of dollars, and won more Academy Awards than any other picture of its kind, but it exhausted the market for big-scale, Bible dramatizations. The independently made King of Kings (1961), starring Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus, was not much more than a shadow of the earlier picture, and subsequent attempts at this sort of material, such as The Bible and The Greatest Story Ever Told, were notorious failures--especially the latter, with its all-star cast in supporting roles.

United Artists' The Big Country and MGM's How The West Was Won were major hits, but seemed to use up whatever patience and goodwill the public felt for sprawling western stories, and late 1960's efforts such as The Way West failed completely. The subsequent disasters encountered by Heaven's Gate, coupled with the lackluster audience response to Wyatt Earp with its three hour running time, would seem to indicate that little has changed since the 1960's -- the sole exception is Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves, which is not, strictly speaking, an epic, and had the virtue of political correctness in its treatment of Native Americans (almost to the exclusion of reality) to pull audiences in.

The failure of most of those late 1960's screen epics--even the seemingly tailor-made, topical The Sand Pebbles--helped doom the epic format, at least as familiar fare. And the establishment of home video as the ultimate viewing format of virtually any film was the nail in the coffin--the huge outlays for sets, and the hiring of vast numbers of extras, seem pointless in making movies that will finally be seen on 20-inch screens by most of us. Occasionally, an exception does come along, such as Turner Entertainment's 1993 release Gettysburg, but it was produced with television in mind, and was only released theatrically when the producers realized just how good it was, and how good it looked, which is seldom the case with such films.