In “The Telling of the Tale,” a posthumously published essay, Jorge Luis Borges rejoiced that the desire for epic never dies, even if the ancient form may have become obsolete. “In a way, people are hungering and thirsting for epic. I feel that epic is one of the things that men need. Of all places (and this may come as an anticlimax, but the fact is there), it has been Hollywood that has furnished epic to the world.” It is a claim both simple and provocative, and my youthful moviegoing experiences can testify to its legitimacy if not its conclusiveness. I passed my teenaged years in an era of self-conscious cinematic grandeur. Many American moviemakers, anxious about the incursion of small screens in people's homes, advertised their products as “epic”—and that meant giant screens, ostentatious overtures, intermissions and a run-time in the neighborhood of four hours. Before I had read the Iliad, the Odyssey or Paradise Lost, I knew The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, El Cid, Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, 55 Days at Peking, How the West Was Won, The Fall of the Roman Empire, The Greatest Story Ever Told.

There was a broad range of subjects and time periods in these mid-twentieth-century movies; their historical fidelity and cultural discernment were often dubious; and artistically they ran the gamut from the masterful to the meretricious. (It was a joke among my peers that one of the films on my list should have been titled The Longest Story Ever Told.) American films since the beginning of the twentieth century had been linking visual spectacle with evocative music—a mix that is one of Wagner's legacies to cinema. And the composers who scored the epic films of midcentury had leitmotifs in their bloodstream; musical themes would linger in theatergoers’ memories when they emerged from epic films as much as they had for the audiences in Bayreuth. By the late 1960s, the movie epics out of Hollywood had largely run out of steam, except for the brilliantly iconoclastic 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. Long movies, a few of them candidates for the designation of epic, continued to be made in succeeding decades, with fantasy, science fiction and mythology predominating, but the clouds of glory that trailed from Cinerama and 70 millimeter, from uniformed ushers and reverential music and leg-stretching intermissions mostly vanished.