In 1937, producer impresario Alexander Korda had a brainstorm for putting the British film industry on the international map. He bought the rights to Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and hired the great Charles Laughton, who had triumphed on screen as Henry VIII and Rembrandt, to portray Graves’s bumbling, crippled protagonist, the most unlikely Roman emperor of them all. And to direct, he imported from the USA Josef von Sternberg, of The Blue Angel and other famous Dietrich vehicles. But the movie fell apart as Laughton couldn’t get a handle on how to play Claudius, becoming more tentative and insecure by the day. The haughty, dictatorial Sternberg was totally unsympathetic. "Laughton needed sun, sun. Instead, he got frost," remembers actor Emlyn Williams, who played Caligula. After a month, the shooting stopped abruptly when actress Merle Oberon, the female lead as vestal-virgin-turned-court-hussy Messalina, was injured in a London auto accident.

A tragedy for the history of cinema? In 1965, the BBC produced The Epic That Never Was, locating and showing for the first time the rushes from the film, and interviewing some surviving cast and crew. Dirk Bogarde, who hosted the show, claims in his monologue that Laughton finally came through and that a tremendous film was in the making. But the rushes show Laughton embarrassingly out of synch, and that suggests Williams was right when he said that Oberon’s accident was a "godsend." As for this curious documentary, where else do you get an interview with a pipe-smoking Sternberg dressed like an Oxford don?