The Emperor’s Club, a film
I watched this film
with my wife and daughter and all of us agreed that it is a profoundly deep
piece of cinematography but above all, carefully (decidedly Un-Hollywood)
thought out on the part of the screen writer.
In The Emperor’s Club several
scenarios are playing out at the same time, while a dedicated teacher does his
best to teach beyond the subject material to instill greater lessons of life in
his students. Mr. Hundert
is a teacher of Western Civilization, teaching the history of the Greeks and
Romans to boys in a parochial school.
The central characters in the movie are a group of boys whose lives
become affected by what they learn in Mr. Hundert’s
class.
Besides Mr. Hundert, the primary character in the story is one Sedgwick
Bell, the son of a U.S. Senator. He is a
brilliant boy, but without discipline and without direction in his life,
presumably in large part due to his father’s involvement in politics to the
exclusion of his son. Mr. Hundert takes a special interest in the boy’s success,
possibly because his own father expected much of his son, but gave him little
in the way of attention (only briefly alluded to in the film.) After a meeting with the boy’s father, Mr. Hundert gives the young Sedgwick a copy of his own high
school history book and manages to inspire the boy to seek after the prize of
winning a spot on the competition of Mr. Julius Caesar. The boy does apply himself, but does not
quite make the top three. In one of the
poignant moments in the film, Mr. Hundert agonizes
over the winners of the top three positions and makes the decision to move
Sedgwick into the position number three, though he has not quite earned that
place. It is a decision made with good
motives and with high hopes, but one that Mr. Hundert
will regret for a long time to come.
Sedgwick, unwilling to face the possibility of loosing the competition,
elects to cheat, writing down the answers and fastening them inside his toga. Realizing the cheating, Mr. Hundert finds that the school headmaster is unwilling to
call the boy on it, as his father the senator is in the audience. So, Mr. Hundert
uses a question not on his note cards, and Sedgwick is unable to answer it, and
so looses the competition.
Many years later
Mr. Hundert passes through his own ethical crisis,
where a younger man, for whom he had secured a teaching position at the
college, gets selected instead of himself as headmaster. Deeply hurt over being so passed up after
seventeen years as assistant headmaster, Mr. Hundert
resigns his teaching position. He says
he wants to write, but can find no inspiration and instead finds himself
invited to proctor a rematch of the Mr. Julius Caeser
competition, hosted and paid for by the now-wealthy Sedgwick Bell. Mr. Hundert agrees
and hopes to find that Sedgwick is a changed man, and that his wealth has been
gained as a result of honest industry.
But he is deeply disappointed when he finds Sedgwick again cheating in a
second attempt to win the competition.
When confronted with his cheating, Mr. Hundert
finds that Mr. Bell has no conscience regarding his willingness to use the
philosophy “the ends justify the means.”
In another of the poignant moments in the film, the young son of Mr.
Bell overhears a conversation between his father and Mr. Hundert. In essence Mr. Bell has told Mr. Hundert that nobody cares about ethics and morality,
essentially the very same thing he had said long ago in the class regarding the
moral dilemma facing Brutus.
But while Mr. Hundert feels he has failed to teach Mr. Bell the real
lessons of history, he finds his other students have done well in life. Deepak, the winner of the Mr. Caeser contest, has become a teacher. And Mr. Blythe, wrongly moved from third
place to fourth to make room for Sedgwick, shows the confidence in Mr. Hundert to place his own son in the St. Benedict’s
school. The film ends with Mr. Hundert back in his classroom, asking the young Mr. Blythe
to read the inscription at the rear of the classroom, of an ancient general and
king who was lost to history. According
to Mr. Hundert, history has no record of Shutruk Nuhunte because “great
conquest and success without contribution is without significance.”
This film is a
fine, inspirational work that I would recommend to all teachers. Mr. Hundert says to
the senator, Sedgwick’s father, “my job is to mold your son’s character.” The senator begs to differ, saying that the
teacher’s only job is to deliver facts and knowledge to his son, not to mold
his character. He claims that job for
himself. His success is measured in his
son’s complete lack of character, though Sedgwick, as an aspiring politician,
is happy to speak of character as though he had some of his own.
In my discussions
with my wife and daughter, we came up with the following list of ethical and
moral questions that make the film so complex and interesting. I list them in roughly chronological order.
This is not a
comprehensive list, but it gives a picture of the multifaceted character of
this profound and well-acted movie.