The Last Roman (German: Kampf um Rom) is a West German-Italian historical drama film starring Laurence Harvey, Orson Welles, Sylva Koscina and Honor Blackman.

Italy is ruled as an independent kingdom by the Ostrogoths, while the surviving, eastern remnant of Roman civilization is fast taking on a new identity as the Byzantine Empire.

The aristocracy of Rome, led by the crafty and arrogant Cethegus Caesarius, dream of overthrowing the Goths and reclaiming their city's ancestral glory.

Having played on Amalaswintha's paranoia to build his own power, Cethegus makes a secret pact with Narses, Byzantium's greatest general.

With an eye on the US market, Brauner hired director Robert Siodmak and actors Orson Welles, Laurence Harvey and Honor Blackman.

In late 1967, he wrote a letter to Brauner in which he noted that after having read all the scripts he felt that the dialogue was "too simple (to put it mildly) almost throughout and barely up to the standard of ten-year-old children.

[...] Treason and exposure, guilt and atonement are constructed so primitively that they cause deadly boredom [...]"[3]: 130 Filming took place between 6 May 1968 and September 1968 in Romania and the Spandau Studios in Berlin.

[3]: 148  Due to a string of problems (budget overruns, withdrawn guarantees, cancelled powers of attorney) he said he lost 4 million DM on the project.

[7] 'Lexikon des internationalen Films' described it as "a spectacle of power struggles, intrigues and battles in an outdated historical and scenographical style" that "rigorously excluded the ideological element of Felix Dahn's novel".