Directed by Cecil B. DeMille
My rating: 1.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Universal)
DeMille's first epic talkie combines delicious Roman debauchery with deadening Christian propaganda. Charles Laughton and Claudette Colbert have a blast in their roles as the Emperor and Empress in Rome in the decades following the great fire. They spend their time eating, drinking, having sex and ordering everyone else to satisfy their every whim. Meanwhile, the Christians are hunted like animals, executed on the spot or worse sent to the arena to be fed to the lions. Fredric March, the Roman prefect with great powers, falls in love with Elissa Landi, a simple Christian girl. Their acting and dialogue is on a high school play level, absolutely dreadful. March's final conversion is unconvincing, even shameful, given that it was an act of selfishness, not of religious conviction. Yet the film wants us to believe otherwise, as if it were not in on the joke. A brief appearance of a man in an ape suit during the arena scenes gets an automatic rating deduction.
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