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The attaining of mystical wisdom marks the final stop, gold and blood pave the road. "A conscience in Pompeii? Bah." Imperial cruelties to be rejected or surrendered to, the humble blacksmith (Preston Foster) loses everything he loves in a single day (the trampling chariot adduces a note from A Tale of Two Cities) and learns the value of the gladiatorial kill. He adopts the boy he orphaned in the arena, confers with Pontius Pilate (Basil Rathbone), leads hearty cutthroats on raids. He passes on the opportunity to stop the Crucifixion but "the greatest man in Judea" nevertheless makes an impression on the boy, who as an adult (John Wood) helps runaway slaves and struggles to remember the sacred encounter. "Did you ever try to recapture a dream?" An advance upon DeMille's The Sign of the Cross for the benefit of future disaster epics, a meticulous construction meticulously dismantled. Spectacle means coins from the sadistic audience, the image is a lavish villa with Mount Vesuvius smoking in the distance. "It's well-known that the rat lives longer than the lion. But who wants to be a rat?" Pliny the Elder saw the beauty of destruction and so do Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper, the climax is a system of shocks to put human machinations in their place: A mammoth statue collapses into the camera, a galley's white sail bursts into flame, steam blanches the screen as crowds try to escape the river of molten lava. A gesture of mercy redeems the rubble, "so even the Fates need an overseer." The influence extends from Ford (The Hurricane) to De Palma (Carrie). With Alan Hale, Louis Calhern, David Holt, Dorothy Wilson, Wyrley Birch, Frank Conroy, Edward Van Sloan, and Zeffie Tilbury. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |