Cinema: Hollywood on the Tiber

While most of the U.S. movie industry was prudently cutting production costs at home last week, its biggest studio was on a spending jag in Rome. Using $4,000,000 in blocked Italian lire and $1,000,000 in frozen sterling (for British actors), M-G-M began production on what promised to be the most colossal film spectacle of all time.

After a decade of dickering for the rights, Metro was filming Quo Vadis? (Where Are You Going?), Henry Sienkiewicz' flamboyant old (1895) novel of Nero's Rome. Filmed three times before on a much smaller scale (once by the...

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