Quo Vadis (MGM) is the costliest movie ever made—$6,500,000* worth of grandeur, violence, faith and fleshpots, glittering with Technicolor and set against the epic clash of Christianity and paganism in Nero's Rome. The film has more lions (63) than most movies have actors; its 30,000 extras outnumber the working population of Hollywood; its army of technicians spent 24 days stoking the conflagration of Rome, which burned only nine days for Nero himself. For sheer size, opulence and technical razzle-dazzle, Quo Vadis is the year's most impressive cinematic sight-seeing spree.
Six months in the shooting at Italy's Cinecitta Studios, nine minutes short of three hours in the theater, the picture recreates ancient Rome with massive splendor and lavish detail. Nero's court lolls midst pleasures and palaces. Massed legions march in triumph through crowd-choked avenues. Mobs flee the burning city and storm Nero's palace. Christian martyrs fall to a pack of lions, burn by the score at rows of stakes in the arena of the Circus Maximus. One of them, Ursus the
Slave (ex-Pugilist Buddy Baer) not only wrestles a wild bull but wins the match.
Like the imperial Caesars, Producer Sam (King Solomon's Mines) Zimbalist and Director Mervyn (Anthony Adverse) LeRoy rely on these circuses to keep their audience diverted from sterner matters. For all the majesty of the theme and magnificence of the trimmings, the story of Quo Vadis, based on Henryk Sienkiewicz' 1895 novel, never rises much above the level of a good melodrama.
The script epitomizes the turmoil of its era in a stilted boy-meets-girl romance between a Roman commander (Robert Taylor) and a Christian hostage (Deborah Kerr) who, as the ads say, must struggle between her faith and "his powerful masculine appeal." Between Actor Taylor's woodenness and the coyly pallid playing of Actress Kerr, the struggle seems tame enough to justify one unconsciously comic lapse into domesticity. After Deborah is snatched from the stake and Christianity bests Nero's regime in a spectacular upheaval of death and destruction, Commander Taylor bids goodbye to his trusted friend: "Come visit us in Sicily, and bring Drusilla and the children."
Yet most of the dialogue is more literate than the Hollywood average; some of it, evidently contributed by Co-Scripter S. N. Behrman, helps Actor Leo Genn to shine as Petronius, the Roman satirist, whose dry wit enables him to needle Nero even while flattering him. As Nero, Britain's Actor-Playwright-Director Peter Ustinov is allowed to hog too much screen time, but he does some expert hamming to create the deliciously malign figure of a spoiled, sensual madman. Finlay (Great Expectations) Currie plays St. Peter with eloquent dignity, though his long speeches are marred by the camera's digressions to tasteless religious tableaux, e.g., The Last Supper. In the role of the lascivious Empress Poppaea, Patricia Laffan has nothing much to do but hold a pair of cheetahs on the leash, but she is certainly one of the sights of Rome.
Perhaps the last epic of its scope, Quo