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"And you said Rome was dull!" The Eternal City up in flames dissolves to Nero in chortling close-up, Charles Laughton in putty beak gives him a trace or two of Mussolini, "lo, the blaze aspires." Christians are blamed and hunted accordingly, a couple of bearded "philosophers" meet in a street and each draws half of the illicit titular symbol on the ground. Among the massacre survivors is a devoted maiden (Elissa Landi), Superbus the prefect (Fredric March) takes a personal interest, much to the chagrin of Poppaea (Claudette Colbert). The imperial wanton splashes in a bathtub of asses' milk (filmed like a bubble-or-nipple? game) and sets out to liquidate her rival, her response to being called a harlot is a dimpled shrug. "Your wishes are sacred to everyone, Empress." "I doubt that." Cecil B. DeMille the auteur-fetishist in full flight, the perfect junction of piety, prurience and sadism. He often opens his frescoes with a detail, a close camera on a leashed leopard pulls back and curves to give a tableau of marble, lyres and furs. (A high-angled tracking shot finds Nero lolling in a divan, "delicious debauchery" written all over Laughton's visage.) Virtue as political resistance—the virgin in the middle of the orgy weathers "the Dance of the Naked Moon" while spiritual dirges persist outside. All set-up to the astonishing Circus Maximus climax, where Rome's (and cinema's) reptilian brain is laid bare in DeMille's barbarous id-images: Gladiatorial bloodbaths, nubile slaves mauled by gorillas and crocodiles, an Amazon holding a skewered Pygmy aloft, all devoured by an eager audience. "Fine program today." "The last two were pretty tame." The root and stem of Fellini Satyricon, decidedly, with a perverse stairway to Heaven for a coda. With Ian Keith, Arthur Hohl, Harry Beresford, Tommy Conlon, Ferdinand Gottschalk, Vivian Tobin, William V. Mong, Joyzelle Joyner, Richard Alexander, and Nat Pendleton. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |