As Easter weekend rolled around, and with it the end of my agonizing Lenten sacrifice of caffeinated drinks, I couldn’t help but remember childhood Easters and the ritual rolling out of 50s- and 60s-era biblical epics on the big three U.S. networks. The big event was always Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 remake of his own 1923 silent-era Mosaic blockbuster, The Ten Commandments, alongside less-esteemed widescreen biblical adaptations like King Of Kings, The Greatest Story Ever Told or more apocryphal tales such as Barabbas, Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur or The Robe, which was recently reissued on DVD by Fox.
Even as an 8-year-old, I could tell that there was something a bit overcooked about these films, especially DeMille’s technicolor Exodus tale, which featured Anne Baxter’s sloe-eyed Nefretiri huskily purring “Mooooses, you fool,” and Edward G. Robinson taunting Charlton Heston in the desert with lines like, “Where’s your God nooooowwwww?” – probably the first celebrity impersonation I ever nailed.
The Robe isn’t quite as purple as DeMille’s film, but it has its moments, most of them provided by star Richard Burton’s overemphatic agonies as the Roman centurion crippled with guilt for his role in the crucifixion of Christ. Like Ben-Hur, director Henry Koster’s film is a Hollywood sequel to the Gospels and these widescreen extrapolations of the Gospel always did better, critically and commercially, than faithful retellings, probably because the simple facts of Christ’s life didn’t lend themselves to swashbuckling sword fights, epic battles or – at least not until Martin Scorsese’s 1988 The Last Temptation Of Christ – romance and melodrama.
You get all of this in The Robe, which is most artful and majestic in the first third, when Burton’s Marcellus finds himself on the edges of Christ’s last days, before taking on his walk-on role in Mark, Luke and especially John, as an unwitting agent of scriptural prophecy. After his conversion from pagan cynicism, Burton’s character becomes the fighting arm of the Christian underground, mixing acts with Errol Flynn while dueling with fellow centurions to save the townsfolk of Cana, and leading a nighttime commando attack on the imperial dungeons – all with a virtuous, but conspicuous, lack of blood, in a film that’s both silly and high-minded.
As with most films of this type, the villains get the best roles, from Richard Boone’s brief but brooding turn as Pontius Pilate, to Jay Robinson’s sneering, raging Caligula, which was so good they brought him back for a sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators, despite Burton’s martyrdom at the end of the picture. The final scene sees Burton and love interest Jean Simmons marching off to their deaths with enraptured expressions as Rome dissolves into heavenly clouds and the soundtrack thunders with choral hallelujahs. It’s the sort of thing you couldn’t imagine in a film today – except, of course, that it’s not markedly different from the ending of Ridley Scott’s 2000 blockbuster Gladiator, where Russell Crowe’s dying hero floats out of the arena to a reunion with his slain wife and children in the afterlife.
While both major hits, neither Gladiator nor The Passion of the Christ saw a revival of either biblical epics or sword-and-sandal pictures. They’re isolated incidents in recent Hollywood history and, so far, we’re unlikely to see theatres filled with New and Old Testament characters like they were in the two decades after World War II. When Caligula recalls the slave revolt of Spartacus in The Robe’s climactic scene, you can’t help but think of Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film. It was released seven years after The Robe, but the widescreen, technicolor sameness of these films – which encompasses gilded tripe like Samson and Delilah, as well as a bloated disaster like Cleopatra – makes them feel like an untidy network of sequels and prequels filmed out of order.
With their common theme of conscience and morality set against authority and tyranny, it has to be remembered that these films were made in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, and it’s hard not to see them as earnest reflections on principle and decency in the face of evil, dressed up in togas and breastplates. That era is long past now and, with political rhetoric so debased that accusations of fascism are glibly slung about like soggy mashed potatoes at a food fight – to about the same effect – it’s no surprise that the Bible has become a mostly inaccessible setting, whose shared language of integrity and sacrifice has become almost lost in a Babel of moral equivalence.
