Quo Vadis

There really should be a question mark after the title, as it translates as “Whither goest thou?” Or as I prefer to think of it “Where da fuck ya think you goin’?”

Robert Osborne at TCM said this was, at the time, the biggest cinematic spectacular ever filmed. It probably stayed that way until The Ten Commandments came along in 1956. And you can sure see it all, up there on the screen. All it lacked was Cinemascope or VistaVision. There were 30,000 extras in the scenes of Marcus Vinicius’s triumphal procession, all of them in costume. (And including, as everyone likes to point out, a pre-stardom Sophia Loren and a slumming Elizabeth Taylor.)

This is a Christian film, as so many of these swords and sandals Roman epics were. Lord, how many were there? The Robe, Ben-Hur, King of Kings, Barabbas, to name just a few. The solemnity is suffocating. Here we get Paul of Tarsus and St. Peter himself, delivering a sermon based on the sayings of Jesus. (And adding one. Jesus never said a word against slavery.)

A striking thing about this totally made-up and historically dubious story is how many women fall madly in love with assholes, pretty much at first sight. There’s a slave who falls for Nero, and another who is gaga for Petronius the Arbiter. (Okay, he’s not an asshole, but her devotion is total.) And at the center is Christian convert Deborah Kerr and Robert Taylor, who likes a good slaughter of Britons and to-the-death rasslin’. She falls for him despite his attempt to buy her and his pagan resistance to her faith.

The central romance falls flat, in my opinion. Robert Taylor isn’t much of an actor. Women may feel differently about him; he’s handsome enough. But the picture belongs to Peter Ustinov. His portrayal of a child-like, egotistic, talentless wannabe artist, and sheer maniac is brilliant. (And probably at least partly wrong, but it conforms to the thinking of the time. Nero was a monster, no question—it seems true that he not only burned Christians alive, but used them to light his outdoor parties, like living Tiki candles; waste not, want not—but it’s not likely that he ordered the burning of Rome as artistic inspiration. It seems to have been his form of urban renewal.) He almost didn’t get the part. Some studio hotshot thought that, at age 30, Ustinov was too young for the role. He replied that Nero was dead at age 31. He is said to have treasured the reply: “Historical research has proved you correct.”