Wednesday, March 13, 2013

When Sheets of Rolling Smoke Involve The Skies

The Sign of the Cross (1932)
directed by Cecil B. DeMille
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Bible epics are first and foremost great excuses for old-fashioned Hollywood excess.  It isn't the penitent pilgrim that someone like DeMille really cared about, but the wicked life that brings ruin (and, eventually, if the producer insists, redemption).  The Sign of the Cross begins with Nero, played by Charles Laughton as a wide, waxy candle melting upon a throne.  He slurs, he tunes his lyre, and the camera pulls back, and back, and back, and all around the emperor, Rome burns.

What a start!  Hail Caesar!  Hail Fredric March, prefect of the city, smitten with a Christian girl, against all sense, all reason.  For two hours, DeMille does what he can to persuade us, to convince us that Marcus Superbus, with his silly name, is a fool: a fool to fall for proper Mercia, a fool to leave Nero's wife soaking alone in her tub.  The tub is the size of a bedroom, a house, a shrine - a shrine to Claudette Colbert, mercurial temptress.

The film is famous for that bath, and for the "Dance of the Naked Moon," although both scenes were supposedly edited from distribution prints for years.  DeMille's sense of artifice is complete.  All we see of a torture chamber is a hole in the floor, and smoke, shadow, and flame.  The Christians meet in secret in ruins on the outskirts of the city: layer on layer of imagined antiquity.  Lions move across the frame like schools of fish, too numerous to count.

"Morpheus give you deep slumber," intones March, en route to a tender rendezvous.
"I'd rather have exciting dreams," Poppaea replies - a dream like The Sign of the Cross.

In the end, the prefect makes the perfect argument against too much "next life" hullabaloo.  The Christian god is not the first to be called the one true god, he says.  There will always be hundreds with such a claim.  But Marcus believes in Mercia: in this woman beside him, this woman he loves, here on earth, right now.  No future, no past; it's like something out of Alphaville.

He dies like a sap, of course, hand in hand with the zealot who has his heart.  They go to their zealots' deaths together, the curtain call at the end of a long, exciting day at the coliseum.  Nero's time will come, we're told.  We know this from history.  But it doesn't, not here.  Not in this movie!