August 27 movie: Sign of the Cross. Wrapping up Claudette Colbert day on TCM (and how I regret not recording Tovarich, Midnight and Since You Went Away! But I'm really too busy to watch that many movies right now) with a Cecil B. deMille epic about the persecution of early Christians. Didn't the early Christians use the sign of the fish to identify themselves, not the cross? Whatever. Colbert plays the decadent Empress of Rome, who loves the prefect of Rome (Marcus Superbus, no I'm not kidding), who in turns loves an innocent young Christian girl (Mercia, again no joke). Charles Laughton also has a nice turn as Nero.
This pre-code movie is one of deMille's classic exercises in debauchery dressed up in a thin veneer of pious moralizing. The movie is as decadent as they could make it, with not much plot getting in the way of the sin, sin, sin: Orgies! Milk baths! Some kind of weird lesbian love dance! Torture! Gladiator fights! Amazons battling dwarves! A naked lady wearing only flower garlands, tied up and ravished by a gorilla! Another one eaten by alligators! Elephants walking on people's heads! Christians fed to lions! One of Claudette Colbert's nipples! It's all here, folks.
Trivia note: according to Robert Osbourne, the milk bath (more like a giant pool) was real milk, and since shooting took two days the milk started to spoil. Colbert was a trooper and sat in sour milk all day, but said later she had a hard time washing the smell off her skin.
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