Pre-Code Parade: MADAM SATAN (1930)

Describe Madam Satan as Cecil B. DeMille's semi-musical comedy-disaster movie and the uninitiated will assume that nothing good could come from such a concept. They're not far from the mark, but it's not what DeMille's contemporaries would have thought before the film first appeared. In 1930 his Jesus biopic The King of Kings was still an exceptional work in his filmography, the Bible scenes in his first go at The Ten Commandments only a prologue to a modern story. Memories of all his supposedly sophisticated society comedies were still fresh, and Madam Satan is like those, if more heavily farcical and dubiously musical. As it turns out, the part that's most DeMille-like to modern audiences is the best part, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

DeMille started the talkie era at a new home, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, after a stint as an independent producer. Madam Satan was his second M-G-M picture, conceived at a time when movies were ideally All-Singing as well as All-Talking. The story I heard at a festival screening last month was that the studio pressured DeMille to make Madam Satan a musical. It's sort of a musical, with most of the songs and dances concentrated in one section except for an out-of-nowhere bursting-into-song moment near the end of an interminable-seeming first act. "Sort of musical" would describe the quality of the music, too. Music isn't the real problem with the picture, however. While DeMille wasn't saddled with a "dialogue director," he probably could have used one. Look at the rest of his career and you might argue that he never really figured out how to deal with dialogue in a way that made it look normal. Look at some of his silent films and you can see how much more efficient he was at storytelling before sound. Had Madam Satan been silent the story still would have been dumb but he probably would have nailed the farce aspect of the first act with little trouble and some panache. With sound the farce is leaden; everyone's timing seems off and the story seems to go nowhere slowly.

Bob Brooks (Reginald Denny) is coming home from a night of hard partying with his millionaire buddy Jimmy Wade (Roland Young). They strive with drunken industriousness not to wake up Mrs Brooks, Angela (Kay Johnson), a stay-at-home wife on whom Bob is cheating with one Trixie, a showgirl (legit singer Lillian Roth). Bob never stays at home long; he's grown bored with Angela, and Angela is boring. Bob is equally boring, by the way, but he's more aggressive about it. Denny played Bulldog Drummond's sidekick Algy in a series of films later in the Thirties; Algy is described by Drummond himself as a "driveling idiot," and you see that quality in Denny's performance here. Roland Young's character is supposed to be a wild and crazy guy, but movie buffs familiar with Young's work -- he was the original Topper, if that means anything to anyone -- will see the problem here. Anyway, things get more farcical when Angela calls on Jimmy Wade to meet his new fiancee. The engagement's a cover story, since Bob uses Jimmy's place for trysts with Trixie, who now has to feign intimacy with Jimmy in Angela's presence. A knock on the door from Bob forces Jimmy to hide Angela in the closet, but she manages to learn the truth about Bob and Trixie. Now she remembers the song her maid sang to her all of a sudden about fighting for her happiness, and by God, she will!

Jimmy Wade is rich enough to hire out a dirigible and a dance troupe for his next big costume party. We're starting to enter the territory of DeMillean spectacle here; the miniature effects for the moored dirigible, with skyscrapers in the distance, look quite good on the big screen, while the antics inside show the influence of DeMille's aesthetic henchman Mitchell Leisen. Early musicals have little to offer in terms of virtuoso dancing or choreography, but sometimes made up for that lack with pure conceptual nuttiness. So it is with Madam Satan's Ballet Mecanique, a dance interpretive of mechanization, the dancers so many cogs presided over by the lightning-bolt wielding Spirit of Electricity. But it really defies description, so look at it instead. This clip was uploaded to YouTube by one absurdomundo, some spiritual kin of mine.



After the entertainment the revelers are to remove their masks, but one latecomer refuses to do so. This is the stunning, the incredible, the irresistible MADAM SATAN! whose true identity is a mystery to none in the audience but all on the blimp. The idea, you see, is that Angela  (did I spoil it???) is so atypically, unprecedentedly brazen that none of her acquaintances would suspect that this gorgeous monster is the once-mousy housewife. It might work on paper, but on film the premise hits a high hurdle early; Kay Johnson in a mask and a slinky costume still isn't as sexy as Lillian Roth; nor can she sing like that legit talent and future biopic subject. Let's compare. Here's Roth rehearsing a number, as uploaded by WMMDN:


Now here's Johnson in her Satanic majesty, at the climax of her re-seduction of Bob. This one was uploaded by ray85milan:


Maybe Bob gets off on novelty. All such speculation is moot, however, as there's a storm coming. Lightning blasts the mooring tower and sends the dirigible adrift into the turbulent sky. Again, on the special-effects level this is all stylishly if not quite realistically done, especially if you see it on a big screen as it was meant to be seen. Fortunately, Jimmy Wade has well-stocked his balloon with parachutes, setting the stage for comedy rather than suspense. Madam Satan climaxes on a mock-epic scale like It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as passengers are tossed from the dirigible to make slapstick landings, the most spectacular Pre-Code Moment of the Film being Trixie's entrance through a skylight into a men's club locker-room. That stuff you'll have to see for yourselves someday.

Length works in Madam Satan's favor. At nearly two hours, you have time to forget the terrible first half-hour and appreciate the often-inspired art direction and overall madness of the picture. Kay Johnson's failings as a demonic seductress don't really detract from the quality. If anything, the way all the men fall for her -- it's like the way the men of Metropolis drool over Brigitte Helm's lead-footed hoochie-koochie dance -- enhances the film's satire of the mentally-idle rich. It just so happens that, with the Depression descending, people didn't find it quite so funny as DeMille or Metro hoped. The director never really worked in this mode again, unless you count his rarely-remembered 1934 castaway comedy Four Frightened People. He may have realized that sound had taken his comedic touch; most of the subsequent laughs he got would be unintended. He may also have realized that this sort of story, the kind that helped make his name, had become obsolete, and adapted in order not to go obsolete himself. The destruction of the dirigible is a symbolic farewell, if not a Viking funeral, to one stage of DeMille's career. It's the triumph of spectacle over wit in his work, and in this case it's a deserved victory that makes Madam Satan worth seeing today.

On the Big Screen: THE GOLDEN BED (1925)

Cecil B. De Mille is identified with a certain kind of movie spectacle exemplified by his second version of The Ten Commandments (1925), now the oldest movie regularly shown on network television. Back when he made the first version, in 1923, he had a different reputation. In both phases of his long career he was widely perceived as a vulgarian, but while late De Mille, the director remembered today, is identified with historical or Biblical spectacle, and with reverence disguising sex, violence or overall sleaziness, early De Mille -- it's really middle De Mille, following a period where he was perceived as a pioneer cinematic artist -- goes straight to the sleaziness, but with style. In the early to mid 1920s a De Mille picture meant scandalous behavior among the opulent classes. Increasingly he covered his preoccupations with a veneer of archetypal ambition. His big gimmick was to interrupt his modern sex stories with interludes set in olden times to illustrate his themes more vividly. The 1923 Ten Commandments was different only insofar as the Moses material went into a long prologue, after which came a modern story in which the penalties for violating the commandments were illustrated with a winking earnestness. The Golden Bed comes at the end of this phase of De Mille's career -- it marked the end of his first stay at Paramount Pictures before he became an independent studio head -- and is perfunctory in its gimmickry. An intertitle equates the film's belle fatale with the legendary Lorelei and De Mille dutifully demonstrates by showing us a possibly-nude maiden urging a shipwrecked sailor to climb up out of a storm-tossed sea and onto her rock. The shot lasts less than a minute and then it's on with the show. There are plenty of characteristic De Mille moments yet to come, but Golden Bed strikes an overall tone that seems atypical of the great showman, and it's unclear whether audiences or reviewers -- one contemporary called it De Mille's worst film -- knew what to make of it. Since its release it's been largely forgotten and unseen. The organizers of the De Mille festival at the Madison Theater in Albany called their showing a world premiere of a George Eastman House restoration of the picture, and chief organizer Michael V. Butler put a distinctive stamp on it by compiling, with a collaborator, a new score that proved surprisingly effective given its dependence on Soviet composers, above all Khachaturian and in particular his Spartacus ballet music. But if it worked for Caligula it was certainly going to work for De Mille. It was still a strange juxtaposition since Golden Bed itself is very much a product of its own time and place, De Mille and his regular writer Jeanie MacPherson tapping into American literary influences above and beyond the Wallace Irwin source novel. Call it De Mille's Magnificent Ambersons and you may get the idea.

The Golden Bed is about the fall of an American family and how they nearly take a rising family with them. In Atlanta live the increasingly shabby yet ever genteel Peakes and the aspiring hardscrabble Holtzes. Papa Peake (Henry B. Walthall of Birth of a Nation fame) was bred to spend money but not to earn it, a title tells us. He's staked his family's future on his beautiful, spoiled, blonde daughter Flora Lee (Lillian Rich), while neglecting still-pretty but definitely second-best Margaret (Vera Reynolds). Flora has been bred to land a rich husband; early proof of her talent is the way young Admah Holtz, a candymaker's son (who grows up into Rod La Rocque) will give Flora free peppermints while making Margaret pay. As Papa patiently explains to a jealous Margaret, when Flora lands the right husband there'll be candy for everybody. Everything works out just in time; Flora lands a European aristocrat and Papa hosts the wedding the same day that the bank repossesses his furniture. As it is, Margaret still has to go out into the world and get a job. She goes to work for Admah, who has inherited the store and the name of "Candy" Holtz. Margaret hits the ground running with ideas for Admah to spruce up his slovenly shop, e.g., take the used flypaper off the candy shelves. Admah appreciates her entrepreneurial sense but is almost cruelly oblivious to the way Margaret plainly pines for him. He jokingly orders her to leave by the employees' back entrance after hiring her, not realizing how humiliating the moment is for her, though she pluckily jokes about noblesse oblige. Worse, he'd gone to Flora's wedding and hovered at the margins like a neglected puppy, except that Flora didn't neglect him. She saved him a flower from her bouquet and threw it to him while her new hubby wasn't looking. He still has a chance.

Now that Margaret has civilized the place and Admah isn't pulling taffy in the shop window anymore, the Candy Holtz business picks up. With Margaret as his conscience Admah rejects schemes to adulterate his produce by using sugar substitutes. As they condemn Atlanta to Type 2 diabetes, Flora is abruptly widowed during an Alpine vacation when her hubby and a rival with whom she'd started an affair fight their way off a cliff. I guess you can call that a De Mille touch, down to a primitive version of the Saboteur effect as the two men take the plunge. Now that Flora's free again, not to mention left out of hubby's will "for some reason," Margaret doesn't have a chance with Admah. Flora becomes Flora Holtz virtually by fait accompli and Margaret practically vanishes from the picture for an hour. Candy Holtz has achieved his dream, but he's also cut his own throat. Like father, like daughter; Flora lives to spend and is determined to rule Atlanta society, even if Admah can't really afford it. When she loses her bid to be hostess of the Peachtree Ball, she browbeats Admah into hosting a rival ball, playing on his class insecurity by blaming his working-class background for her defeat. Admah has been warned by his banker, whose wife won the right to host the ball, that he'll get no more credit if he continues his extravagance, but he blows practically all of his latest $40,000 loan on staging an insane candy-themed ball. This is the true De Millean showstopper, a nutty (and chocolatey!) masterpiece of demented set design (topic for future discussion; De Mille's true heir in our time is Tim Burton) garnished with hostesses in costumes made of candy -- that is to say, edible costumes. C.B. doesn't mean that in a purely theoretical sense, either. Censors reportedly went nuts over scenes of men nibbling near sensitive areas on those outfits. So which ball would you go to? Most of Atlanta society agreed with you, but Admah and Flora's moment of triumph is about to turn to ashes like many Cinderella stories. You see, after all that party planning Admah is running on fumes and Flora's dressmaker won't let her have her party gown until she pays her back bills. In a Dreiserian moment of decision (read Sister Carrie, or read about it if you're in a hurry), Admah takes the day's sales receipts out of a safe to pay the dressmaker, and that, children, is what we call embezzlement. Oh, and Flora is practically cheating under his nose with social butterfly Bunny (a young Warner Baxter). With Flora walking out on him and the police closing in, Admah may think the world has turned against him but this is really a moment of self-destruction, perfectly illustrated by De Mille in what should be this film's signature shot. In a self-parody of Samson and Delilah a quarter-century in advance, an enraged, self-pitying Admah brings a full-sized candy gazebo crashing down behind him by pushing the pillars apart. Next on his schedule: five years in prison.

It would be too brutal if the film ended here, so we get a final act in which Flora is punished and Admah is reformed through labor, while Margaret reopens the original Candy Holtz store and proves herself a successful businesswoman in her own right. This sets up a sad, almost chilling emotional climax that anticipates not only Orson Welles's Maginificent Ambersons but the mad pathos of southern gothic literature. In short, Bunny kicks Flora to the curb at the first opportunity, and with her youth gone and her looks going its only downhill for her. On the day Admah is released from prison a threadbare, moribund Flora makes her way to the old Peake mansion, which is now a boarding house. She has a poignant reunion with her old pet monkey, now working for an organ grinder -- I could write a whole post on the monkey as her totem animal going back to a childhood doll, the way its mischief at the Candy Holtz store embodies Flora's destructive rivalry with Margaret, and whether the monkey's name, Louella, is a dig at Parsons the gossip columnist -- before the new mistress of the house reluctantly lets her tour the place. How far Flora has fallen is hard to say; she may be homeless, but there's no hint of prostitution, and I might have found her comeuppance excessive except that I know that Hollywood actresses actually did fall that far if not further. Anyway, Flora's old Golden Bed is still in its old place -- I should explain that Admah had bought the house for her, and presumably refurnished it, as a wedding present -- but its crowning swan's head is broken and tied to the bed, upside-down, with wire. Meanwhile, as I mentioned, Admah is getting out of prison, and Margaret has put together a nice dinner to welcome him back. But he -- can't -- let -- go! Some morbid instinct draws him, too, to the boarding house, where he finds you-know-who in the Golden Bed. She recognizes him, but seems to have forgotten, in her decrepitude, that she and the "Candy Man" had been married. You'd like to think that her calling out for Bunny in her last moments would be the ultimate deal-breaker, but I think she actually has to die before Admah will finally quit her. Of course, Margaret has no clue about this nearby deathwatch and sadly falls asleep at an untouched dinner table. But the film does us the kindness of closing on a things-could-yet-be-worse note. After all, neither Admah nor Margaret commits suicide. Instead, he finally shows up about twelve hours late, and "your sister died in my arms" proves a satisfactory excuse. The Golden Bed actually closes on a note of bittersweet perseverance as the two survivors watch a construction crew reporting for work across the street and realize that the only thing to do is start over.

I feel justified in giving a detailed synopsis because most of you are never going to see this film. I hope the synopsis conveys that you're missing out on something because Golden Bed packs a wallop that's probably unexpected in a Cecil B. De Mille movie. It's as anti-romantic a movie as C.B. ever made while retaining considerable emotional power. In fact, it's an all-out attack on a certain romanticism, in movies and the wider culture, that Walthall, D. W. Griffith's Little Colonel, may have purposefully symbolized. Golden Bed is a vindication of bourgeois virtues, as forgotten by Admah but learned under pressure by Margaret, against an aristocratic romanticism of leisure and conspicuous consumption that Flora Peake was shaped to embody and Admah Holtz could not help idolizing. Knowing that Flora was consciously shaped by her father into the creature she becomes justifies the pathos of her wretched end if we realize that by spoiling her, her father victimized her while guaranteeing the victimization of others. Amid the often outlandish set design there's surprising seriousness of purpose, or else an on-the-nose satiric impulse. But whatever message you take from it, artistically Golden Bed demonstrates how good a visual storyteller De Mille was in the silent era. We'll have a chance shortly to discuss his struggles in early talkies, but when he didn't have to worry about staging dialogue the director was, on this evidence, quite good at getting emotions on screen and finding the right images to keep the story moving and its meaning plain. His three lead actors deserve a lot of the credit. Earlier this year Rod La Rocque impressed me as the heroic idiot in The Log of the Jasper B., and now I'm more impressed by his range. Neither Lillian Rich nor Vera Reynolds had much of a career, so maybe C.B. does deserve more credit with them, but Reynolds especially is very good and seems to have deserved better than she got. So does this film; I consider myself lucky to have seen it.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956)

My plan for the weekend was to wrap up "Holy Week" and honor Max Von Sydow's 80th birthday by rewatching and reviewing The Greatest Story Ever Told, but as I do every year at this time I fell under the spell of Cecil B. DeMille's bizarrely enthralling swan song when it turned up on ABC. I don't propose to do a full-scale review, since I presume this item is quite familiar to everyone. But I have to say something about this enigmatic blend of grandeur and garbage.

DeMille's remake of his own 1923 picture is very much a product of its period. The silent version is actually just a long prelude to a modern story of the woes suffered by people who violate the commandments. The remake is all Exodus, with elaborations. But it's Exodus viewed through the lenses of Christianity (the anachronistic "Deliverer" myth) and the Cold War (Egypt as a totalitarian state). The director pounds the latter point home in his spoken introduction, which ABC always skips. But for all that C.B. thought he was making a profound political allegory, his movie is just an old-timey melodrama at heart.

The remake is the work of an old man. While the special effects are upgraded from the silent version, the direction has devolved from the slick, sick style of Sign of the Cross. The staging is often primitive, and DeMille had either lost his touch with actors or had lost control of them. There are moments of performance in Commandments that are right down there with the worst dross of the 1950s.

Here's an early example. Rameses I has ordered the execution of the firstborn of Goshen. We get this would-be poignant shot of a shellshocked woman and a soldier wiping a baby's blood off his sword, when into the scene rushes this woman who pauses, with a murderous soldier in hot pursuit, turns toward the camera and just emotes, badly, wailing for help and such before running offscreen with the soldier closing in for offscreen bloodshed.

Now we're at the opposite shore of the Red Sea. God, sadist that He is, could have saved the Hebrews and spared the Egyptians, but just had to remove the pillar of fire so the Egyptian chariots would enter the temporary channel. The first person to see them coming is this woman, who really goes over the top. I remember her dialogue as "Oh! The chariots! Run! Run!," but stills don't do justice to the moving image, so she gets off easy here.

By the way, I'm no military strategist, but I think that at least some of the charioteers could have made it to shore and done some damage to the Hebrews if they had not (as this shot shows) paused in the middle of the Red Sea to admire the scenery or something.

All through the pictures there are moments when extras (or actors who are slightly more than extras) run amok. In the Golden Calf sequence, Edward G. Robinson and John Carradine are trying to command the scene, but they're being constantly upstaged by this one woman who's all over the place with gestures and broad facial expressions. As Aaron puts the finishing touches on the calf, she's all over it, polishing it with her hair with maniacal glee. Who is this person?

One aspect of the movie that is both awkward and redeeming is its gratuitous display of femininity. You'll notice that young Hebrew womanhood seems no worse for wear -- the opposite in fact -- for their years of drudgery, but perhaps their slavery took another form. In any event, DeMille misses no opportunity to show them off, even when it doesn't seem to fit into the rhythm of the film. The most notorious instance is when Moses parts the Red Sea. Heston says his line, "Behold his mighty hand!" We get a shot of the sea. And then:

The camera lingers on these babes for a long moment before the FX kicks in. You can't help but wonder what casting couch they stopped at before reporting to the set that day. The emphasis placed on them makes no sense otherwise -- unless it's a moment of pure gratuitousness of the sort that defines this film.

DeMille's attitude toward women is one of the most primitive aspects of the movie. In Sign of the Cross he upheld a vamp-vs-virgin dichotomy, but in Commandments it seems that every woman, Egyptian, Hebrew or Midianite, is a man-hungry hoyden. Let's take a look at Midian. It looks like a vision of female empowerment as Jethro's daughters run things in the absence of sons. But once Yvonne de Carlo discovers Moses, it may as well be Dogpatch U.S.A. Here they are, frozen in time, crying out together, "A MAN!!!"

And I mean all women. The one moment when DeMille regains his envelope-pushing form is the Ethiopian embassy scene, and the moment in the moment is when the King's sister offers a token of regard to Moses, "who is kind as well as wise." The implication had to be unmistakable even in 1956.

You can tell that's how Nefreteri infers things. Her comment: "And what a bee-YOO-tiful enemy!" -- is Anne Baxter's performance in a nutshell, and never was that metaphor more apt.

Once upon a time, Baxter won an Academy Award for acting. Tell that to people whose only exposure to her is The Ten Commandments and they will struggle to believe. For me, her performance defines this film more than Heston's or Yul Brynner's. She embodies the great mystery of the whole show. Does she realize that her character and her dialogue are trash, and is she camping it up, expecting us to be in on the joke with her, or is this her fatally straight reading of material she takes at face value, not realizing what an ass she's making of herself? It's the difference between risk and obliviousness to risk, because Nefretiri, as written, could have been and possibly was a career-killing role. But whether it's intentionally arch or unintentionally awful, Baxter's performance is what it is, and it exemplifies what fascinates me about the whole project.

DeMille's film is the point where the extreme tendencies of movies converge, the rich massiveness of spectacle combined with moments of pure schlock worthy of Poverty Row. For all the money at stake, it remained an intensely, domineeringly personal film, and an expression of declining powers that nevertheless or for that reason slipped free from the conventional discipline of classical cinema narrative to achieve moments of raw strangeness as well as scenes of pure theatrical power. Whether it's uncontrolled extras or the discordant word-jazz of a script in which there is no such thing as a casual utterance, the same kind of aesthetic sensibility is at work here as in films a thousand times cheaper. When people wonder aloud about the kind of film people like Ed Wood would have made if they had millions of dollars to play with, I suspect that in some way those theoretical movies would look and sound like The Ten Commandments. Its imperfection is its perpetual attraction.

THE SIGN OF THE CROSS (1932)

"And you said Rome was dull!"

My first glancing encounter with Cecil B. DeMille's masterpiece was on a TV station I don't remember, many years ago. It was the 1944 re-release version, which added an opening framing scene with American soldiers in Italy being shown Roman ruins and learning about imperial decadence. DeMille had brought his film to Code standards by then, so I would have missed many of the good parts had I bothered to watch the film whole. But that opening was a turn off, and what I saw of the rest looked old-fashioned compared to the more modern spectacles I enjoyed on TV.

So it was years later, during a Film Preservation Festival in the good old days of American Movie Classics, when I first took in the restored pre-Code original version of The Sign of the Cross. I was floored. I think it was then that I really began to appreciate what "pre-Code" meant compared to what came after the crackdown. It meant more violence, more sexuality, more high-gloss depravity than you could shake a thunderbolt at. In this particular case, it also meant an ambivalence toward Christianity that comes as a surprise coming out of the 1930s, and a source novel coming out of the 1890s.

Cecil B. DeMille had just returned to his old headquarters at Paramount following a stint of independence and a disappointing stay at MGM. He had two invaluable allies in this project. Mitchell Leisen did the incredible art direction, while Waldemar Young co-adapted the Wilson Barrett novel and play. Young did scenarios and screenplays for Tod Browning and Lon Chaney during the 1920s, and something of the sick freakishness of those films comes through here.

C.B. drops us right into the third night of the Great Fire of Rome. Emperor Nero looks to the flames for inspiration, but breaks a string on his lyre. He's in no mood to hear his advisor Tigellinus tell him that Romans have accused him of setting the fire. But when Tigellinus suggests finding someone or some group to blame for it, he just happened to be thinking of the Christians, practitioners of "a dangerous superstition that teaches that the meek shall inherit that which belongs to the mighty." That subversive message is growing more popular, but Rome might nip it in the bud if Christians are blamed for the fire.

Nero's strategy seems to work, for when two Christians are recognized in one intact neighborhood, they're nearly lynched. "The sign of the cross" is a two-part line drawing of a crucifix in the dirt; by completing what one starts, the other confirms that both are Christians. But how did you recognize me? Titus from Galilee asks Favius of Rome. Maybe it was the way that they're the only two men in the neighborhood who look like they've wandered in out of the desert. Maybe it's that odd fixed expression on their faces. Whatever it was, local thug Strabo figured it out nearly before they did themselves. Strabo (played by perennial oaf Nat Pendleton) hates Christians but realizes that persecution can go too far. "If they killed off all the Christian lice," he tells his hairy sidekick, "me and you'd have to go back to work."

Strabo has cause to worry that he'll lose his reward as the mob menaces his prizes, but Marcus Superbus ("the proud," I believe), the prefect of Rome, rides in to restore order. He lashes his way to the fountain to find out what's going on, but finds himself mesmerized by Mercia, Favius's ward. An admirer of beauty, he's happy to listen when Mercia tells him the old men are harmless "philosophers." And if Strabo doesn't like it, he can taste the whip. But most people don't buy that alibi -- including Tigellinus, Marcus's main rival for proximity to the Emperor -- not to mention the Empress.

But let's mention her. She bathes in a vast pool of asses' milk, tended by her comely slaves. Her girlfriend Dacia witnessed the scene with Marcus and the "philosophers," and she saw Mercia. Since Empress Poppaea (Claudette Colbert)has the hots for Marcus, she'd naturally want to know all about it. In fact, Poppaea insists. "Take off your clothes, get in here and tell me all about it," she commands. For the sake of arguments, DeMille throws in a symbolically suggestive shot of two cats lapping at the milk as Dacia strips.

Lapping pussies?

I'll spell out the complications of the plot. Marcus has an itch he wants Mercia to scratch, but being a "philosopher," she plays hard to get, though she's clearly attracted to someone who looks like a young Frederic March. As an object of Marcus's affection, Mercia is an unwitting rival to the Empress, for whom Marcus has been playing hard to get out of loyalty to Nero. Since gossip spreads fast, Poppaea knows that Mercia is a Christian and wants her executed so she can have Marcus. Tigellinus, thanks to Strabo, also knows about Mercia, but he wants to use Marcus's relationship with her to destroy Marcus. Both Poppaea and Tigellinus want to manipulate an indecisive Nero into eliminating their enemies.

Charles Laughton plays Nero as too often exhausted from "delicious debauchery"
to take an active role in the story.

And Mercia? What do those Christians want, anyway?

Nero seems to have a better idea of the Christian agenda than Marcus does. He thinks Christians want to kill people and destroy the world. The main story of the film is his desperate attempt to deprogram Mercia so that she can live, preferably as his wife. He realizes, however, that Mercia is already deep in the grip of the cult.

Marcus: Something has twisted you out of all natural feeling.
Your kind of life, your faith has done it. I've always believed that
Christianity was merely stupid, but it's vicious if it can do this to you!

But why not let a Christian speak for himself. Titus addresses a secret gathering, telling them that "We are to become as children, Jesus said, with the child's simple loving vision. [Cut to a little girl giggling and playing with her doll] If we have the simplicity, the faith, the trust of a child, we accept that which we do not fully understand."

Unfortunately, young Stephan has been captured by Strabo and tortured to reveal the location of the gathering. By Sign of the Cross standards this bit is a modest atrocity, as the boy is taken into a glowing pit through an opening in the floor, and the action takes place off-screen while we see Tigellinus watching it. Since we don't hear the sound of a whip, we can guess that Stephan is being flayed, one strip at a time. He cracks and reveals the location, where a massacre shortly takes place. Please note that a baby has been killed with an arrow in this scene.

Again Marcus gets Mercia out of danger, but it's now more important than ever that he get her out of the cult. Look at it from his perspective. These Christians seem to want to die. They sing hymns of joy in a strange, droning, dirge-like fashion. They seem to go into trance states of unnatural serenity. As far as Marcus is concerned, Christians are pod people -- but there's still a chance to save Mercia. Maybe she just needs to loosen up a little. Hell, he supposes: maybe she's bi.

Mercia's next intervention takes the form of Ancaria, "the most wicked and ... talented woman in Rome." The wickedness is fine, but the talent is questionable. I imagine there were dedicated tribades in Rome who would dive for the nearest window whenever Ancaria launched into "The Naked Moon." Based on what I could make of the lyrics, as a singer-songwriter Ancaria is right up there with Nero himself.

It bugs Marcus that Mercia didn't respond to Ancaria's seduction, just like Ancaria was bugged by the singing of the Christians as they were being marched past the window to the arena dungeon. The artiste blames this distraction for her failure, but Marcus blames Mercia's brainwashing. "Don't you see what this thing has done to you?" he protests, "It hasn't let you live. It's deformed you. It's made love impossible for you." Still, Marcus is willing to try physical therapy, but Tigellinus picks just that moment to show up. And where's the justice? The prefect of Rome is about to rape a virtuous young woman, and Tigellinus arrests the woman for being a Christian.

The stage is being set. Mercia is the object of a tug-of-war between Poppaea and Tigellinus. He doesn't care for her, but she's the means to his end of ruining Marcus, while Poppaea would destroy Mercia to save Marcus. Marcus himself lets Nero know that he'll take extreme measures to save her, but backs down when he realizes he's spoken treason. He does elicit a promise from the Emperor: Mercia can live if she renounces her faith. The alternative is the arena.

Up to this point, The Sign of the Cross has been an attractive Roman soap opera with fleeting moments of brutality and the usual DeMille veneer of piety, perhaps thinner than usual. At this point, as bourgeois Rome fills the arena seats with gripes and gossip, the movie goes berserk. It goes stark raving mad. Is it Cecil B. DeMille and Waldemar Young's nightmare, or yours? Together with Mitchell Leisen, they take Hollywood cinema to a place it won't return to for nearly forty years. It's nearly ten minutes of concentrated evil that possibly hasn't been topped, ever.

Ready when you are, C.B.! We who are about to die, salute thee!

And here...

...we...

...go!

Alternating between cuts and dissolves, DeMille keeps taking us back to the spectators in different states of agitation or arousal. The people place bets or argue with one another while a band plays throughout the action. Sometimes they're just bored, content to read the program rather than watch the action.

But DeMille has only been warming us up for the main events.

All of this happens before the Christians are sent into the arena. We don't actually get to see them die, but we definitely know what's coming. So it's do or die for Mercia as Marcus makes his last appeal for her to renounce her faith. But she won't renounce her friends, and won't go back on her promise to poor Stephan, who was chickening out at the arena gate, that they'd be together forever. And that's what makes Marcus crack. The appeal of Christianity is its promise of eternity. Marcus, realizing that he can't live without Mercia, takes a version of Pascal's Wager, hoping that by dying with her, he'll be united with her forevermore.

What exactly has happened here? This is where the movie is more ambivalent than its literary source. I checked the final chapter of the novel (the whole thing is available as a Google book for free), and in the 1896 text Marcus explicitly declares his conversion to Tigellinus. There is no doubt that he dies a worshipper of Jesus. But in the film, Marcus tells Mercia, "I believe in you, not this Christ," and even at the end says, "I can't sing the hymn, and I shan't look up. I'll be looking at you and believing that you're my wife." DeMille's film is a triumph not of evangelism, but of romantic love, which has in common with Christianity an imagination of eternal union. But the director's game is such that pious audiences could leave the theater convinced of Marcus's redemption, while more sophisticated spectators could draw different conclusions. I don't know if DeMille could have pulled it off after the crackdown.

DeMille's historic reputation is as a huckster who could fill the screen with decadence as long as piety triumphed in the end. The Sign of the Cross certainly fits that description. It is an epic of exploitation that delivers the goods in an insane avalanche of pure spectacle, but it's also a beautifully made film. Maybe it was Mitchell Leisen, or maybe DeMille was better off in black and white, but for all its brutality it's a more visually impressive film than the garish epics Samson and Delilah and the Ten Commandments remake, -- not that those films don't have virtues of their own. But The Sign stands apart as an ultimate statement of the pre-Code cinema, dishing out everything the screen could offer in 1932 except for outright nudity. It's a "bible movie" for people who hate bible movies, but love movies in general -- the less holy, the better.

* * *

Epilogue

You may think it'll be just a brief martyrdom, John Carradine,
but your ordeal is only beginning.