Immediately after Henryk Sienkiewicz got the Nobel Prize for his brilliant novel QUO VADIS, there were attempts to bring the story of the 1st century Rome to screen. In 1912 an Italian director Enrico Guazzoni made a colossal (for that time) epic which focused primarily on huge spectacle. The results at the box office quickly proved a smashing success. Throughout the world, QUO VADIS became popular not only among readers but also among fans of a new phenomenon, cinema. Big, gorgeous premieres in the various metropolises and soon QUO VADIS compared by the critics to other great epic productions of the time, like CABIRIA, INTOLERANCE or THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEI. The film became so important that among many film lovers it still constitutes the QUO VADIS of the silent era, though some regard the movie as a "lost" one.
However, 1924 brought the next screen adaptation of the book, this time not from the Italians but the Germans. One of the directors was Georg Jacoby, the cast and crew also moved the production works to Italy in order to achieve authenticity and in this case, a great help was offered by Gabriellino D'Annunzio. However, one fact was the most promising: a great German silent star, Emil Jannings, known and loved for such marvelous portrayals like in Murnau's LAST LAUGH, was cast as infamous emperor Nero. Yet, despite wonderful chances, the filming soon occurred unfortunate for the cast and crew. Financial problems caused condensations and, according to some reports, one actor (while allegedly playing Seneca) was accidentally consumed by hungry lions. Moreover, the stills from the movie show that sets leave much to wish when compared to the original 1912 silent classic. Therefore, it failed to repeat the great success of the 1912 version. Although Jacoby's movie was later (in the late 1920s) supplied with musical score, its fate was similar to another very unfortunate production of history, I CLAUDIUS (1937) by Josef Von Sternberg (strange that both deal with Ancient Rome). As for silent movies, I don't know if this QUO VADIS will ever be appreciated.
As a result, fans of Henryk Sienkiewicz had to wait for another screen adaptation...this time already a talkie made in Technicolor - a colossal spectacle by Mervyn LeRoy, certainly up till now, the most famous and the worldwide popular QUO VADIS on screen...
