A big disappointment. I've wanted to see this for years.The historical era, of course, is of great interest to me. And Charles Laughton as Nero just seems like inspired casting! But unfortunately Laughton is barely in the picture! He's got like about 15 minutes of screen time. Maybe less than that even. Claudette Colbert as the empress Poppaea is in it a bit more she takes a famous bath in milk and you can even catch a glimpse of her nipple if you watch carefully but she's not in it enough, either. No, the vast bulk of this vastly bulky film is spent with Frederic March and Elissa Landi. He plays the prefect of Rome and she the young Christian woman he tries to save from persecution. March's acting, in my opinion, varied a lot from role to role. He was occasionally great, as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or especially in Inherit the Wind, but oftentimes he was dull or mediocre (too many examples to name). In The Sign of the Cross, he is just bad. Elissa Landi, who was the second female lead in After the Thin Man and played opposite Robert Donat in The Count of Monte Cristo, is a beautiful woman, but not much of an actress. The film is very stilted in an early-talkies sort of way. The dialogue is very bad, and often very difficult to understand (I had to watch some scenes with subtitles). The film does have some great moments. Any scenes with Laughton or Colbert are worthy. I love the scene where Joyzelle Joyner molests Elissa Landi with her erotic dance. And the Christians in the film are so stuffy and self-righteous it's actually a lot of fun when they all get fed to lions, tigers and bears. And crocodiles and one girl is even offered up sexually to a gorilla (a scene which begins and vanishes just as quickly I'm guessing DeMille didn't want to leave it up long enough for anyone in 1932 to actually get it).
Review of The Sign of the Cross
