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Contents © 2000
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

The Sign Of The Cross

Directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Starring Fredric March, Claudette Colbert, Charles Laughton, 1932, B&W, English, 124 minutes. Available at Kensington Video

Matthew: As persecuted Christian movies go, this one was better and worse than Quo Vadis, which didn't wallow in the sadism of torturing Christians. Ernie: Quo Vadis had Christians being burned alive, the scariest of all deaths. And it wasn't naked babes being burned alive; it was normal-looking people.

* * * Ernie: Christianity is portrayed better here. They didn't make as many attempts at Christian speech-making. They relied more on juxtaposition of the Christian and Roman ways of life -- as when the Roman woman was doing her dance of seduction while the Christians sang the hymn outside. Matthew: I liked the use of music there -- it set up a tension in the hearer's soul. The dissonance between the Naked Moon song and the Christian chorus drove home the dissonance between Marcus and Mercia. Ernie: Still, you can see how, to an educated Roman, the question of Christianity was more subtle than just Christianity vs. the barbarism of the world. This religion asked you to deny yourself, and even in some way, deny your nature. At the feast, Marcus says to Mercia, "These are my friends. They are content with life." In a world unenlightened by Christianity, contentedness with life was a high virtue.