Quo Vadis (1951)

64 AD, Rome · 171 minutes

Historical Accuracy ★★☆☆☆
Immersive Experience ★★★★☆

WHAT YOU’RE ABOUT TO SEE

You meet the Emperor of Rome while he’s having his toenails done, composing awful poetry and whining that nobody appreciates his genius.

He is an insecure man-child with the power of a god who needs your applause… and will kill you if he doesn’t get it.

Peter Ustinov’s performance as Nero earned an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe, and it fixed the popular image of Nero so firmly that every screen emperor since has been either an imitation or a reaction.

Watch the man standing beside him. That’s Leo Genn as Petronius, and his job is to flatter an emperor he privately finds ridiculous. So he does it in lines with two meanings — the surface one for Nero, the real one for you.

Both men were nominated for Oscars. Neither won. Nobody won: eight nominations, zero wins, and we’ll come back to that, because one of the people who complained about it was wrong in a way that’s almost funny.

Stay with the poetry, though. Because later Nero will sing while a city burns, and the tune he sings is real. Not “based on” real. Real. Somebody carved it on a gravestone nineteen hundred years ago and it’s still there, in a museum in Copenhagen. Hold that thought.

THE FIRE

The fire is fire. Nothing since has looked quite like it, and nothing will, because nobody is ever going to be allowed to do it again.

For the burning of Rome, workmen spent months building four full city blocks of the ancient city at Cinecittà — real buildings, at full height — and piped every one of them for flame. Then they set fire to it, on camera, over twenty-four nights.

MGM kept the receipts. Fifteen thousand litres of fuel oil. Seven and a half thousand litres of petrol. Eleven thousand litres of a special alcohol mixture, mixed to make the flames jump a particular way. Fifty butane tanks running at any one moment, and three kilometres of pipework to control it. When those buildings come down, they are really coming down.

Rome burned for six days. It took MGM twenty-four nights to film it.

THE TERROR

When a crowd run in terror, you’re looking at thirty thousand people. Not thirty thousand renders — thirty thousand human beings, in thirty-two thousand costumes, cut from forty-eight kilometres of cloth, wearing fifteen thousand sandals that took Italian craftsmen three months to make by hand. They’re wearing twelve thousand eight hundred pieces of jewellery copied from museum originals. (Somewhere in that enormous crowd, uncredited, is a teenage Sophia Loren.)

THE PERSECUTION

Nero blames Christians for the fire. Christians are rounded up en masse and forced into the arena to be torn apart by animals and burned at the stake.

The arena has sixty-three lions in it. TIME magazine pointed out at the time that this gave the film more lions than most movies have actors.

THE LOVE STORY

A Roman commander lusts after a hostage living in a patrician household and cannot understand why she will not have him.

HISTORY DETECTIVE TIPS

Early on, Nero shows off a scale model of the Rome he intends to build. Look at it carefully. There is a building in that model that could not possibly be there — and the reason why is one of the best pieces of accidental irony in cinema. He is admiring a monument to his own humiliation and he doesn’t know it.

Later, his troops salute him from a balcony. Massed ranks, arms up, camera high behind him. Note the shape of that shot. You’ve seen it before, somewhere else, in a film made by somebody else about somebody else, and it is not an accident.

And in the last act, look at who’s in the room. Count the faces at Nero’s court in the closing scenes, then ask when the scene is set. Some of those people had been dead for years.

Watch Quo Vadis (1951) for the sheer visceral thrill. Watch it for Ustinov, for Genn, for a city that genuinely burns, and for a score built out of scraps of music older than the Colosseum.

WHAT IT GETS WRONG

THE ARENA IS THE WRONG ATROCITY, and this is a case of Hollywood making the truth less horrifying. Tacitus describes Christians sewn into animal skins and torn apart by dogs, and others set alight after dark to light Nero’s gardens while he walked among the crowd dressed as a charioteer.

Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer…

Classicists read the dogs as Nero’s staged version of the Actaeon myth — mythology performed with real people dying inside it.

The film gives us lions. Cleaner, more filmable, and it loses the specific horror of the record: not mass slaughter, but slaughter dressed as theatre.

THE ARSON IS UNPROVEN, and the whole plot depends on it. Tacitus — who despised Nero — refuses to say. He reports it as an open question, places Nero thirty-five miles away at Antium when it started, and records him returning to organise relief, open his gardens to the homeless and impose fire-resistant building codes. The lyre on the rooftop is in Tacitus too, as a rumour he is noting, not a fact he is asserting.

THE PEOPLE IN THE ARENA ARE DEAD. Marcus announces that Galba is marching on Rome, which dates the scene to 68. Sitting in the imperial box at that moment: Seneca and Lucan, both executed in April 65 for their part in a conspiracy against Nero. The film has them publicly defying him three years after they died for doing exactly that.

Watch what they do, too. Nero gives the thumbs-down; the courtiers give the thumbs-up to back the crowd. Thumbs as a life-or-death signal is a modern invention — no ancient source describes it. Two dead men making a gesture nobody ever made.

POPPAEA is there as well, and then in the inner room, where Nero strangles her as the mob reaches the gates. She died in 65 — three years earlier, reportedly kicked while pregnant. The film moves her death, changes the method, and converts a domestic killing into a political one.

And PETRONIUS isn’t in any of it, because the film gets Petronius right: dead by his own hand at his own farewell feast, having first written a letter mocking the emperor. The one character treated most faithfully is the one absent from the tableau of ghosts.

THE BUILDING IN THE MODEL

THE BUILDING IN THE MODEL is the Colosseum. Nero never saw it. It was begun two years after his death by the dynasty that replaced him — and built on the drained bed of the private lake Nero had dug for his own palace. That siting was the whole point: what the tyrant took for himself, the Flavians gave back to the city.

MGM handed Nero a scale model of his own posthumous humiliation and asked him to admire it. The Pantheon is in there too, about sixty years early.

ONE LINE IS STOLEN FROM THE WRONG EMPEROR. “I wish the mob had a single throat” is Suetonius on Caligula.

THE SALUTE ON THE BALCONY is wrong about the first century deliberately, and right about the twentieth. When Nero’s massed troops salute him, note where the camera is: behind Nero and above the crowd, looking down with him at the massed ranks below. You are not watching an emperor being saluted. You are standing where he stands, seeing what he sees.

You have seen that shot before, in a film made by somebody else about somebody else, and it is not an accident. The staging is lifted from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.

It isn’t an error. It’s an argument.

This film was released in 1951, six years after the war, and shot at Cinecittà — a studio Mussolini built to make Rome the capital of the world again. Its Nero burns a European capital, blames a religious minority, persecutes them systematically while a decadent court applauds, and plans to raise a new capital in his own name, “Neropolis,” on the ashes.

Which is exactly what Hitler intended for Berlin, renamed Germania.

And there’s a layer underneath that one. Sienkiewicz wrote the novel in the 1890s, a Polish writer in a Poland that had been partitioned off the map, about a small persecuted community holding its faith against an empire that owned it. His heroine is a Lygian — one of the Lugii, the tribal confederation of what is now Poland. The Polish girl is a hostage in Rome, and the empire holding her was never Nero’s.

No version of this story has ever really been about Rome.

Did audiences make the fascism connection when they watched the film?

I can’t tell you, and I’ve looked. TIME, LIFE, Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, Variety, the Associated Press, and even André Bazin in France — six contemporary reviews, and not one of them mentions fascism, Hitler or the war. They talk about lions and extras and how much it cost.

But I can tell you what the studio thought it was selling.

In the same weeks the film opened, MGM licensed Deborah Kerr’s face to a hand-lotion campaign built around the burning of Rome. The headline was “Nero fiddled while I burned!” and the complaint was that filming beside real flames had left her skin dry as paper.

Four city blocks. Twenty-four nights. Real fire, in a building the dictator’s own government put up. A visceral window into a brutal past. A damning indictment of fascism.

And the authorised public meaning of it was moisturiser.

WHAT IT GETS RIGHT

Quo Vadis (1951) has been unfairly treated by history buffs. It didn’t invent everything.

MGM hired a historical advisor — Hugh Gray — at a time when most productions didn’t bother, and it shows.

THE PERSECUTION HAPPENED. Whatever you conclude about the fire, this part isn’t invented. Suetonius records Nero punishing Christians; Tertullian names him as the first to do it.

PETRONIUS IS ALMOST ENTIRELY ACCURATE. He really was Nero’s arbiter of taste. He really did open his veins while chatting with friends, having first written a document ridiculing the emperor. Genn’s performance follows the historical record more closely than anything else in the picture.

POMPONIA GRAECINA IS REAL. Most viewers assume the Christian woman in the general’s household is invented. She isn’t — Tacitus records her tried within her own family for “foreign superstition,” a line historians have read for centuries as possible early Christianity in a senatorial house. It’s the film’s best-sourced inclusion and almost nobody notices it.

AND THE MUSIC IS A GENUINE ACT OF ARCHAEOLOGY. Miklós Rózsa spent six months researching before he wrote a note, and concluded there was no surviving Roman music at all — only about a dozen scraps of Greek. He used them: a bar here, an interval there. Nero’s song at the burning of Rome is built on the Seikilos epitaph, a memento mori carved on a grave marker in the first or second century AD, about how short life is.

He put a song about death in the mouth of a man watching a city die, and almost nobody in the audience knew.

Rózsa’s own account of his method is the best sentence anyone has written about historical film: “From these fragments I used two bars, or one bar, or an interval, something that gave authenticity — and the rest is mine”.

THE SEIKILOS EPITAPH
The first song Nero sings. The oldest complete piece of music that survives from anywhere in the world. You can stream it.

THE VERDICT

Quo Vadis (1951) is a shaky guide to 64 AD, an interesting primary source for 1951, and a great film.

Oh — and the man who complained loudest that the film was ignored at the Oscars?

That was Miklós Rózsa, who wrote in his memoirs that it received no nominations at all.

It received eight. One of them was his. Go figure.

IF YOU LIKED THIS FILM

Three films, one emperor, seventy-two years. After Quo Vadis (1951), enjoy the other two as well and you’ll see something none of them shows on its own.

THE SIGN OF THE CROSS (1932) ★★☆☆☆ / ★★★★☆
The same story, nineteen years earlier in this film — a Roman commander, a Christian girl who won’t have him, a burning city, an arena. DeMille got away with things here that MGM couldn’t have filmed in 1951, and the reason isn’t taste. It’s the censor. This film inadvertently helped create the organisation that later cut it to pieces.

NERO (2004) ★★☆☆☆ / ★★★☆☆
The same emperor, the same sources, and a very different film. Three hours long, it begins when young Lucius witnesses the tyrannical Emperor Caligula murder his father and exile his mother, Agrippina. Nero chronicles the tragic transformation of Nero from a compassionate, idealistic prince into a paranoid tyrant driven mad by imperial power.

AGRIPPINA (1911) ★★★★☆ / ★☆☆☆☆

Eighteen minutes, silent, free, and made by Enrico Guazzoni — who two
years later directed the 1913 Quo Vadis that MGM was remaking here.
The film you have just watched is a remake of a film by this man.

It is also, by some distance, the most historically committed Nero
film ever made. A trade reviewer in January 1911 praised its accuracy
of staging and detail; it puts Locusta the professional poisoner on
screen, which almost nothing since has done; and it contains one scene
that no film in the following century has been brave enough to touch.

The oldest thing on this site, and the one that flinches least.

The Novel
QUO VADIS (1896) — HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ

The heroine is Callina, called Lygia, because she is a Lugian — and nineteenth-century Slavic scholars enthusiastically identified the Lugii as ancestors of the Poles, in the country between the Oder and the Vistula. Her protector Ursus is a giant virtuous barbarian from the same northern woods; his name means “bear,” and his real Lygian name is Urban.

Sienkiewicz made his heroine Polish, and made the empire holding her someone else’s.

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