The Sign of the Cross (1932)

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64 AD, Rome · 125 minutes (or 87, or 118 — see below)

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

WHAT YOU’RE ABOUT TO SEE

Claudette Colbert is bathing in five hundred gallons of asses’ milk, and the camera is not being careful.

That is Poppaea, Nero’s empress, and this is 1932. In two years it will be impossible to film – not by law, but by an industry code with teeth. And this film is one of the reasons that code exists.

Hold that. It’s the strangest thing about the picture and we’ll come back to it.

THE EMPEROR

Charles Laughton’s Nero is somewhere nearby, chortling.

He plays the emperor as a giggling, boneless voluptuary who finds his own cruelty delightful — and he is having the time of his life. Nineteen years before Ustinov made Nero pitiable, Laughton made him delighted, and it is a genuinely disturbing performance because nothing in it is troubled.

THE STORY

A Roman commander falls for a Christian girl who will not have him. He tries seduction, then persuasion, then despair, while the woman who wants him watches from the palace. Then the city burns, the emperor needs someone to blame, and the arena fills.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It is the plot of Quo Vadis.

The 1895 stage play this film is built on borrowed heavily from Sienkiewicz’s novel, published the following year. Roman officer, Christian girl who resists, decadent emperor, burning city, persecution, arena. Nineteen years before MGM spent a fortune on Quo Vadis, Paramount had already made it.

Which turns these two films into something more useful than a pair of Roman epics. They are the same story, told twice, by two studios, either side of a revolution in what Hollywood was permitted to show.

WHAT DEMILLE WAS ALLOWED

Quo Vadis gives you thirty thousand extras and a burning city.

The Sign of the Cross gives you a seduction dance performed by one woman on another, a milk bath shot to catch what it catches, and an arena sequence containing crocodiles, an ape, gladiators, and women tied to stakes.

None of that is in the 1951 film, and it is not because MGM lacked nerve. By 1951 it was unthinkable.

HISTORY DETECTIVE TIPS

Ask which version you are watching. This matters more here than for almost any film on this site. There are at least four, and they are substantially different. If a scene seems to end abruptly, it probably does.

Watch the crowd in the arena, then watch yourself. The film’s subject is Romans who enjoy watching people die for entertainment. Its method is to stage people dying, at length and in detail, for an audience that has paid to watch. Notice how long the sequence goes on. Notice whether you look away.

And count what the film lets Nero enjoy. Laughton is doing something Ustinov and Matheson never do — he is playing a man who is not conflicted. Ask, when it’s over, whether that made him more or less convincing.

Watch The Sign of the Cross for Laughton and for a version of Rome that a studio would never be allowed to film again.

WHAT IT GETS WRONG

THE LOVERS ARE INVENTED. Marcus Superbus and Mercia are stage creations from an 1895 melodrama, not historical figures. Poppaea was real; her scenes here are not.

THE MORAL FRAME IS A COMMERCIAL DEVICE. This is the film’s real dishonesty, and critics named it at the time. By draping the entire production in Christian piety, DeMille obtained a pass from church authorities for a parade of nudity, sadism and sex that would have sunk any film without a cross in the title.

Every atrocity is presented as something to deplore and photographed as something to enjoy.

AND THE ARENA IS STILL NOT THE RIGHT ATROCITY — though it is closer than Quo Vadis manages.

DeMille gives us variety: crocodiles, an ape, gladiators, women at stakes. The historical Roman arena did have that variety, and a menagerie, and staged executions dressed as entertainment.

But Tacitus describes something more specific. Christians sewn into animal skins and torn apart by dogs. Others set alight after dark to light Nero’s gardens, while he walked among the crowd dressed as a charioteer.

Classicists read the dogs as Nero’s staged version of the Actaeon myth — mythology performed with real people dying inside it. Neither film stages that, and it is the thing most worth staging: not mass slaughter, but slaughter dressed as theatre.

THE FILM THAT MADE ITS OWN CENSOR

Now the part that stops you.

The Catholic reaction in the United States to this film — and to Ann Vickers, released around the same time — helped lead directly to the formation of the Catholic Legion of Decency in 1934.

The Legion was among the forces that turned the Production Code from a suggestion into an enforcement regime with real power over what American studios could release.

Which means that in 1938, when the Dance of the Naked Moon was cut out of the negative of The Sign of the Cross, it was cut by machinery that The Sign of the Cross had helped build.

A film about martyrdom, martyred by an organisation it created.

WHICH VERSION DID YOU WATCH?

[IMAGE: comparison still]

1932	Original release, roughly 125 minutes
1935	Re-released after full Code enforcement, significantly trimmed
1938	The Dance of the Naked Moon cut from the negative; arena footage removed
1944	DeMille supervises a reissue — the censored cut, with new material added
1993	MCA/Universal restore the cut footage for video
now	UCLA Film and Television Archive have restored it to its original length

Between 1935 and 1993, nobody outside a vault saw the film DeMille released. If you watched this on television at any point in that window, you watched something else.

One footnote in the record. In 1944 there was talk at Paramount of re-editing the milk bath. On 2 April that year, it was decided DeMille could keep it.

THE AEROPLANES

The 1944 reissue did something else, and it is the reason this film belongs beside Quo Vadis rather than merely resembling it.

DeMille added a new prologue and epilogue, with an actor who is not in the original film. Aircraft fly over what had been ancient Rome. Their crews talk, and the conversation leads directly into the 1932 opening. At the end, American bombers head back to North Africa, their work done.

Nero is Hitler. It is not implied. It is bolted onto the front of the picture in 1944 — and then bolted on again, differently, when MGM stages Nero’s troops like Triumph of the Will in 1951.

Twice in seven years, the same emperor is handed the same modern costume. And in this case we can date the decision precisely, because the footage was shot separately and added later.

WHAT IT GETS RIGHT

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

POPPAEA WAS REAL, and the film knows what she was for. She is not a decorative empress here; she is a woman using the only instrument available to her in that court.

THE ARENA’S VARIETY IS CORRECT, as above — the Roman games were not one animal repeated. They were a programme.

AND THE DECADENCE IS NOT INVENTED. The court of the Julio-Claudians as described by Tacitus and Suetonius was, by any standard, extraordinary. DeMille exaggerates for the box office. He did not have to invent the direction.

THE VERDICT

The Sign of the Cross (1932) is a poor guide to 64 AD, an outstanding primary source for what Hollywood could show before 1934, and a considerably stranger film than its reputation suggests.

Oh — and the scene that most offended the churches, the one cut out of the negative in 1938?

It was not cut in 1932. Exhibitors ran it uncut, on the reasonable assumption that most audiences would not understand what they were watching.

They understood by 1938.

IF YOU LIKED THIS FILM

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