Word: colosseums
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...here's to the great Colosseum...
...traveled outside their country in the first six months of 1953, many of them in the humpbacked little Volkswagen that are driving British cars off Central Europe's roads. Millions more camped by picture-postcard rivers or along the Baltic shores. Germans pointed Leicas at Rome's Colosseum, Istanbul's bazaars, Granada's Alhambra. Their wives thumbed the lingerie in the Faubourg St. Honoré, where Parisian shopkeepers endured the hated language for the sake of the Deutsche mark. Richer folk drove to Greece by way of Yugoslavia, and one of them reminded his host that...
...central characters are a couple of Abbott & Costello-like American sailors (Walter Chiari and Carlo Campanini) who are knocked out by thugs while sightseeing in the Colosseum and dream that they are having all sorts of misadventures in ancient Rome. Among the picture's low-comedy highlights: the voluptuous Empress Poppea (Silvana Pampanini) taking a milk bath that out-DeMilles De-Mille; the sailors engaging in a pocket-billiard contest with Nero (Gino Cervi); gladiators waging a savage football game in the Colosseum with a Grecian urn as a pigskin; a Roman orgy with jitterbugging; a frenzied chariot race...
...only fitting that MGM's Roman-made picture should play in Rome at advanced prices, for all the city to see and admire. After the pressagents took over, there were a few false starts. The Colosseum was to be used for the premiere, but: "It's too damn cold now to get them sitting out there at night." Also abandoned was a scheme to stage a chariot race along five roads converging on Rome. There were plenty of advertising tie-ins, however. Quo Vadis was linked with shirts, perfume, razor blades, and a contest among 400 hairdressers...
...much of Shaw's gently playful comedy the movie preserves-and only so much. Bypassing the play's philosophy and blunting its rapier wit, the Hollywood version offers instead some gaudy Colosseum sequences, complete with gladiators, lions and glamorous vestal virgins...