Word: nero
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Vadis (MGM) is the costliest movie ever made-$6,500,000* worth of grandeur, violence, faith and fleshpots, glittering with Technicolor and set against the epic clash of Christianity and paganism in Nero's Rome. The film has more lions (63) than most movies have actors; its 30,000 extras outnumber the working population of Hollywood; its army of technicians spent 24 days stoking the conflagration of Rome, which burned only nine days for Nero himself. For sheer size, opulence and technical razzle-dazzle, Quo Vadis is the year's most impressive cinematic sight-seeing spree...
...months in the shooting at Italy's Cinecitta Studios, nine minutes short of three hours in the theater, the picture recreates ancient Rome with massive splendor and lavish detail. Nero's court lolls midst pleasures and palaces. Massed legions march in triumph through crowd-choked avenues. Mobs flee the burning city and storm Nero's palace. Christian martyrs fall to a pack of lions, burn by the score at rows of stakes in the arena of the Circus Maximus. One of them, Ursus...
...must struggle between her faith and "his powerful masculine appeal." Between Actor Taylor's woodenness and the coyly pallid playing of Actress Kerr, the struggle seems tame enough to justify one unconsciously comic lapse into domesticity. After Deborah is snatched from the stake and Christianity bests Nero's regime in a spectacular upheaval of death and destruction, Commander Taylor bids goodbye to his trusted friend: "Come visit us in Sicily, and bring Drusilla and the children...
...Nero strangles Poppaea...
...Desperate, forsaken and alone, Nero destroys himself...