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THE ROBE The Robe was a blockbuster at the box office. Its damning legacy, however, isn’t in being the first movie released in CinemaScope (that’s a good thing) or having spawned Demetrius and the Gladiators (a good thing too). By elevating Lloyd C. Douglas’s thaumaturgy as if to usher in the Eisenhower era of boring pious submission, Fox and director Henry Koster unintendedly helped set back the God thing. If the miracle robe isn’t enough to satisfy the saps, there’s Betta St. John’s cripple singing the book’s theme of masochistic religiosity, which even back then was as offensive and repulsive as it is now. (Koster admittedly was a religionist; after dealing with the script’s preposterousness, he’d seem a prime candidate for recovery.) Deemed prestige moviemaking, the only things in it ranking as deluxe are those Fox floors and some of the sets. Richard Burton engages in fits of overacting; Victor Mature’s less an actor than a stockyard gate crasher whose “pecs, cheekbones and nose,” says TCM’s Michael Atkinson, “tower over those of ordinary mortals”; Jay Robinson as Caligula gleefully chews the scenery while swishing around in capes and crown. Nature giving her a lush beauty to thwart Robinson’s impedimenta, Jean Simmons’s final facial expression flashes, “OMG, what am I walking up to?” Nine months after the release of The Robe, and directed by Delmer Daves, who’d later bring the Preggers Trilogy A Summer Place, Parrish and Susan Slade to overheated teens, the sequel Demetrius and the Gladiators gave audiences the chance to delight in the very entertaining low grade juiciness of sinners. Previously a seductress in David and Bathsheba, Susan Hayward is back for seconds as a red mane wicked, this time with a yen for voyeurism—she gets the hots watching the barely clothed loins flexing in a tavern and to the death in the arena. Robinson returns to pull the rest of the stops he didn’t get to in the first (and only receiving 6th billing!); Anne Bancroft tries to subdue her Bronx accent while feeding her face; and Milton Krasner’s camera more fluid than Leon Shamroy’s in the original. Some of the buffed floors are a little dirty and scruffy from all the prior action, and the tigers in the Coliseum seem to want to play more than chow down. Oscar wins for The Robe: best color art and set direction, best color costumes. Oscar noms: best pictue, best actor (Burton), best color cinematography. Technically not a full-blown roadshow, The Robe was absorbed into the lore of the format throughout the years because it was the first mass widescreen presentation. While other biblical epics before it were hits—Samson and Delilah, Quo Vadis and David and Bathsheba—they were filmed in the cramped 1.37:1 screen ratio. The impact of the success of The Robe would dictate what followed—chronic Biblicarama. The blu-ray of the movie reminds us it would be easily amendable to hardticket accoutrements. In fact, it got everything but reserved seating, as there were slightly elevated ticket and concession prices, the hawking of souvenir booklets and customers clad in their Sunday best. Pushing continuous performances, Fox was mindful of the need for a fairly quick return on the costly investment by owners who retrofitted theatres to accommodate the CinemaScope screen, in short time the defacto standard. The first films in the process to be pushed as hardticket were The King and I, A Farewell to Arms, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Gigi. ROLLOVER IMAGES BELOW
Text COPYRIGHT © 2002 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
