God bless the Orgiast / who's brought his own

Cecil B. DeMille's SIGN OF THE CROSS (1932) mixes pre-code decadence with stilted odes to the Lord, have mercy, and makes a great exhibit A of the dualistic prurience of 1930s small town America. Like much of Hollywood it quietly snickers at the rubes for watching it, mimicking its own audience in a lengthy final coliseum scene, where a playbill announces a vast array of spectacles, and then we're treated to lurid shots of every last one, right down to the amazons vs. pygmies

While ostensibly being something that could be shown in Sunday school, THE SIGN OF THE CROSS harbors a pre-code phallic yen for lurid godless orgies, and the willingness to sit through Sunday school to get to one. The lurid tableaux that get the Romans howling and leering are the very reason after all, that we're watching this, not the dialogue. De Mille is our own delighted Nero (here played by a false-nosed Laughton, on low) and his audience as the slavering Roman crowd, turning away in horror from the spectacle while peeking through their fingers, leering and judging and gasping all in one emotional outburst of repressed desire. 

Maybe that's because the film sparks to life only in the decadence, for decadence is cinematic, and Christianity is not. Jesus didn't understand the subtle joys of a circus. But that kind of showmanship, the Todd Browning-style carny horror, is where De Mille's heart is really at. His story may preach meekness but aside from their suicidal tendencies, these simpering Christians are strictly like from dullsville. De Mille never shows any spark of life in them, they just pose like old paintings and drone on and on, until Roman intervention is all but begged for by an impatient theatergoer. Ann Harding even seems to be rolling her eyes at their secret meeting.

And besides! These Christians may preach a good game, but in a short milennium or so they'd be torturing and burning astrology-minding pagans just as viciously as they're being tortured by them now. Where's your messiah now, m'yeah!

But as long as we're not stuck alone in a room with Ann Harding, things are pretty lively. A great moment is when Frederic March is streaming to the rescue in his chariot and goes plowing into Claudette Colbert's carriage on the main drag. It's awesome the way De Mille cuts from the calm and seductive Colbert to March, racing to the rescue and clutching the reigns like a boy told to take out the trash right at the climax of some Cinemax erotica, if you know what I mean:

Besides, who wants a Christian with a water pitcher when you can have savvy Claudette Colbert in a milk bath? Only a fool! Only a man young enough that he still does an unconscious John Barrymore impression (He'd actually played him, more or less, in 1930's THE ROYAL FAMILY OF BROADWAY); probably explained by his lack of guidance from DeMille, a director notoriously good with crowd scenes and bad with up close actors. He's so bad that he can't really do the self-sacrificial heights-scaling mastered by, say, Edmund Goulding, without even the most bitterly pious of small town prurients choking on their smuggled-in thermos of Ovaltine. At least I hope they'd choke, and not completely miss the point of all life. For as Oscar W. notes in An Ideal Husband (which I caught yesterday on TCM): 

"Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not -- there is no weakness in that."

I found the Cecil B. DeMille set online for $17,  my own risky throw of the dice, and and it was worth it just for CLEOPATRA and this weird old film, which is restored with lots of long unavailable scenes of sex and violence. Special thanks to Glorious Trash's Joe Kenney for recommending it! My natural inclination to avoid anything with Christians in it has until now prevented me from every even considering seeing any post-Christ DeMille pic but SIGN is hardly a biblical epic at all but rather a horror film, similar to one of my top five essentials, Todd Browning's DRACULA (1931) in the way the stilted, undead quality of early sound film adds an extra frisson, as if the air itself is being photographed and recorded and is in its own way even thicker and more nurturing than the bottom of a dark ocean. Like DRACULA, CROSS even ends with lovers marching out of a deep cellar's steep stone steps into the wrathful sunlight.

In DRACULA it's the still-human survivors going into light, in CROSS it's the doomed Roman-Christian vampires going to their death. For though Christians are 'reverse vampires' (drawing crosses in the sand, making them out of sticks like sad sack introverts confusing shyness with moral piety) they're still outsiders; these Christians are the cast-offs, the lost, the elderly and fearful, the desperate for salvation, and they can be tricked by any good cult leader into dying and killing and blood-drinking with alarming ease. The thing is, can actors be tricked so easily? Can they look up from their private life Gomorrahae long enough to feel the burn of that cross upon their forehead, and suffer through another deadening sermon from that old Catholic Legion of Decency?

Hell no. In two years with the advent of the production code that would all have to change, but for now, in year 64 AD and 1932, let sweet freedom of carnal expression, drunkenness reign (the most heartbreaking scene for me was when March orders out his big Fellini-esque dinner party--including the always delightful Ferdinand Gottshalk, who gets off all the wittiest and Wide-iest cracks-- and you see these huge slaves carrying huge kegs and ice buckets leading the way down his marble steps) and the lions take the Wilde-jailing buzzkills everywhere. Two hundred pieces reward for every Christian turned in! Free Oscar Wilde and send in Joe Breen to fight the amazons!