Cinema: The New Pictures: Dec. 5, 1932

The Sign of the Cross (Paramount). Cecil Blount De Mille directed his first cinema, The Squaw Man, 19 years ago. Since then he has directed 56 more. A director of the old school, he has retained his taste for grandiloquent language, pretentious sets, casts of 1,000 or more. This picture, a vast conglomeration about the Emperor Nero, Christian martyrs, Roman palaces, catacombs, lions yapping in the Circus, is a religious spectacle, like The King of Kings and The Ten Commandments, of the type De Mille likes best. Before starting it he said he had been waiting for ten years for the cinema to become a vehicle adequate for what he had in mind. Choosing Elissa Landi for the role of heroine, he said: ". . . She combines mysticism and sex with the pure and wholesome. There is the depth of the ages in her eyes, today in her body and tomorrow in her spirit." As is his custom, Director De Mille took his scenarists on a yachting party to prepare the script; used a megaphone, now almost obsolete in Hollywood, to harangue his extras whom he gets not from the studio casting office but from a list of his own.

As usual, Director De Mille explained to his extras that they were not merely supernumeraries, they were actors. As usual, they overacted, "mugged" their meagre parts.

From a company making a picture for him, Director De Mille demands strict attention during his frequent harangues. During the course of one such address while filming his latest piece, he sternly asked one female extra what she was whispering about. She said she was wondering when he would stop talking so she could get to lunch. Thereupon he took her to lunch.

The story of The Sign of the Cross, included in the repertory of every stock company in England since it was first played in 1895, is obvious devotional melodrama. Nero (Charles Laughton) orders his lieutenant, Marcus Superbus (Fredric March), to clear Rome of Christians. While doing so, Marcus falls in love with a Christian girl named Mercia (Elissa Landi). This makes the vicious Empress Poppaea (Claudette Colbert) jealous. Marcus Superbus tries to persuade Mercia to become a pagan. He fails. Nero wants to forgive her for being a Christian but Poppaea, to save Marcus from what she considers a misalliance, refuses to allow it. Mercia goes to the lions first. Marcus follows her—not, as in the original story, because he has been converted, but for reasons of gallantry, which Director De Mille considered more affecting. As rewritten by Paramount's Scenarists Sidney Birchman and Waldemar Young, The Sign of the Cross is a Roman holiday of semi-civilized sentiment which is likely to redeem the $600,000 it cost, validate Director De Mille's dictum that no religious cinema has ever failed. Typical shot: Christians in a dungeon, waiting to be martyred, with a young and handsome female Christian under a beam of light in the centre.