Demetrius and the Gladiators (Delmer Daves, 1954)

A very Scope film

Note on Demetrius and the Gladiators, in the occasion of the new restoration of the film premiered at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024. It was restored in 4K by The Walt Disney Studios and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Academy Film Archive at Cineric and Audio Mechanics laboratories from the 35mm original negative, a 35mm interpositive and a 35mm internegative. – EK

The trials and tribunals of Demetrius (Victor Mature), from a freed slave to the protector of the robe of Jesus, to gladiatorship and the illicit relationship with Claudius’s wife, Messalina (Susan Hayward). Straying away in a life of debauchery, Demetrius is reawakened to Christian values thanks to Peter the Fisherman while there is a good dose of lust, blood and tiger-fighting in between. This Bible pulp (“I never thought of Jesus being so tall”) culminates in the assassination of Caligula and a return to reason after Claudius becomes the new Caesar. Sequel to the first CinemaScope film The Robe (1953), this is the 1950s “muscular Christianity” that the late Terence Davies, who saw this film when he was nine, described as “dazzling and profane” and belonging to a time when God was in every cinema, “like a drug." Muscular indeed as Mature fights three tigers at once and profane as the film’s campy theology takes him to sermon a lascivious Hayward lying down in her designer dress.

Still, a couple of years before Delmer Daves’s highly creative period (1956-58) and the quartet of westerns – starting with Jubal and ending with Cowboy – for which he is better known today, what distinguishes this box-office hit from similar endeavours is its using of biblical framework for proposing racial equality (similar to what Daves did in his western Broken Arrow) through a dignified representation of the black slave William Marshall. This is also thanks to the liberal writer Philip Dunne, in high demand for this sort of thing after hitting the jackpot with biblical sword-and-sandal David and Bathsheba (1951). His dialogue nicely carves out the venomous language of the court and makes the relationship between Mature and Marshall credible.

I tend to agree with Jonathon Rosenbaum that a) this is a better movie than The Robe; b) it is interesting for Daves’s interracial utopianism; c) it is notable for various rhyme effects between Michael Rennie’s Peter the Fisherman and his Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still.