The main character is Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton), a Roman tribune who is, in many ways, the epitome of Hollywood’s view of Roman decadence. Portrayed as a casual womanizer whose empty and vacuous life affords him little meaning or spirit, Marcellus is a prime candidate for redemption, which comes in the form of Demetrius (Victor Mature), his Greek slave who is moved to spiritual heights after witnessing Christ’s crucifixion (which Marcellus, not incidentally, is in charge of). Jesus is never clearly seen, but is rather depicted only in long shots or, in the case of the walk to Golgotha, as a beaten body whose face is obscured by the cross he bears. Thus, the idea of Christ and the salvation he offers is made more abstract and therefore appreciable even to non-Christian viewers (an important point during an era when Hollywood’s audience was being rapidly eroded by the spread of television).

The majority of the film’s narrative traces Marcellus’s spiritual journey as he comes across various people who knew Jesus and are working to keep his teachings alive, including an elderly man from Nazareth named Justus (Dean Jagger) and a crippled woman named Miriam (Betta St. John) who has a crucial conversation with the tribune that forces him to rethink his admonition that it is only power that matters. Marcellus’s love interest is a woman named Diana (Jean Simmons), who has been promised to the corrupt Roman emperor Caligula (Jay Robinson), but is smitten with Marcellus and ultimately comes to embrace his newfound Christianity, which leads to the film’s heavy-handed final images of them walking arm in arm toward martyrdom, which conveniently elides the brutality of a martyr’s death in favor of the glorious rise to heaven.

Like all the subsequent sword-and-sandal Hollywood movies of the 1950s and early 1960s, there is something inherently hokey about The Robe, with its historically accurate, yet ridiculously clean and well-pressed costumes and its insistence on then-contemporary hair styles that never allow a single strand to be out of place (to realize just how insistent this style was, note that even the great Stanley Kubrick couldn’t get past it in Spartacus). The film is also fairly static, which was an unfortunate result of the CinemaScope process, which required two lenses that had to be focused separately, meaning that significant camera movement was difficult, if not impossible. Despite having no models to emulate, director Henry Koster and veteran cinematographer Leon Shamroy (one of only six cinematographers immortalized on the Hollywood “Walk of Fame”) seem to have an intuitive understanding of what the wider frame offers, particularly the opportunity to combine close-ups with wide shots, which helps to situate the characters’ emotions within a larger context.

Koster, who began his career by making light comedies and had a special gift for directing actors, also does an admirable job of keeping the film’s energy up, even when it bogs down into talky sequences that are ultimately necessary to establishing the idea of early Christianity and how it posed a social and political threat to the ruling Roman order. This leads to what is easily the film’s best sequence, which finds Marcellus being tried before Caligula for treason against Rome. The manner in which Caligula demands that Marcellus reaffirm his allegiance to Rome and renounce Christ has unavoidable echoes of the HUAC meetings, particularly the manner in which Marcellus agrees to the former but refuses the latter, which has a neat symmetry with how “unfriendly witnesses” insisted that they could be good Americans but hold leftist political views at the same time.

The scene also works beautifully because of Jay Robinson’s portrayal of Caligula. Although Koster was highly regarded for directing actors and the film is packed with movie stars both established (Victor Mature, Jean Simmons, Michael Rennie) and rising (Richard Burton), it is only Robinson, then a theater actor making his film debut, who makes a genuine impact on the screen with his high-pitched, snaky performance as one of Rome’s most notorious Caesars. With his wild, leering eyes and voice that combines a kind of whiny insouciance with ego-centric power-tripping, Robinson embodies Caligula’s unsettling psychosis more fully than all the graphic imagery in Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione’s notorious 1980 porn/historical spectacle Caligula combined.

Copyright ©2009 James Kendrick

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