The Last Days of Pompeii (1935)

This film has nothing in common with Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel except the title, and that's too bad. The novel is a potboiler, but its story is much better than this adaptation, which is brought to us by the same team that created King Kong: Merrian C. Cooper and Ernest Shoedsack, with special effects by Willis O'Brien. I suppose the idea was to ignore the laws of time and avoid the problem that the eruption of Mount Vesuvius occurred over 40 years after the death of Christ.

That eruption is the only plot point in common with the novel. We begin with a happy blacksmith, Marcus (Preston Foster). He tells a nobleman, who admires his strength and suggests that he should become a gladiator, that he has everything he needs: a wife and a baby son. Of course, he will shortly lose them to a chariot accident, and his lack of money will cause their deaths because he cannot afford a doctor. Bitter, he will volunteer as a gladiator and make a lot of money.

Marcus still has a soft heart, though, and adopts a boy he has orphaned by killing his father in the arena. After Marcus is injured and can't fight anymore, he takes a job as a slave and horse trader, and will travel to Judea. He meets Pontius Pilate (Basil Rathbone), who will assign him on a mission that brings them both great wealth. But Marcus' adopted son, Flavius, is injured in a horseback riding accident. With nowhere else to turn, he travels to see a healer passing through town. We don't see him, but we can guess who he is, and Flavius is fully restored.

But Marcus is still greedy, and does nothing while the healer is crucified. Interestingly, Rathbone's Pilate is shown in a sympathetic light--he condemns Jesus, but feels bad about it. Later, when Flavius is a young man, he will help Christians escape from slavery, and ends up captured and sentenced to die in the arena, and Marcus, who now runs the arena, is powerless to stop him from being executed. Then the volcano blows.

The condensation of time is, of course, necessary in order to make Jesus an actual character in the story. Bulwer-Lytton simply used Christians, but Cooper and Shoedsack wanted an actual tale of the Christ. This makes the film fine for a Sunday school crowd, but a lousy representation of history, and an even worse movie. The acting by Foster is mediocre, the script laughably bad.

I imagine Cooper chose this subject as a way to further the special effects that he and O'Brien had used for King Kong, but it comes off awfully bad here, with some painfully obvious rear projection and backdrop paintings. As exciting and revolutionary as King Kong was, The Last Days of Pompeii is the opposite.