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). First straying into a life of debauchery, Demetrius is reawakened to Christian values thanks to Peter the Fisherman, but 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. A 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 sermonise 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 use 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 his biblical swordsand-sandals epic 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 Jonathan 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.

Ehsan Khoshbakh