The New Pictures

Quo Vadis (MGM) is the costliest movie ever made--$6,500,000* worth of grandeur, violence, faith and fleshpots, glittering with Technicolor and set against the epic clash of Christianity and paganism in Nero's Rome. The film has more lions (63) than most movies have actors; its 30,000 extras outnumber the working population of Hollywood; its army of technicians spent 24 days stoking the conflagration of Rome, which burned only nine days for Nero himself. For sheer size, opulence and technical razzle-dazzle, Quo Vadis is the year's most impressive cinematic sight-seeing spree.

Six months in the shooting at Italy's Cinecitta Studios, nine minutes short of three hours in the theater, the picture recreates ancient Rome with massive splendor and lavish detail. Nero's court lolls midst pleasures and palaces. Massed legions march in triumph through crowd-choked avenues. Mobs flee the burning city and storm Nero's palace. Christian martyrs fall to a pack of lions, burn by the score at rows of stakes in the arena of the Circus Maximus. One of them, Ursus the

Slave (ex-Pugilist Buddy Baer) not only wrestles a wild bull but wins the match.

Like the imperial Caesars, Producer Sam (King Solomon's Mines) Zimbalist and Director Mervyn (Anthony Adverse) LeRoy rely on these circuses to keep their audience diverted from sterner matters. For all the majesty of the theme and magnificence of the trimmings, the story of Quo Vadis, based on Henryk Sienkiewicz' 1895 novel, never rises much above the level of a good melodrama.

The script epitomizes the turmoil of its era in a stilted boy-meets-girl romance between a Roman commander (Robert Taylor) and a Christian hostage (Deborah Kerr) who, as the ads say, must struggle between her faith and "his powerful masculine appeal." Between Actor Taylor's woodenness and the coyly pallid playing of Actress Kerr, the struggle seems tame enough to justify one unconsciously comic lapse into domesticity. After Deborah is snatched from the stake and Christianity bests Nero's regime in a spectacular upheaval of death and destruction, Commander Taylor bids goodbye to his trusted friend: "Come visit us in Sicily, and bring Drusilla and the children."

Yet most of the dialogue is more literate than the Hollywood average; some of it, evidently contributed by Co-Scripter S. N. Behrman, helps Actor Leo Genn to shine as Petronius, the Roman satirist, whose dry wit enables him to needle Nero even while flattering him. As Nero, Britain's Actor-Playwright-Director Peter Ustinov is allowed to hog too much screen time, but he does some expert hamming to create the deliciously malign figure of a spoiled, sensual madman. Finlay (Great Expectations) Currie plays St. Peter with eloquent dignity, though his long speeches are marred by the camera's digressions to tasteless religious tableaux, e.g., The Last Supper. In the role of the lascivious Empress Poppaea, Patricia Laffan has nothing much to do but hold a pair of cheetahs on the leash, but she is certainly one of the sights of Rome.

Perhaps the last epic of its scope, Quo

Vadis is a triumph of money over matter, a monument to Hollywood's faith in the formula that nothing succeeds like excess. Petronius speaks for Quo Vadis when, discussing the emperor's monstrous arson, he tells Nero: "History need not say that the burning of Rome was good, but it must say that it was colossal." --

For its Hollywood opening of Quo Vadis later this month, M-G-M is planning a celebration almost as colossal as the burning of Rome. So many invitations have already gone out to local bigwigs, from Governor Earl Warren on down, that only the most dazzling movie names can hope to make their way along Wilshire Boulevard, lined with a Praetorian Guard of dress extras, to the Four Star Theater. To keep lesser mortals constantly reminded of the occasion, M-G-M hirelings have already arranged publicity tie-ups with everything from soap to fire insurance. Piece de resistance: the Quo Vadis hairdo, a tight-fitting cap of curls specially designed by a Manhattan coiffeur.

Across the Wide Missouri (MGM) boasts all the expansive paraphernalia of a painstaking Hollywood epic: vast stretches of the rugged Colorado outdoors, superbly photographed in Technicolor; a conscientious effort to show how trappers actually looked and lived in the Western wilderness of 1830; a big cast headed by Clark Gable in one of his manliest roles. Unfortunately, all the color and muscle is not enough to hide the script's severe case of dramatic anemia.

As winnowed out of a Pulitzer-prize history by Bernard DeVoto, the story tamely recalls 1950'S Broken Arrow, without its surprise or suspense. Trapper Gable marries a proud Indian maiden (Maria Elena Marques) so he can use her to ease his way into the beaver-rich bailiwick of her grandfather, a Blackfoot chief (played by well-disguised Oldtimer Jack Holt). On the trail, he learns to love and respect her. Their marriage wins the blessing of the Blackfoot ruler and gives them a son. But when one of Gable's men kills the old chief to satisfy a personal grudge, a hostile brave (Ricardo Montalban) takes command of the Indians to war on the whites. A Blackfoot arrow, guided by the Production Code's antimiscegenation line, cuts down Gable's bride.

Too often, the film sacrifices action to authenticity; all the Indians' speeches must be translated into English, usually by a bibulous French scout (well played by Adolphe Menjou*), so that some scenes move almost as leisurely as a discussion at the U.N. But the picture fills the eye with the grandeur of its well-chosen locations and the flashing charm of Mexico's Actress Marques, who looks something like a brunette Faye Emerson. And it gains vigor now & then from the hairy-chested direction of William (The Oxbow Incident) Wellman, notably in the roisterous humor of a drunken free-for-all, shots of horses charging and churning through mountain snowdrifts, and the unsqueamish thunk of arrows hitting human hide.

Two Tickets to Broadway (RKO Radio) is a backstage musical that makes its only nod to the times by placing its song, dance and story routines in & around a television studio. Though the commercials are missing and Technicolor is floridly present, the film so well reflects the quality of current TV entertainment that moviegoers may feel their fingers itching for a dial.

Janet Leigh, playing a young hopeful from Pelican Falls, Vt., hits Broadway just as Tony Martin is hopelessly leaving. An accidental switch of suitcases at the bus depot brings them together, and a finagling agent (Eddie Bracken) teams them with Gloria De Haven, Ann Miller and Barbara Lawrence on the phony assurance that they will get a spot on Bob Crosby's TV show. When they don't, Janet blames Martin and walks out on the act. But a last-minute booking on the Crosby show brings her rushing to the studio from a homeward-bound bus.

Like an evening with TV, Two Tickets to Broadway comes laden with acrobats (The Charlivels), vaudeville comics (Smith

& Dale) and jokes about Bing Crosby's moneybags (by brother Bob). As it turns out, these items, plus the old Rodgers & Hart tune, Manhattan, offer occasional relief from the picture's tired situations and tasteless staging. Actor Martin, in good voice, is better heard than seen. Bright-eyed Actress Leigh proves a bust as a singer and a dancer, but is undeniably a hit as a bust.

* Including $3,000,000 in frozen Italian lire. Before M-G-M breaks even, Quo Vadis will have to earn $14,000,000 at the box office. Gone With the Wind, which cost $4,000,000 in 1939, has grossed $32 million so far. * Still wearing the famed mustache he later shaved off for a role in the forthcoming The Sniper (TIME, Oct. 1).

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