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They Won’t Forget (1937). He then signed on as a producer at MGM,
where he oversaw the production of The Wizard of Oz (1939), but its poor
box office sent him back to directing. LeRoy made several more films in
the 1940s, including Little Women (1949), and then in 1950 he decided to
take over the epic Quo Vadis from director John Huston. In the later
1950s and 1960s, LeRoy directed musicals almost exclusively, such as Gypsy
(1962), and today he is celebrated for his exceptional creative range and
productivity.
Making the Movie
Like other films of the epic genre, Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis, a spectacular
reconstruction of the story of Nero and the Great Fire of Rome, makes
a strong case for its historical authenticity. The film’s accuracy, in both the
literate quality of the script and the understated look of the production,
can be attributed to the research of Oxford-educated Hugh Gray, who
served as the film’s advisor (Solomon, 2001a, 217–18). The name of the
movie does away with the question mark of the novel’s title because “such
punctuation was not an ancient phenomenon,” according to the film’s
publicity releases (quoted in Wyke, 139). By the early 1950s, one of the
most common narrative structures for the historical epic film was to set
the depravity and vice of Rome against the devotion and virtue of Christianity
(Fitzgerald, 24–32). This cinematic opposition is usually situated
within a greatly condensed historical context: “In these works, history is
caught at some imaginary turning point, or anticipation of the turning
point, between the Roman and Christian worlds; the Christians, a small
minority with history on their side, are being cruelly persecuted by the
decadent Romans” (Fitzgerald, 25). Filmmakers could cite reliable historical
sources like Tacitus for Christian martyrs torn apart by lions or burned
on crosses in the arena, and were eager to animate the romantic tradition
established by early Christian authors and then popularized by nineteenthcentury
novelists, like Sienkiewicz (Elley, 115).
The Roman historical epics of the 1950s, including LeRoy’s Quo Vadis,
feature a brave and heroic Christianity as a redeeming influence in an
otherwise corrupt and degraded Roman society. Within an assortment of
plotlines and characters, the basic message is constant, as one scholar
notes: “The method of and passage towards redemption may differ, and
the extent to which Rome is censured may vary, but the underlying theme
remains the same” (Elley, 121). But this simple moral metaphor can be an
QUO VADIS (1951) 19