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crime as a Roman citizen who has joined the sect. Marcellus refuses to
denounce Rome, and even as Diana levels a sharp personal attack on
Caligula and his brutal regime (“Vicious, treacherous, drunk with power,
and evil”), neither one is compelled to “change the system”; instead they
seek only their shared salvation. “To the Romans, Christianity itself may
appear to be a subversive political creed, but any accusations of disloyalty
to the state are stoutly and routinely denied by the movie Christians, who
have no revolutionary ambitions” (Fitzgerald, 30). But in the Galilean
village of Cana, the film proposes a model of a utopian, indeed revolutionary,
community of new Christians, with a growing population of brave,
decent people, like Justus and Miriam, who believe in a local man’s teaching
about simplicity, love, and hope. As Tiberius predicts: “When it comes,
this is how it will start. Some obscure martyr in some forgotten province.”
In The Robe, the real polarity between Roman and Christian is negotiated
not in the cold marble luxury of Caligula’s palace, but in the dusty towns
of Judaea.
Themes and Interpretations
With its appealing characters, tasteful design, and sensitive treatment of
the Roman and religious themes, all projected in the exciting new widescreen
format, The Robe was both a critical and a commercial triumph.
The film garnered five Oscar nominations, for Best Picture, Best Actor in
a Leading Role for Burton, and Cinematography, winning in two categories,
Costume Design and Art Direction/Set Decoration. Also, the
Academy awarded a special Oscar to 20th Century Fox for the development
of the new technology of CinemaScope. At a cost of $5 million, and
filmed in the hills north of Los Angeles, a frequent and convenient cinematic
stand-in for Mediterranean locations, the film has grossed over
$36 million worldwide. Like the earlier film Quo Vadis, Koster’s The Robe
presented audiences with spectacular visual displays and attractive subject
matter that evoked the prestige of classical history and literature, but such
privileged topics were made accessible to average viewers because their
story lines were derived from hugely popular novels.
As film historians have observed, epic films about Roman antiquity
produced in the 1950s offered narratives and themes that reflect social and
political concerns of the times and were “seemingly uncontroversial, educational,
spiritually uplifting, and of immense relevance to conservative
America’s self-portrayal during the Cold War era as the defender of the
54 THE ROBE (1953)