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Hollywood artists who sold out during the witch hunts and turned “friendly
witness” to the committee by exposing their colleagues to the blacklist.
The film’s markedly negative depiction of the Syrian informant, Abidor,
who compiles a list of Christians and then betrays Marcellus and Justus to
the Romans, confirms the common distaste for snitches. One of the blacklisted
writers in this period was Albert Maltz, who co-authored the screenplay
for The Robe but was not credited on the original print of the film in
1953. In an attempt to correct such blacklist omissions, in 1997 the Writers’
Guild of America researched and added the names of several writers,
including Maltz’s, back to their films. While the references are brief and
discreet, it is unlikely the writers of The Robe did not intend them as
critiques of the police stakeout on their immediate creative environment.
There is also a powerful implication in these epic films that by representing
the militaristic sprawl of the Roman Empire, Hollywood is taking
a pacifist stance against the growing American militarism of the 1950s
and, in particular, the government’s recent elective involvement in Korea
from 1950 to 1953, a politically contentious and publicly divisive war that
was perceived by some as a gesture of American imperialism. In the figure
of old Senator Gallio, with his ineffectual attempts to restore Roman Republican
values, The Robe seems to delineate the increasing irrelevance of
the entitled patrician in American politics, and the transition to a more
populist element in the ascendancy of elected leaders from the middle
class, such as Missouri haberdasher Harry S. Truman, or from the military,
such as General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Although the film’s pessimistic
portrayal of the Roman garrison in Palestine reflects authentic Roman
attitudes about that remote and troublesome territory, Senator Gallio’s
ominous description of the place confirms his anti-imperial outlook while
also suggesting contemporary analogies with the problematic American
presence throughout the world by the early 1950s. What Gallio tells his
son about the province of Judaea evokes the enduring sense of American
ambivalence and anxiety about empire, especially in the Middle East:
Palestine, the worst pest-hole in the empire. A stiff-necked, riotous people,
always on the verge of rebellion. Our legions there are the scum of the
army, the officers little better than the men . . . Some have been assassinated,
sometimes by their own men. Others spared the assassins their
trouble. What Caligula hopes he has given you is your death sentence.
Such political interpretations of The Robe should take into account the
similar way in which equivocal and even contradictory positions are taken
56 THE ROBE (1953)