Watch The Last Days of Pompeii For Free

It is a performances centric movie

Best movie ever!

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

POMPEI is a lot of fun - well made, some good acting and the sets and the special effects are pretty impressive for its time. GLADIATOR has a lot of the same plot points. A man starts to fight for money to save his ill wife. When tragedy ensues, he throws himself into arena fighting and becomes a legend. (Of course, there's a smoking volcano behind them at all times - reminding us that all of this will soon be gone.) There's definitely some cheese in the film - some hokey dialogue, silly costumes, but there are times when the film has some real grit. Willis O'Brien who did all the special effects for the classic KING KONG does the effects here. The destruction of the city has some effective moments and a few stunts that are very well done. Basil Rathbone chews up the scenery as Pontius Pilate and yes, there's even a cameo from the big J.C. himself.

The team that produced King Kong for RKO Pictures, writer Meriam C. Cooper and director Ernest B. Schoedsack, decided to emulate Cecil B. DeMille in giving us The Last Days Of Pompeii. It's not a bad film, but it nearly bankrupted RKO so prohibitive was the cost for that small studio. The film bears a distinct resemblance to DeMille's eye filling, but now incredibly campy The Sign Of The Cross. Our protagonist here is Preston Foster who plays Marcus the Blacksmith, but before the film is done goes through more reinventions of character than you would find in good and bad Russian literature. As a content, but happy blacksmith a bit of good fortune has him and wife celebrating. But she's accidentally injured and dies for lack of medical care, not that medical care was all that good back in those days to begin with. Foster decides that all that matters in life is the money you can accumulate for a rainy day. Foster is constantly reassessing life throughout the film.Foster gets to go to Judea and is on the scene of the crucifixion and before that has Jesus heal his adopted son David Holt who grows up to be John Wood. Foster also meets Basil Rathbone as Pontius Pilate who also does some major reassessing after presiding over the trial of Jesus.If the Oscar for Special Effects was in existence in 1935 it would have been interesting to see either The Last Days Of Pompeii or Mutiny On The Bounty would have won the award. Those scenes of the volcanic eruption of Versuvius are what guaranteed this film would not show a profit. They do rival what DeMille was capable of, but DeMille had a far bigger studio and more financial security in Paramount.Also in the cast are Louis Calhern as the Roman consul and Alan Hale as Foster's number two man. They give their usual good performances.As for RKO Studios and Preston Foster, they got some Oscar recognition for another film that Foster did for them that year. It was the low budget, but incredibly powerful Irish story, The Informer where Victor McLaglen won for Best Actor. A much better film than The Last Days Of Pompeii. Still the spectacle of this film can still awe you, even on the small screen.

I wonder how many of you read any of these novels: THE CAXTONS, THE LAST OF THE BARONS, MY NOVEL, PAUL CLIFFORD, EUGENE ARAM, THE COMING RACE. Any takers out there? Well how about PELHAM (which has nothing to do with an 18th Century British Prime Minister, nor an area of the Bronx near the Connecticut Border)? No? Well, how about THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII? Bet you heard that title somewhere? It has been the subject of about seven or eight major productions in the movies from the silent period (a major full length version by the Italians in 1913 or so - which was a flop) to a television version in 1985 (that remains something of a critical joke to this day - all 240 odd minutes of it). Most people agree that of all the versions of the story, the 1935 version starring Preston Forster and Basil Rathbone (as a sad, philosophical Pontius Pilate) is the best. That it is basically entertaining is true. That it jettisoned the novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton is equally true. That the novel is unreadable today is also true.Bulwer-Lytton has become, in a small way, a literary immortal from Victorian England - actually from late Regency through Victorian England). He was a wealthy landowner and aristocrat, who would be in the British cabinet as Secretary of State for the Colonies in the middle 1850s. He was the father of a would-be poet, who rose to be Viceroy of India. Lytton was a baronet when he started writing in 1825, and would eventually be an Earl (First Earl Lytton). He wrote all the titles (including THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII) which I mentioned. Only PELHAM, his novel of Regency England's aristocracy (which he knew well) and THE LAST DAYS are still reprinted. That's because (as his own contemporaries - especially the greatly amused Thackeray noticed) Lord Lytton's ideas out paced his abilities. He wrote bad prose. A "Bulwer-Lytton" prize is now presented every year to those writers who write the worst, cliché-full opening paragraph for a novel. It is named for him because of the start of his novel EUGENE ARAM: "It was a dark and stormy night...." He tried to be original in his concepts. EUGENE ARAM was based on the 18th Century schoolteacher, linguist, and murderer (hanged in 1759). Lytton tried to make a case that Aram's philosophical beliefs allowed him to take the blame for the murder he was hung for. The story sold well in the 1830s, but it met with mostly critical rejection. In MY NOVEL, his villain, Baron Levy, actually has a very human reason for his improbably complicated vengeance on two men: he's angry of their attentions to a woman he loves. Levy is Jewish, so it was a curious thing to make his motivation so mundane as love for a woman - but Bulwer spoiled it shortly after by adding the image of a vengeful Jew who had been insulted. That was always the problem with Bulwer-Lytton. He's a literary Ed Wood, in that his concepts outstrip his abilities (and in comparison Wood is more bearable - one of his movies lasts about an hour or so, while Bulwer can write a novel of over 700 pages!). The reason THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII happened to have a long shelf life is that the subject (the small town near Naples that was buried in a sea of ash and lava by Vesuvius, and rediscovered preserved 1,700 years afterward) fascinates us, and to his credit Bulwer did his classical history homework. But as a piece of fiction his characters are dry as dust. One of the more interesting is a wealthy Egyptian who plans to take over the Roman Empire. He's the villain in the plot. The events that destroyed Pompeii are clearly revealed to us, including the earthquake that hit the town a decade before the volcanic eruption.So when the movie was made they wisely jettisoned the actual story line (which I plowed through when I read the boring novel about 1985). Foster is a blacksmith who becomes a successful gladiator, and then a wealthy land owner near Pompeii. Early he lived in Judea, and met Christ, and he (like his old patron Pilate) are aware of an alternative to the materialist and corrupt empire. The film is old fashioned, but bearably so, and gave Foster one of his best screen performances (his retired police captain in KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL is it's closest rival). Never a leading man in major productions, Foster demonstrated here that he could handle lead roles. Except for an occasional film though he usually was in supporting parts. For his performance, and Rathbone's Pilate, and for jettisoning Bulwer's idiot writing and plot, I'll give this an 8.By the way, if you want to see an interesting, literary view of the later life of Pilate - by a Nobel Prize Winner no less - read the short story, THE PROCURATOR OF JUDEA by Anatole France. Far from being so thoughtful and sad as Rathbone's Pilate acts, France's version of the Procurator seems more realistic regarding his memories.

I just saw this film recently and found it absorbing enough as a kind of Judeo-Roman kitschy melodrama, which argues that only bad people are punished by volcanic eruptions. (Please enjoy the final scene where the spirit of Preston Foster communes with a double-exposure of "the Master" while a heavenly choir sings). Basil Rathbone is a pleasant figure but it cannot be said that there's anything subtle about his Pontius Pilate, with his heavy shrugs and sighs and his "I wonder" and "What is truth?"; his style is just as "big" as Preston Foster but he carries it off better because he's a more attractive presence. Anyway, we should point out two things. First, this is NOT based on Bulwer-Lytton's novel; not that it's better or worse for it, but even B-L didn't claim that the eruption in 79 A.D. happened only about 10 years after the Crufixion. Second, Willis O'Brien's special effects are not terribly impressive even "for the time." The recently released video of the 1913 Italian version is at least as convincing and maybe more so. This 1935 version is content to mostly have a lot of flying debris as people run for their lives. There is one carefully stiff, transparently processed "lava shot" as people jump into the sea. The major visual spectacle during the disaster--the collapse of a giant statue--is marred by a glaring continuity error. First we see the statue crack in two across the abdomen (well above the discreetly place sword) and begin to fall, and then we cut to a close-up of the falling torso, now completely intact but with the head coming off. There was no reason for that mistake. So the long-awaited spectacle is not what it's cracked up to be.