Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tuesday, January 12, 2021

SIGN OF THE PAGAN (1954)

Sandwiched between two Rock Hudson vehicles, director Douglas Sirk made the WideScreen Christian historical he probably hoped to avoid.  His first CinemaScope project, a big brawny epic about Attila the Hun (Jack Palance slathered in Max Factor) taking on a divided Roman Empire (Constantinople only gets a friendly visit) and coming up against Centurion Jeff Chandler’s military tactics and his own fast developing Christian conscience.  After a lumpy start on unconvincing, museum diorama soundstage sets with understaffed invader hordes, things improve once we head to the great (California) outdoors with the film finding its footing arguing a la Edward Gibbon on the role Christianity played in The Decline and Fall . . . not of Rome but of Attila!  Not an uninteresting idea, though straying so far from what we know about Attila (dying not in battle, but from wedding night revels!) as to be largely useless.  Palance is really the whole show here.  And, once you accustom yourself to his oversized playing, spectacular.

DOUBLE-BILL: Vet helmer Michael Curtiz also debuted in CinemaScope this year in another religious-themed historical, THE EGYPTIAN/’54, a handsomely designed, starrily cast Pre-Christian dud about a doctor who turns from Egypt’s many Gods to Monotheism.

No comments: