Review of The Last Days of Pompeii

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.