I'm not big on ancient/Biblical films - there's really only about four good ones, especially from this period. This one is particularly horrid. Rita Hayworth stars as Salome, you know, that chick who calls for John the Baptist's head on a platter and did a sexy dance. I saw a decent silent version of this story earlier this year, but even then I noted that the premise was mighty thin for an entire feature film. For this one, they must have come up with the idea of casting Rita Hayworth as Salome (here pronounced as if it rhymed with "baloney"), and only afterward realized that they couldn't really have her be the villain of the story. So they concocted a whole alternate view of the Biblical character to make Hayworth, who is miscast in the first place (pretty sure Salome was supposed to be a fairly young woman, probably even a teen, but Hayworth was about 35 at the time), the heroine. Here, Salome is more of an innocent, a tool used by her evil mother (Judith Anderson) to rid the world of John the Baptist, who is talking a lot of crap about her. John (Alan Badel), by the way, is depicted as such an annoying, unlikable prick, basically a prude standing around complaining about other people's sex lives, that you almost can't feel sorry for his execution. Chales Laughton plays Salome's stepfather. His role is much like the one he had in Sign of the Cross, but he was getting old by this point and he doesn't seem to be having much fun here. The other major player is Stewart Granger, who plays a Roman military officer and Hayworth's love interest. He's utterly boring. There's almost nothing to recommend here besides some decent costumes and a decent Dance of the Seven Veils sequence, but the rest of it is enormously dull and self-important.