Pompeii, A.D. 79. Glaucus, "the most handsome, the most elegant" statesman in Pompeii is in love with the beautiful Ione, unaware that Arbace, a priest in the temple of Isis, also has designs on her. When Glaucus rescues the blind slave Nydia from her abusive owners and takes her into his household, she falls in love with him and becomes jealous of his relationship with Ione. During a trip to the verdant slopes of Mt. Vesuvius, Glaucus and Ione run across a witch and Glaucus kills her sacred lizard while attempting to protect Ione. Arbace exploits the witch's anger and convinces her to concoct a potion that will induce madness. He then gives it to Nydia, telling her that it will cause Glaucus to fall in love with her. When another priest, Apoecides, threatens to unmask Arbace's evil deeds, Arbace kills him and successfully blames the murder on the mad Glaucus. The uncomprehending Glaucus is convicted and taken to the arena to be thrown to the lions. All is lost unless Nydia can escape from her captivity underneath the temple of Isis and reveal the truth. Meanwhile, high above the labyrinthine intrigues of Pompeian society, rumblings on the slopes of Vesuvius warn that Nature has yet to make her grand entrance in the drama.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii has always been prime material for film adaptations, with its tangled melodramatic plot and the inherently cinematic spectacle of the destruction of Pompeii. Other adaptations of the novel include Ernest B. Schoedsack's 1935 version for RKO Studios, a 1960 German/Spanish/Italian co-production directed by Mario Bonnard and a 1984 TV movie directed by Peter Hunt and starring Laurence Olivier, Franco Nero and Donald Pleasence. Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), born in London and educated at Cambridge, was easily one of the most popular and critically acclaimed novelists of the Victorian era, though today his works have largely fallen into obscurity aside from The Last Days of Pompeii. Other notable novels by Bulwer-Lytton include Zanoni (1842) and the Caxton family trilogy. His greatest achievement may in fact be sartorial rather than literary: his novel Pelham (1828) started the fashion of black evening wear for men which lasts to this day.

For a brief period starting in the early 1910s and lasting until the outbreak of World War I, the Italian film industry emerged as one of the world's strongest. While its ability to sell films abroad was aided partly by the presence of large Italian Diaspora communities in the U.S. and other countries such as Argentina and Brazil, Italian films appealed to world audiences as a whole, who were hungry for feature-length product. By 1914, Italy was making around 90 feature films a year and possessed the largest studios in Europe. Audiences admired the skill of Italian filmmakers at mounting costume dramas and handling large crowd scenes. The massively popular The Last Days of Pompeii (1913), directed by Mario Caserini, is one of the leading examples of the kind of period spectacle at which the Italians excelled, along with Enrico Guazzoni's Quo Vadis? (1912) and Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria (1914). A contemporary reviewer in Variety gives us an idea of just what contemporary audiences were looking for in such films: "The moving vista of the holiday arena is worth many times the price of admission. In no other film has the immense sweep of the old Athenian [sic] playgrounds been so impressively conveyed. You don't see merely a corner of what might be an arena. You see it all. The merrymakers, shouting, gesticulating and waving, are in the thousands, or seem to be. The ring is a real one, massive in stone and marble pillars, boxes, runs, stairways, and all clearly a reconstructed original."

The output of Mario Caserini, (1874-1920), one of the first significant directors of Italian cinema, is characteristic of Italian cinema as a whole at the time. He specialized in literary adaptations, ranging from Otello (1907) and Hamlet (1910) to Parsifal (1912); costume spectacles such as The Last Days of Pompeii and Nero and Agrippina (1913); and romantic melodramas such as But My Love Does Not Die (1913), starring the great diva Lyda Borelli. A number of his films starred his wife, Maria Caserini.

By this time, directors such as Caserini had developed a more sophisticated approach to the tableau style, which previously involved staging entire scenes in long shot in front of a static camera. As film historian Charles Affron points out, Caserini often plays effectively between the foreground, middle and background space within a single shot. A good example of this is the scene in which Nydia learns of Glaucus' love for Ione; she enters the room through curtains in the right foreground, which has relatively subdued lighting. Rays of sunlight fall upon the amorous couple in the background, thus emphasizing them within the composition. However, this static approach to mise-en-scene would soon be eclipsed by the moving camera of Cabiria and the more elaborate editing within scenes, including the alternation between closer and longer shots, displayed in American films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915). Still, it is a testament to Caserini's skill as a director that the film remains entertaining to watch to this day.

Producer: Ernesto Maria Pasquali
Director: Mario Caserini
Principal Cast: Ubaldo Stefani (Glaucus); Fernanda Negri Pouget (Nydia); Eugenio Tettoni Fior (Ione); Antonio Grisanti (Arbace); Cesare Gani-Carini (Apoecides); Vitale Di Stefano (Claudius).
Music compiled for this version by Beatrice Jona Affron, performed by Martha Koeneman.
BW-89m.

by James Steffen