In this rather lackluster sequel to The Robe Victor Mature reprises his role in the earlier film as the faithful ex-slave who recovers Jesus’s robe from the foot of the cross and carries it to Rome.  In this film he’s in love with Lina, a chaste Christian girl, played by Debra Paget, but separated from her when he assaults a Roman soldier in her defense and is sent to gladiator school.

There, because he’s such a super hunk, he catches the eye of the lascivious Messalina, wife of Claudius, the Emperor Caligula’s uncle.  She contrives ways to save his life and throws herself at him sexually.  Messalina is played by Susan Hayward, and she is smoking hot in the film.  In fact, she gives the picture the only juice it has.

The scenes of gladiatorial combat are clumsily staged, the Christian characters are all drips, and Jay Robinson’s Caligula is such a camp caricature of the mad emperor that he can’t be taken seriously as a villain, though the performance is certainly amusing.

Paget’s Lina is so thoroughly insipid that your heart leaps up when Demetrius loses his faith and decides to commit adultery with Messalina, which sort of subverts the film’s nominal allegiance to Christian virtue.  By the same token, when Demetrius gets his faith back and stops boffing Messalina, the picture is essentially over.

The film, like The Robe before it, was a smash hit, but it’s hard to imagine why.  The novelty of Cinemascope, in 1954, and Hayward’s carnality must have carried the day with audiences of the time.

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Being a storyteller at heart I generally don’t like abstract or experimental movies unless, like most of Godard’s films, they’re in the nature of essays about movies, essays about stories.

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona is an abstract and experimental movie which I do like, because it’s very playful in its violation of normal narrative expectations, in its exploration of the extreme limits of what movies can do.  There is a story at the center of it, like an image in a mirror that Bergman smashes to pieces and reassembles in front of your eyes, not quite the way it was but still recognizable.

As with Godard’s films, the “text”, insofar as it can be read, is less important than the way the text is looked at, assembled and reassembled.  The text of Persona, about the instability of the ego, the essential meaninglessness of the ego, is sort of trite.  It’s the clever ways Bergman finds to examine the text, using all his considerable resources as a filmmaker, that keeps the film engaging and entertaining.

In general I find Bergman’s gloomy existentialism tiresome but Persona is not tiresome.  Its dour text contradicts the exhilarating experience of watching it.  Maybe Bergman knew he was creating this paradox, maybe not.  It doesn’t really matter.

The film is engaging and entertaining in another aspect as well—the erotic.  At its center are two very beautiful and sensual women playing characters who may or may not be falling in love with each other, may or may not be two parts of the same character trying to reconcile with each other.  Either way it’s non-stop girl-on-girl action at every level but the physical, and this is erotically intriguing.

Bergman doesn’t try to pretend that the interaction of the two women is not being seen from a male perspective, but the power of the performances by the two female leads subverts the male gaze, gets beyond it and whatever limits it might want to set on the relationship between the characters.  This generates a complex tension, which Bergman wisely chose not to resolve.

There is also one quite extraordinary scene in which one of the women recounts to the other, in a extended monologue, an episode of anonymous sex on a beach.  The sexual encounter takes place entirely off-screen but becomes one of the most erotic moments in all of cinema.  It’s one of those off-screen scenes, like the one conjured up by Mr. Bernstein’s story of the girl on the ferry in Citizen Kane, that are as potent and indelible as any on-screen scene ever created.

A really dumb movie, with an incoherent comedy tone — part slapstick, part satire of movie clichés, part gross-out humor, part character gags — all pulled together by a sweetness and generosity of spirit that are impossible to resist.  The jokes tumble out at such a furious pace that you’ll find something to laugh at every few minutes in spite of any resistance you may be inclined to put up.

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