Had it not been the first film shot in CinemaScope, very few people would be talking much about this film, except for possibly its role as one of the first of the biblically themed sword-and-sandal epics that would come to dominate Hollywood in the 1950s. However, despite its general blandness, it does have an interesting political subtext, with its pious surface story about early Christianity playing cover for some rather pointed jabs at the nature of power run amok, then embodied by the U.S. House on Un-American Activities Committee, which is not terribly surprising given that one of the film’s screenwriters was a member of the “Hollywood 10” and the director was a German Jew who had fled his homeland after the rise of Hitler. (Blu-Ray)