It's like HBO's "Rome", only it's from 1932.
The first film in the collection, "The Sign of the Cross" (1932), is ostensibly a tribute to the early Christian martyrs, though DeMille, of course, spends far less screen time on the suffering of the Christian faithful (stoically embodied by Elissa Landi, with her British stage diction) than with an effeminate, heavily made-up Charles Laughton, as a Nero who dutifully fiddles as Rome burns, and a svelte, seriously underdressed Claudette Colbert, who as the Empress Poppaea takes the required milk bath (and invites a female courtier to strip and join her).
The cross may finally conquer all, but not before a female Christian, selectively draped in plastic ivy, has been staked down in the arena for the delectation of a pack of hungry alligators and one of her sisters has been tied to a post and offered up to an aroused gorilla. These and other scenes — long cut from television versions of the film, but restored here thanks to the fine work of the UCLA Film Archive — have led the film historian Mark A. Viera to describe "The Sign of the Cross" as the single film most responsible for the enforcement of the censorious Production Code in 1934.
