SPECTACLE, ROMANCE, COMEDY!...as only Shaw could write it and the screen show it!
1952-12-01
N/A
98 min
George Bernard Shaw’s breezy, delightful dramatization of this classic fable—about a Christian slave who pulls a thorn from a lion’s paw and is spared from death in the Colosseum as a result of his kind act—was written as a meditation on modern Christian values. Pascal’s final Shaw production is played broadly, with comic character actor Alan Young as the titular naïf. He’s ably supported by Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Robert Newton, and Elsa Lanchester.
I think Charles Erskine has done pretty well with this entertaining adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw comedy. Escaping from his overbearing wife "Magaera" (Elsa Lanchester), "Androcles" (Alan Young) discovers a lion in the wilderness with a thorn in it's paw. Despite being petrified, he removes the offending pain and the lion escapes. Shortly afterwards, he finds himself a prisoner of the Romans under the command of Victor Mature. He is rounding up Christians for the Emperor's grand circus and has already recruited "Lavinia" (Jean Simmons) and will soon add the ferocious "Ferrovius" (Robert Newton) as they journey to Rome. En route we learn a little about the strength of their respective faiths - to Jesus and to the Emperor, and by the time we get to the sharp end, it's clear that loyalties are becoming a little blurred on the latter side. I think this is GBS writing at his best. The comedy is fairly continuous, though not always laugh out loud, and the effort from Newton is as good as he delivers anywhere in a career of strong, characterful, acting. Hats off also to Young who does well here serving to hold together a cast of experienced talent delivering quite a thought-provoking and certainly enjoyable hundred minutes of historical light-heartedness set to a positively jolly score from Frederick Hollander. This is good fun, and well worth a watch to see what can be done with a strong story delivered by a cast who know what they are doing.
