is a 1951 American religious epic film set in ancient Rome during the final years of Emperor Nero's reign, based on the 1896 novel of the same title by Polish Nobel Laureate author Henryk Sienkiewicz.

Produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and filmed in Technicolor, it was directed by Mervyn LeRoy from a screenplay by S. N. Behrman, Sonya Levien, and John Lee Mahin.

The film stars Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Leo Genn, and Peter Ustinov, and features Patricia Laffan, Finlay Currie, Abraham Sofaer, Marina Berti, Buddy Baer, and Felix Aylmer.

Unlike his illustrious and powerful predecessor, Emperor Claudius, Nero proved corrupt and destructive, and his actions eventually threatened to destroy Rome's previously peaceful social order.

[2] The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and it was such a huge box office success that it was credited with single-handedly rescuing MGM from the brink of bankruptcy.

The Christian apostle Peter has also been arrested after returning to Rome in response to a sign from the Lord, and he marries Marcus and Lygia in the Circus prisons.

Massively impressed by Ursus's victory and seeing that Lygia is the beloved of Marcus who is still regarded as a great war hero, the crowd exhorts Nero to spare the couple.

Then Acte, Nero's discarded mistress who is still in love with him, appears and offers him a dagger to end his own life before the mob storming the palace kills him.

The film features many uncredited supporting parts and cameos: including Elizabeth Taylor as a Christian prisoner in arena,[citation needed] Sophia Loren as a Lygian slave,[4] Christopher Lee as a chariot driver, Clelia Matania as Parmenida the hairdresser, Marika Aba as the Assyrian Dancer at Nero's banquet, Richard Garrick as a slave with Marcus at Triumph, Giuseppe Tosi as a wrestler at Nero's banquet, Adrienne Corri as an imprisoned Christian woman, Bud Spencer as an Imperial Guard, and Robin Hughes as Jesus in a flashback tableau.

Others included Buddy Baer (Ursus), Peter Miles (Nazarius), Arthur Walge (Croton), and William Tubbs (Anaxander).

Also, several were among the uncredited cast; perhaps the most notable of these was 70-year-old Irish-American character actor Richard Garrick as the public slave who stands behind Marcus in his Triumph chariot, holding a victory laurel above his head, and repeating "Remember thou art only a man."

[7] Clark Gable turned down the role of Marcus Vinicius very early in the film's production history because he thought he would look ridiculous in Roman costumes.

Italian star Bud Spencer (real name: Carlo Pedersoli) also had an uncredited extra role as a Praetorian guardsman inside Nero's summer palace at Antium.

[9][10] Patricia Laffan was selected by the producer and director for the major role of Poppaea after they watched a screen test she made for a smaller part in the film.

Filmed at the sprawling Cinecitta Studios that had been opened by Benito Mussolini in 1937 as part of the dictator's master plan to make Rome the pre-eminent world capital.

This business alliance with the Fascist state horrified 1930s Hollywood moguls and ultimately led to Roach defecting from his MGM distribution deal to United Artists in 1938.

)[12] Filming in postwar Italy offered American studios immense facilities and cheap Italian labor and extras, of which thousands were required.

Hollywood returned to Cinecitta often, producing many of its biggest spectacles there, including Helen of Troy (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), and Cleopatra (1963), with the latter two dwarfing Quo Vadis in scale.

The first use of the phrase "Hollywood on the Tiber", which has come to refer to a golden era of American runaway film production in Italy, was as the title of a Time article in the issue dated 26 June 1950, published while Quo Vadis was being shot in Rome.

With the exception of the Via Appia,[6] most of these have not been identified, but the final stage of the chariot chase was filmed along the 2000-year-old Viale dei Cipressi (Avenue of Cypresses) near the village Bolgheri.

[6] At one point in the film, Nero shows his court a scale model illustrating his plans for the rebuilding of Rome as a new city to be called Neropolis.

Studio publicity claimed that this was the model of Ancient Rome housed in the Museum of Roman Civilization and that it had been borrowed from the Italian government.

According to MGM's records, during its initial theatrical release, it earned $11,143,000 in the U.S. and Canada and $9,894,000 elsewhere, making it the highest-grossing film of 1951, and resulting in a profit to the studio of $5,440,000.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote in a mixed review, "Here is a staggering combination of cinema brilliance and sheer banality, of visual excitement and verbal boredom, of historical pretentiousness and sex."

Crowther thought that even Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross "had nothing to match the horrendous and morbid spectacles of human brutality and destruction that Director Mervyn LeRoy has got in this.

But within and around these visual triumph and rich imagistic displays is tediously twined a hackneyed romance that threatens to set your teeth on edge.

"[23] Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times declared it "one of the most tremendous if not the greatest pictures ever made ... Its pictorial lavishness has never been equaled in any other production.

"[25] Harrison's Reports declared, "For sheer opulence, massiveness of sets, size of cast, and beauty of Technicolor photography, no picture ever produced matches 'Quo Vadis'.

The film is unimaginatively directed, at a very slow pace in keeping with the general larger than life proportions, and its technical qualities are not impressive.

[42] In his 1982 autobiography, Miklós Rózsa expressed his regret at the way his score was handled by producer Sam Zimbalist, 'a dear personal friend': "[He] didn't use the music in any way as effectively as he might have done.