The Last Days of Pompeii (1935) is an RKO Radio Pictures film starring Preston Foster and directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack,[1] creators of the original King Kong.

In the time of Jesus Christ, blacksmith Marcus is content with his life, beautiful wife Julia and six-month-old son Flavius.

When Julia and their child are run down by a chariot in the streets of Pompeii, Marcus spends the little money he has to pay for a doctor and medicine.

While honeymooning in Europe, Cooper visited Pompeii's ruins and felt inspired to produce a movie depicting the volcanic eruption that devastated the city.

[9] For the destruction of the temple of Jupiter, four high speed cameras recorded twenty special effects technicians who destroyed the set using wires and rods.

[11] Last Days includes a final repentance by Marcus that seems designed to align with a rule that wrongdoers in movies reform if they have a happy ending.

One contemporary American review noticed a conspicuous lack of sexual material for a film set in a Roman vacation town.

[12] The Last Days of Pompeii appeared to be a moderate box-office success upon its release in 1935, but RKO ultimately lost $237,000 after the film's first theatrical run.

[13] A book on representations of Pompeii in media speculated that Last Days was unsuccessful because of "its exaggerated exhibition of Christian morality and the completely implausible span of time covered in Judea.

"[11] Writing in 2012, Richard B. Jewell remarked that the film probably failed because of the "relatively meager level of its spectacle", stating that O'Brien's special effects were not as impressive as usual.

[5] Andre Sennwald reviewed the picture for The New York Times in October 1936, praising it as "an ably managed historical work" until the last part of the film "begins to bludgeon the moral".

"[14] Writing at the Brooklyn Eagle, John Reddington compared the film to Cecil B. DeMille's religious epics and called Preston Foster's performance "virile".

Both Sennwald and Reddington noted that the temporal closeness of the destruction of Pompeii to Christ's crucifixion, as depicted in the film, was not historical.

[16] In a book on ancient Rome in cinema, Maria Wyke described Last Days as a "highly moralistic gangster film dressed in classical costume".

[19] In a book covering hundreds of historical epics, Gary A. Smith described the film's middle as "long and tedious" but praised the special effects involved in the final eruption.

"There are plenty of flavorful supporting efforts in the film, including those of Louis Calhern as the treacherous prefect, but Rathbone essentially walks away with the picture in a role that took all of a week to shoot.