The Robe - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of The Robe or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to The Robe

[carla]

Richard Burton was 27 when he played Marcellus.

[wallace]

Richard Burton hated making the film so much that he turned down a contract from 20th Century-Fox. He was amazed to receive an Oscar nomination after critics had almost universally described his performance as "wooden". Still, Burton would make more films at Fox than at any other studio.

[javier]

Director Henry Koster chose Donald C. Klune--his Second Assistant Director--to play the role of Jesus. Klune would thus sign all the extras' vouchers and finish the paperwork while still in costume. He also had to take his meals in his dressing room, as producer Frank Ross thought it would be inappropriate for "Jesus" to eat in the studio commissary.

[wesley]

Until the recent DVD and Blu-ray versions, the film's co-screenwriter Albert Maltz's screen credit was omitted as a lingering effect of the infamous Hollywood blacklist. A cooperative program between the Writers Guild and studios resulted in numerous blacklisted writers' credits being restored to the films they wrote.

[violet]

Although widely regarded as the first film produced in the anamorphic CinemaScope format--along with How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)--that honor actually belongs to a French film, Construire un feu (1930) (aka "To Build a fire") . Based on a Jack London (I) story and directed by Claude Autant-Lara, it utilized a lens developed by French astronomer Henri Chrétien and was patented as the Hypergonar process. Bizarrely, higher-ups in the French film industry demanded that cinema owners stop showing the film, even threatening them with a revocation of their exhibition license should they not comply immediately. This perhaps explains why there are no surviving prints of this landmark film: indeed, only a scant handful of frames exist to this day. In 1955, Chrétien received an Academy Award for his work on CinemaScope.

[alyssa]

Following the movie's release Richard Burton was accused of being a wooden film actor, a charge that would remain with him throughout his career.

[edgar]

Richard Burton once said this was the least favorite of all his films. However in an October 1979 interview he named The Bramble Bush (1960) and Ice Palace (1960) as the worst films he had starred in.

[christina]

The second movie to begin shooting in CinemaScope, but the first to be released (Sept. 16, 1953). The first film to go before CinemaScope-lens-equipped cameras was How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and was released Nov. 4, 1953.

[ray]

Ernst Toch's Hallelujah chorus, employed by Alfred Newman in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) for the scene where Quasimodo rescues Esmeralda from being burned at the stake, was used by Alfred Newman once again in this film, when Marcellus Gallio and his band of Christians rescue Demetrius from the Emperor Caligula's Praetorian prison.

[stephanie]

Advertised as "The modern entertainment miracle you see without glasses!", a dig at the 3-D movies that were briefly in vogue at the time.

[albert]

Janet Leigh was considered for the role of Diana.

[leo]

Richard Burton was an Atheist and did not care for the film's religious theme.

[lynn]

Acclaimed by many film historians as a triumph in the art of motion-picture music, Alfred Newman's reverent, intense film score failed to receive even a nomination as Best Original Score for a Dramatic Picture from the Motion Picture Academy's Music Branch Award (though Newman still took home an Oscar that night - for his adaptation of music for the Irving Berlin-Ethel Merman frolic, Call Me Madam (1953). Incensed by the snub of Newman, distinguished film composer Franz Waxman, an Oscar winner for Sunset Blvd. (1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951), resigned from the Academy. Ironically, when Newman, in his role as 20th Century-Fox's head of music, hired Waxman to write the score to the film's sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), Waxman insisted that he should adapt Newman's original themes from The Robe, rather than write his own.

[chris]

Richard Burton had a ferocious argument with 20th Century-Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck before the film's release. This was another reason why he decided to return to London's West End theater district rather than remain in Hollywood.

[javier]

The rights to this film were originally bought by RKO in 1943 at the time of Lloyd C. Douglas's novel's initial publication when it was a the top of most best-seller lists. Because of wartime austerity, and RKO's shaky financial situation, the studio shelved the expensive historical epic, eventually selling the rights to Twentieth Century-Fox. Unusually, the film's release resulted in Douglas's novel once again being on best-seller lists, ten years after its original publication.

[kyle]

Richard Burton was once threatened with a gun by Stewart Granger because of the affair he was having with Granger's wife Jean Simmons during filming.

[sylvia]

It is the first motion picture in CinemaScope to be nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award.

[jesus]

The sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), was put into production even before the first film had been released, or the studio knew whether it, and CinemaScope, would be successful or not..

[tammy]

There was speculation that remarks Richard Burton made about Hollywood blacklisting while filming this movie may be the reason why he never won an Oscar, despite being nominated seven times.