--- title: "The Robe" year: 1953 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/the-robe" fi1m_score: 48 critics_score: 52 critics_reviews: 7 published: "2026-09-20T02:43:12.959089+00:00" updated: "2026-09-20T02:43:46.444192+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # The Robe (1953) Directed by Henry Koster · 2h 15m · MPA NR · Drama, History **Fi1m score: 48** · Critics 52 from 7 reviews *In a sentence:* A screen wide enough for the whole Roman Empire, and everyone in it stands to attention > The first film in CinemaScope fills its enormous frame with Rome and Jerusalem, then asks the cast to stand in it and talk. Burton finds a real crack-up and Newman’s choir does the rest; too much of the remainder is a sermon in sandals. ## Synopsis Rome, under the Emperor Tiberius (Ernest Thesiger). Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton), a tribune and the idle son of Senator Gallio (Torin Thatcher), attends a slave auction and, to spite the heir Caligula (Jay Robinson), outbids him for a defiant Greek, Demetrius (Victor Mature). The same morning he meets again Diana (Jean Simmons), the girl he knew as a child, now the emperor’s ward and promised to Caligula. Caligula answers the insult by posting Marcellus to Jerusalem, the worst garrison in the empire, with Demetrius as his slave. He arrives at Passover to a city full of pilgrims, and Pontius Pilate (Richard Boone) hands him a routine duty: the crucifixion of a Galilean preacher. Marcellus wins the dead man’s robe at dice, and finds he cannot bear to touch it. ## Review *The Robe* is 135 minutes of Lloyd C. Douglas’s novel about a Roman tribune who supervises a crucifixion and is undone by the dead man’s clothing. It was also, as its own poster shouted, the first film released in CinemaScope, and it reached British cinemas on 19 November 1953. Henry Koster was handed a frame more than twice as wide as anyone had worked in and a story about a soul. He filled the frame. The soul had to wait. Leon Shamroy’s camera stays well back, because the new lenses would not let it do much else, and so the film is built out of tableaux: the slave market as a long row of bodies, Pilate’s hall as a line of columns, the road to Calvary as a procession filmed from the side. Some of it is handsome, and Emile Santiago’s costumes are the reason: scarlet cloaks, white togas, the plum and gold of Caligula’s court, laid out across the frame like bolts of cloth on a counter. But nothing moves towards you. After half an hour we stopped noticing the width and started noticing that everybody was standing still in it. The crucifixion is the exception, and it is the best sequence in the film. Koster keeps Christ almost entirely off screen, a pair of feet on the road, a hand, a shadow on the ground. The storm comes over the hill, the rain runs down Burton’s face and he pulls the wet robe around his shoulders and shakes. Alfred Newman’s choir comes in under it, low and wordless. We were moved, more than we expected from a picture of this kind, and the reason is that for four or five minutes nobody was explaining anything to us. Then the film goes back to explaining, and it keeps at it for another ninety minutes. Burton is the reason to watch. He plays Marcellus as a spoilt, clever man who has never had a thought he could not drink off, and when the robe starts to work on him he does not go pious; he goes to pieces, clutching his head in his father’s house, shouting at a slave who is no longer there. It is raw, a size too big, and better than the film around it. Jean Simmons has a quiet intelligence as Diana and is asked mostly to wait in doorways. Victor Mature plays Demetrius on the jaw, with an aggrieved decency that is hard not to like. Richard Boone’s Pilate washes his hands like a man who has done it before and expects to do it again. Jay Robinson’s Caligula shrieks every line as if the wide screen were a matter of volume, and the effect is exhausting long before it is meant to be frightening. The middle hour is the problem. The script, credited to Philip Dunne and Albert Maltz, sends Marcellus back out after the robe, and we will not say where he goes or whom he finds, except that the supporting players he meets there, Dean Jagger, Betta St. John and Michael Rennie among them, are given lessons to deliver rather than parts to play. Every scene is a sermon, and Barbara McLean lets each one run until the sermon has been fully delivered. We were bored, in the specific way of a child in a pew, and we say that as people who came prepared to be patient with a 1953 film about faith. The Roman pictures that followed learned to put things across that frame: chariots, armies, ships. [*Ben-Hur*](https://film.one/film/ben-hur), six years later, set a race in the middle of a similar story and let everything else lean on it. Koster had made *Harvey* three years before this, a small comedy with an invisible rabbit and a light hand, and none of that lightness survives here. He was not a director of spectacle, and the studio needed one. It carries a U certificate and earns it; nothing in it would trouble a child except the length. See it for Burton’s collapse and for the crucifixion in the rain, both of which arrive in the first hour, and know that the second hour is why most critics have been lukewarm and why we are too. At home the width shrinks to a letterbox and the stillness is harder to forgive, though you can at least get up during the parables. *Fi1m score 48, published 20 September 2026.* ## What the critics say The critics are split, and the split runs along the calendar. Almost everyone agrees the film is a spectacle first: the CinemaScope frame, the sets for Rome and Jerusalem, and the sheer size of the pageantry draw praise from the warmest and the coldest reviews alike. The notices from its original release find the performances consistently good, with Jean Simmons, Richard Burton and Victor Mature singled out, and treat the scale as an achievement in its own right. Later critics see something else. Empire calls it pompous schlock, and Time Out and Collider find the direction turgid, the dialogue creaky and the whole thing preachy and slow, of interest mainly as the first CinemaScope production. Even The New Yorker, writing in 1953, complains that some scenes take far too long to end. The spread is wide, from 90 down to 20, and the pattern is plain: the closer a critic sits to 1953, the more the spectacle covers for the rest. ### Reviews we read (7) - **Variety**, Variety Staff (90/100, inferred): The film is a big picture in every sense, with magnificent scenes unveiling the splendor of Rome and turbulence of Jerusalem under the new CinemaScope technique. Performances are consistently good, with standout work from Simmons, Burton and Mature, and impressive set pieces throughout. [Read](https://variety.com/1952/film/reviews/the-robe-1200417355/) - **Los Angeles Times**, Mark Chalon Smith (70/100, inferred): The Robe is a testament to Hollywood storytelling and an icon of big-studio showiness combining CinemaScope and Technicolor, with earnest performances especially from Victor Mature. It is well-meaning but not art, with grandiloquent gestures and excesses that would not offend even a zealous fundamentalist. [Read](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-04-06-ca-42776-story.html) - **The New York Times**, Bosley Crowther (70/100, inferred): The picture is essentially a smashing display of spectacle on the new giant CinemaScope screen, with magnificent panoply of Rome, Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Performances are remarkably good given the emphasis on physical action and spectacle over intimate drama. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1953/09/17/archives/the-screen-the-rose-shown-in-cemascope-movie-based-on-douglas-novel.html) - **The New Yorker** (50/100, inferred): The launch film for CinemaScope is an adaptation of Lloyd Douglas's pious novel about a Roman tribune's conversion, but it takes an unconscionable length of time to get through some scenes. It is at its best in standard movie routines like duels and chases, which remain effective on the wide screen. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1953/09/26/1953-09-26-138-tny-cards-000048218) - **Time Out**, DT (30/100, inferred): The critic notes that The Robe has receded into the lost genre of religious epics and describes its direction as turgid, with creaky dialogue and stiff performances, rendering it of purely historical interest due to its pioneering CinemaScope use. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/the-robe) - **Empire**, Kim Newman (20/100, inferred): The critic calls it pompous schlock that typifies the worst aspects of the Hollywood Christian epic, with stiff or demented performances, enormous but inert pageantry, appalling dialogue and a stultifying religiosity that kills any camp appeal. The film is dismissed as overblown melodramatic biblical nonsense. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/robe-review/) - **Collider**, Andre Dellamorte (30/100, inferred): The critic finds the film itself stagey, preachy and boring, though the first CinemaScope production has historical interest. Production design and cinematography, particularly the innovative anamorphic framing, are singled out as the main points of value. [Read](https://collider.com/the-robe-bluray-review/) ## Details - **Director:** Henry Koster - **Director:** Henry Koster - **Screenplay:** Philip Dunne, Albert Maltz - **Novel:** Lloyd C. Douglas - **Cinematography:** Leon Shamroy - **Editor:** Barbara McLean - **Music:** Alfred Newman - **Costume design:** Emile Santiago - **Producer:** Frank Ross - **Cast:** Richard Burton as Marcellus Gallio; Jean Simmons as Diana; Victor Mature as Demetrius; Richard Boone as Pontius Pilate; Leon Askin as Abidor; Michael Rennie as Peter; Dean Jagger as Justus; Jay Robinson as Caligula - **Runtime:** 2h 15m - **Certificate (MPA):** NR - **Release (the US):** 16 September 1953 - **Genres:** Drama, History - **Budget:** $4 million - **Box office:** $36 million - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4TXamLcmZE ## Where to watch in the US - Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $9.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-20.* Also available in: AT, AU, BE, CA, ES, FI, FR, GB, IE, IT, JP, NL, PL, PT, SE, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1954: Best Actor (nominated); Best Cinematography, Color (nominated); Best Picture (nominated); Best Art Direction, Color (won); Best Costume Design, Color (won) - Golden Globes 1954: Best Motion Picture (won); Best Motion Picture – Drama (won) - Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film 1953: Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film (nominated) - National Board of Review Award for Best Actress 1953: National Board of Review Award for Best Actress (won) ## If you liked this - *Ben-Hur* (1959), Fi1m 76: The same Rome, the same Christ kept off screen, and a chariot race that moves. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/ben-hur.md) - *Demetrius and the Gladiators* (1954): The sequel gives Mature the robe and an arena, and is livelier for it. - *The Gospel According to St. Matthew* (1964): Pasolini tells the story with peasants and a handheld camera; no togas, no choir. - *Spartacus* (1960): Kubrick and Trumbo find the politics under the sandals, and the crucifixions hurt. - *Barabbas* (1961): Anthony Quinn as the thief who walked free; darker, stranger, shot under a real eclipse. --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/the-robe