No one would ever call Tribune Marcellus Gallio a man of foresight.
Proud. Drunken. Womanizing.
Those words all fit him quite well. He might even claim them. He’s also quite competitive.
And that competitive side of him always tends to peek its head up at the wrong time. Especially when Caligula is around, and he’s had too many cups of wine. Yes, it’s definitely unwise for a Roman soldier to purposely ruffle the feathers of Emperor Tiberius’ regent.
But Caligula is such a vile, self-indulgent man that he makes Marcellus look like a saint.
So Marcellus can’t keep himself from goading and prodding the man when he pompously parades into the slave trade. And soon after … Marcellous finds himself punitively posted to some barren outpost out in the desert. A dust bowl called Judaea.
The only good aspect of the whole affair is the fact that Marcellus reconnected with an old friend back at that Roman auction. Well, perhaps she’s more than a friend. Could he say that he once loved the pretty Diana? Perhaps. Perhaps.
In any case, Diana said she would talk to Tiberius on his behalf about Marcellus’ situation. All Marcellus needs to do is hold on for a while, and he’ll be transferred back to civilization before he knows it. And he’ll be returning to Diana. Yes, that prospect is sounding sweeter by the day.
So, Marcellus spends his time sweating and drinking. And waiting. When he’s finally called before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, the man looks very disturbed. Not at Marcellus, but at the fact that he can’t seem to get his hands clean.
There is this magician in the city who’s been giving the governor fits. The Jews—well, many of them—call this bewildering person a “king.” And all Pilate wants is to see the man called Jesus done away with. So, he tells Marcellus to simply crucify this criminal. Then he can be gone, and Marcellus can leave this terrible place.
Marcellus has never killed anyone in this manner, but a few extra cups of wine will surely get him through.
The rest is a blur. Blood on his hands. Dying men breathing their last. Gambling with the Centurion guards.
But there’s something strange about this man they call Jesus. He bleeds and hangs on the cross, to be sure, but it’s as if He calls the time of his death. “Father, forgive them,” the man cries out as Marcellus gazes up at him. “For they know not what they do.” And then He dies.
Marcellus feels the shift before he sees it. The day slides out of gear, the sky grows black. The clouds swell. The people standing around quiver, look up and cry. And then the rains begin to fall.
Marcellus grabs this Jesus’ cast-off robe—for he had won it rolling dice—but when he puts it over his shoulders it burns, it scalds. Is the robe cursed? Or is it something else? Is the pain he feels outside him, or in?
On the way back to Capri, Marcellus falls ill and thrashes in nightmares. And when he reports his story to the superstitious old emperor, Tiberius, the ruler and his soothsayers quickly see what must be happening. Marcellus’ agonies are surely a curse, caused by the foul dead magician and his robe.
Marcellus must return to the parched land of Judaea and find that accursed robe. That is his foresight, his destiny. That will be his salvation, they declare.
And in a way … they’re absolutely right.
Diana proclaims her love for her childhood friend, Marcellus, and she stays true to her word. In fact, the deeper he falls into trouble, the stouter her feelings become. (She eventually is willing to face death for his sake.) In turn, Marcellus begins changing for the better after meeting her again. He clings to her love as a means to find emotional healing.
Gradually, as I’ll detail in the next section, Marcellus has a spiritual awakening. After that, he takes steps to protect others. He readily steps forward to put himself between his friends and dangerous Roman soldiers. And when given a chance to be free by simply renouncing Jesus, he refuses.
Demetrius is a Greek slave whom Marcellus buys at a slave market. This man honorably stands up to serve after being bought. But he openly proclaims his enmity to Marcellus and all Romans, comparing himself to being no better than a dog. However, after he also is transformed by his interaction with Jesus and His followers, Demetrius dedicates himself to spreading the good news (with the fisherman Peter). And he and Marcellus declare their friendship.
As the movie begins, Marcellus narrates, telling us about how the Romans had made gods for themselves, “gods who make love and make war.”
When Marcellus first enters Judaea, he sees a man riding a donkey in the distance surrounded by people waving palm fronds. And he’s told that at this time of Passover “soothsayers predict the ‘messiah’ will come, every year the same.”
Marcellus isn’t fazed by the man on the donkey, but Demetrius locks eyes with the rider (off camera) and is instantly shaken. “He looked at me,” Demetrius proclaims. “I think He wants me to follow Him.” And from that moment on Demetrius does so. He slips away from Marcellus. He tries to warn Jesus’ followers of the Romans’ plans, and later he seeks to aid a fallen Jesus as He carries His cross.
It’s implied that Marcellus was the one who supplied the money used to bribe Jesus’ disciple, Judas. Demetrius meets the grieving man after the betrayal. And he warns Demetrius about the weakness of men’s hearts. “Tell the others to keep faith,” Judas pleads.
After presiding over Jesus’ crucifixion, Marcellus is plagued with nightmares. One of them depicts Jesus’ hands being nailed to a cross (though we don’t directly see the nail pierce his flesh). Thereafter Marcellus jolts up screaming, “Were you out there?!”
Later, however, Marcellus’ contact with Jesus’ followers slowly changes him in lasting ways. He hears their words and is drawn to them and their God. We don’t see his turning moment of acceptance of Jesus’ sacrifice, but it’s implied that he takes that step. And he declares his loyalty to God’s kingdom. He attempts to share that truth with Diana.
In the emperor’s palace in Capri, a soothsayer talks of reading fortunes in an owl’s entrails. And he mentions Jesus’ followers having “magic formulas and potions” with which to curse others. “Evil never dies, it lives in the air, in the robe,” the man proclaims.
On the other side of the spiritual coin, Jesus’ followers are kind and caring people who speak repeatedly of living by Jesus’ declarations. “He only asked two things of us,” a woman named Miriam tells Marcellus. “Love God, he said, and love ye one another. … And He meant not only the Jews, but the Romans and the Greeks, the slaves and the weak.”
Demetrius also tries to calm Marcellus’ fears. “You think it’s his robe that made you ill,” he tells the man. “But it’s your own conscious that makes you ill. … It was for the sake of all of us that He died.”
Marcellus admits to Peter that he was the commander who crucified Jesus. But instead of rejecting him, Peter tells him, “He forgave you from the cross. Can I do any less.” Peter also miraculously heals a very badly wounded man. (Off camera.)
Eventually Marcellus, proclaims that Jesus is king to the recently crowned Caligula: “If the empire desires peace and brotherhood among all men, then my king will be on the side of Rome and the emperor. But if the emperor and the empire wish to pursue the course of aggression and slavery that have brought agony and terror and despair to the world, if there’s nothing left for men to hope for but chains and hunger, then my king will march forward to right those wrongs. Not tomorrow, sire. Your Majesty may not be so fortunate as to witness the establishment of his kingdom, but it will come!”
The first scene of the film takes place in a Roman slave market. We see some female slaves dressed in revealing outfits. And the merchants make it clear that the women can be purchased for a lady’s or a male’s household companion.
Marcellus bids on a pair of twin sisters dressed in gossamer wraps. But he’s outbid by Caligula
In narration, Tribune Marcellus Gallio tells us that the “nobles of Rome are free to live only for our own pleasure.” And it’s strongly implied that he has played with many women’s affection, potentially both slaves and nobles.
Marcellus and Diana embrace and kiss passionately on several occasions.
Early on, Marcellus’ father tells him to grow hard in Judaea, a place of disease and assassinations. And indeed, there is a sense of danger and peril there, but it’s generally created by the Romans themselves. Christians are attacked by soldiers, for instance, and one or two are killed by arrows.
Jesus falls beneath the weight of carrying a large cross. (Again, we don’t see His face but just his fallen body and bloodied legs.)
We see three men hanging on crosses from a distance. And when the camera draws closer, we only see Jesus’ suspended feet. Marcellus leans against the cross, and Jesus’ blood drips down and spatters his hand.
Marcellus and a Roman centurion fight with swords. Marcellus is bloodied, but he prevails. And he refuses to kill the man. Later, Demetrius is held in a Roman dungeon and tortured by a rack-like mechanism. Marcellus and other believers rescue the nearly dead man and fighting breaks out. Some are seemingly stabbed, but the violence the camera captures is bloodless.
[Spoiler Warning] After rejecting Caligula’s demand that he renounce his faith in Jesus, Marcellus is ushered off to his death. And though Diana isn’t a believer, she says she’ll join him “in his kingdom.” “Then by the gods, you shall,” Caligula screeches. They walk off as the scene closes.
Someone is called a “fool,” someone else a “jack-ss.”
Throughout the movie we see people drinking wine; some with meals, others for sport and entertainment. Marcellus drinks quite heavily early on. We see him inebriated once, and he talks of his past drunkenness while carousing with women. A former fling retorts that he was “drunk as a pig” when he was with her.
Marcellus’s father encourages him, early on, to be a man of honor. But the tribune snorts at the idea, “Perhaps there’ll be amusement at being a ‘man of honor.’”
The Robe is one of those “notable” movies that no one remembers.
It was an early breakout Hollywood film for Oscar-winning British star Richard Burton. It was the first film ever shot in CinemaScope, a new widescreen format designed to give waning American audiences something they couldn’t get from their tiny TV screens. It won five Academy awards. And to top it all off, it was the highest-grossing film of 1953.
In fact, when adjusted for inflation, The Robe’s box office ranks it ahead of all three Lord of the Rings movies, The Toy Story pics and several of the Star Wars films.
These days, however, the movie—while still beautiful to look at and listen to—can feel a bit dated, overly dramatic and stiff. Much of that is because the script was designed to fill the CinemaScope soundstage with as many colorful things and people as possible. As such, it steered clear of many intimate and introspective moments that might have better developed the characters and drawn us in.
We don’t, for instance, ever actually see Burton’s Tribune Gallio take a personal moment to turn his life to Christ. He stands up, tosses aside his womanizing ways and gives his life to God’s service. But why? It’s surely not because of a dead man’s robe. That intimate clash between the Tribune’s rising guilt and the heart-changing forgiveness of the Son of God is implied, but it isn’t allowed to reach the screen.
My dramatic carping aside, though, The Robe does offer some thoughtful moments. It takes the time to give audiences a sweeping sense of the Holy Spirit’s movement after Jesus’ crucifixion. We aren’t shown His resurrection (in fact, the person of Jesus is always kept just offscreen in the film) but we are shown how His love and sacrifice impacted His world.
Jesus’ life and death changes people here. It helps them see hope where there was none. We’re shown average people who struggle and hurt but still whisper of the goodness of God’s moving hand.
One of the most intimate and moving scenes in the film, for instance, takes place when Marcellus Gallio encounters a disabled woman who Jesus did not heal but left as a cripple. The Tribune is confused about her positive attitude. And the woman declares that Jesus changed her heart but left her as a cripple so that all others could see, through her happiness, that their misfortunes needn’t deprive them of joy.
That’s a stirring part of the Christian message that many films ignore. But The Robe takes pains to include it. And that’s one of the many reasons that this forgotten film should be watched, and perhaps, remembered once more.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
Our weekly newsletter will keep you in the loop on the biggest things happening in entertainment and technology. Sign up today, and we’ll send you a chapter from the new Plugged In book, Becoming a Screen-Savvy Family, that focuses on how to implement a “screentime reset” in your family!
