Le signe du païen

According to Marilyn Kirk's biography of Jeff Chandler, Chandler was originally offered the role of Attila in Sign Of The Pagan. I think he was wise to decline as he would have been ill suited for the part. But I think Jeff would have been smart to skip this one altogether. He's rather colorless as the centurion who becomes Captain-General of the Roman forces.

When Jack Palance is on screen as Attila the Hun there ain't a stick of furniture safe in his view. It's that kind of part so sit back and enjoy. In fact Anthony Quinn took the same approach when he did Attila in a film that came out around the same time.

Nothing remotely historically accurate about Sign Of The Pagan other than Attila's meeting with Pope Leo I and his turning back from his conquest of Rome. Moroni Olsen in his farewell big screen performance is is the Pope. No one knows what was actually said so its is all open to speculation.

If you love scenery chewing acting when it's called for than Sign Of The Pagan is your kind of film.

Made the same year as another sword and sandal movie dealing with the same subject ,"Attila Flagello Di Dio" (starring Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren),it is an icily impersonal movie from Douglas Sirk.It's watchable ,but it could have been done by anyone at all.Sirk's métier was melodrama (he was the master of the genre in the fifties) and western ("Taza,son of Cochise" ) and epics are not obviously his forte.

Although Jack Palance was potentially as ideal as Anthony Quinn to portray the king of the Huns,the screenwriters made him a too polite ,too sentimental ,not bestial enough character (just compare with Anthony Quinn's performance,in a movie which was not better though).

Sirk did not seem to put of lot of effort into his work:"Christian" best describes it:the thunderbolt,the Roman talking about the Virgin and her son to the pagan daughter ,the pope 's intervention (there's a similar scene in the Italian movie),the final victory which was given by "their" God...

An enjoyable spectacle, though some of the plot was a bit unconvincing. For a tough guy, Marcian was very eager to volunteer details of his mission when he was captured by Attila, and I don't know he he got intelligence of the pagan hordes' move on Rome and was able to rush some of his troops to its defence across considerable distances. And I was also puzzled by how Attila came to be in awe of Christianity. But Palance made an excellent Hun, and was every bit as good a villain as he was in Shane and Arrowhead. And Chandler has never looked better, thanks to his Roman armour and longer hair than usual. It was also fun to try to recognise lesser actors such as Pat Hogan and Leo Gordon in their barbarous costumes. A good 90 minutes of entertainment.

Overall production value is not very high on this film; I seem to recall the film's inability to pass off studio sets as exterior locations. My recollection is of a very "TV-like" production on the level of a "B" movie with a large then usual budget. However, Jack Palance is excellent as Attila the Hun. He really does come across as a barbarian, giving a very intense performance that compares well with his earlier role as Toriano in "Arrowhead" with Charlton Heston. Some great supporting roles, also, with Jeff Morrow (This Island Earth) playing the grizzled Roman General, and Alexander Scourby (famous for his narration/voiceover work) playing Chrysaphius the Eunuch, advisor to Theodosius II. Jeff Chandler's subdued performance is a good match for the stoic Christian Roman he plays. It's a good counterpoint to Palance's growling Attila. For years, I thought Palance was short of stature, based on his sword fighting here with Jeff Chandler, but it was just that Chandler was several inches taller than Palance who was himself 6' 2"...

Interesting trivia:

The uncredited narrator of the film is Rex Reason who co-starred with Jeff Morrow in "This Island Earth."

At 7:05 pm on Saturday, 1 May 1976, BBC 1 showed the complete and uncut version of Sign of the Pagan. Puzzlingly, this was probably the last time that anyone was allowed to see Ludmilla Tcherina's exotic dance number. For reasons known only to the Universal studios, that whole sequence has been deleted from subsequent television showings, both on American station AMC and Britain's Channel 4. Nor do DVD releases contain the dance, even though the main title still credits Kenny Williams as choreographer, leaving viewers wondering what he could have possibly choreographed. Most surprising of all is the 2011 German DVD "special edition" which presents both the original wide screen and 4 x 3 versions. Even here, Universal have cleanly cut the dance number from both prints and both languages.

For those who have never seen the sequence, Attila has just won the palace show fight with Herculanas. After that, the Emperor commands his sister, the Princess Pulcheria, to dance for the visiting barbarians. For the first 50 seconds she performs a graceful and dignified piece of ballet which the barbarians obviously find boring. Therefore, the Emperor tells a servant, "Advise my sister this is not suited to barbarian taste." So ordered, the Princess switches to a more raunchy routine that the visitors find much more enjoyable. This lasts about two minutes. Few genre fans would argue that, in both the Hollywood and Italian epics, the exotic dance interlude is something of a highlight. We get to see beautiful girls in eye-catching costumes, always accompanied by some classy music. Indeed, the ballet score we hear (or used to hear) from Salter and Skinner in Sign of the Pagan is arguably the best music they ever composed.

Universal obviously hope no-one's going to notice what they've done, but why did they do it in the first place? One can only theorize. Perhaps the film was cut at some stage to fit into a fixed television slot. Or maybe the dance was excluded to make the film more suitable for children's matinees. Then nobody remembered to put the scene back? A somewhat wilder theory is that it's a rights issue. Remembering how the Gershwin estate, not liking the Porgy and Bess movie, have tried for years to prevent anyone seeing it, could Ludmilla Tcherina and her estate have somehow bought out this dance scene and are now withholding it because it does not enhance her memory as a classical ballerina? But surely Universal, with all their wealth, would hardly spoil one of their classics just to grab a few dollars?

Whatever the reason, most fans will agree that missing scenes in movies are a continuing source of irritation. Come on, Universal, put it back!