Commentary track featuring film historians including Nick Redman and composer David Newman, audio interview with co-writer Phillip Dunne, “The CinemaScope Story”, “The Making of ‘The Robe’”, “The Robe Times Two: BD-Live Comparison between the Widescreen and Standard Versions of the movie”, “From Scripture to Script: The Bible and Hollywood”, Interactive Pressbook, Fox Movietone Newsreel

“The Robe” is one of those epic films that manages to touch on religion without offending everyone who isn’t Christian. A Cinemascope epic that truly lives up to the hype of the format, “The Robe” was based on Lloyd Douglas’ bestselling novel from the 1940’s. Essentially the same story as “Quo Vadis” made a couple of years before the differences here are so minor in terms of plot as to make this almost a remake if not for the different source material. Roman tribune Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton) feels complicit in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Christ’s robe falls into the care of Gallio’s slave Demetrius who has become a convert to Christianity. ***

Of the two films “The Robe” is more emotionally complex and rich with a riveting performance from Burton as a man haunted by his guilt and unable to forgive himself. The big surprise here though is Victor Mature an actor who hadn’t exactly demonstrated a tremendous range in his previous films. Here he gives a terrific and often moving performance and in a film that also features Michael Rennie as Peter as well as Burton THAT is an accomplishment worth noting. Throw in Jean Simmons and Michael Ansara and you have a cast that could read the phone book and make it interesting. ---

Image & Sound:

Fox has done a terrific job in transferring “The Robe” to Blu-ray. While the images are occasionally soft overall we get a remarkably sharp looking image for a film over 50 years old. Considering the condition of the film and how poor the condition of the interpositives and even the negative itself, It’s remarkable that Fox was able to assemble a composite print that looks as good as it does here. ***

We get both the original 4.0 soundtrack as well as a nice sounding DTS-HD mix. Both sound quite good. ---

I’ve beaten up Fox (deservedly I might add) over the quality of their preview discs (which usually suck), the quality of their transfers (which have been so-so depending on the film, its source, etc.)and how the studio has generally been really cheap when it comes to their reissues (they have)but they deliver the goods here. ***

We get an excellent commentary track featuring historians Nick Redman, Jon Burlingame, Julie Kergo and film composer David Newman. *** Martin Scorsese appears in a new introduction for the film and we also get an audio only interview with writer Philip Dunne who helped craft the screenplay for the film. ***

“The Making of ‘The Robe’” provides interesting tidbits about the making of the film . “From Scripture to Script” focuses on the role of “The Rope” among the religious epics from the 1950’s. “The CinemaScope Story” gives viewers an interesting of the value of the format as well as the challenges in both shooting and showing films in the format. ***

“The Real-Life Search for The Robe” is a Blu-ray pip extra and evidently you can compare both the CinemaScope version of the film on the disc to the standard version of the film shot for non-CinemaScope theaters and that showed at the same time. This version hasn’t been seen in years (even though the formatting would be perfect for TV) via BD-Live. Due to some connection problems, however, I wasn’t able to watch this by the due date of this review. I should note that this is the type of added content that is very nice to have available. However, since they really are two different films consisting of different takes of the same material, it would have been nice if Fox had included it for completeness sake. ---

Final Words: