Los últimos días de Pompeya

This French version is very well acted, particularly by Georges Marchal. The classical Roman sets and costumes are outstanding. The characters are closer to Bulwer-Lytton's originals than the 1936 American version, but the action scenes are very much lacking. Micheline Presle is lovely as the noble Roman lady Helena enmeshed in a sinister and fraudulent Eastern cult which makes her unresponsive to the honest young man Lysias (Georges Marchal) who loves her.

Meanwhile the young servant girl Nydia is so in love with him that she absconds with a dangerous drug supplied to the unscrupulous highborn lady Julia by the slimy Arbaces, high priest of Isis. Nydia substitutes water in the vial and later administers the potion to Lysias in the belief that it will make him enamored of her. Unfortunately, it puts him into a psychotic stupor during which he wanders onto the scene of a murder and gets blamed and imprisoned for trial.

The final cataclysmic scenes are nowhere near as magnificent as in the earlier 1936 American film. If the two films were combined (the characters from the French version and the action scenes from the U.S. version) the result would be a film far better than either.