The eruption of Vesuvius plays only a minor part in this lurid tale of murder, blackmail, insanity, witches, unrequited love, gladiators, imprisonment and blindness. However, as this was made in 1913, it's all done in the best possible taste, and The Last Days of Pompeii is one of the figureheads of early Italian cinema as it's an epic feature-length movie from a time when other countries were still making small-scale 20-minute shorts. Hugely influential, then - Griffith, whose own feature-length epic was still two years off was a fan - but kind of camp.
Review of The Last Days of Pompeii
