Summary
Austrian screens first tremble under the weight of myth in this 1922 colossus: Nazirite muscle ripples through expressionist shadows while a Philistine vamp in silk and kohl stalks the parapets of Gaza like a panther bred on decadence. Samson, all sun-bronzed shoulders and covenantal fire, topples temples with the hubris of a nation drunk on its own origin story; Delilah, veiled in cigarette smoke and proto-flapper ennui, unpicks his strength strand by strand until the desert itself seems to exhale a sigh of complicity. Between them Korda stitches a Vienna-haunted modernity—jazz-age eyelashes flutter against biblical thunder, gilt opera-house décor collides with crumbling pagan masonry, and the Danube glows sulfur-orange beneath an eclipse that feels suspiciously like post-war dread. The result is a fever dream where martyrdom and celebrity, sacred oath and tabloid betrayal, share the same intoxicated waltz.
Synopsis
One of the first epic films made in Austria, as in some of the similar Cecil B De Mille entries, a fusion of a biblical story with a modern update.
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