DVD Format: Digipak, Academy , 1.33:1, Black and White
DVD Features: Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, Audio Track 1: English, Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Review
Box set of five features from Cecil B. DeMille, Hollywood’s king of melodramatic epics and spectacle, from the thirties. DeMille was famed for his lavish historical spectacles and three of them are collected here: the Biblical drama The Sign of the Cross (1932) starring Fredric March, Claudette Colbert (in a bath filledwith milk) and Charles Laughton as Emperor Nero; Cleopatra (1934) starring Claudette Colbert as the scheming Egyptian queen, Warren William as Julius Caesar and Henry Wilcoxon as Marc Antony; and The Crusades (1935), set in the 12th century and starring Loretta Young, Henry Wilcoxon, C. Aubrey Smith and Joseph Schildkraut. Also features Four Frightened People (1934), an early disaster adventure starring Claudette Colbert and Herbert Marshall as survivors of a bubonic plague-infested ship whose only escape is through a deadly jungle, and the western railway epic Union Pacific (1939), starring Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, Akim Tamiroff and Robert Preston. 5 discs in a digipack but no supplements.