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Quo Vadis released nationally in the USA on November 8, 1951

Box-office performance

The film was a major commercial success. It was number one at the US box office for 6 consecutive weeks and 11 weeks in total.

According to MGM’s records, during its initial theatrical release, it earned $11,143,000 in the U.S. and Canada and $9,894,000 elsewhere, making it the highest-grossing film of 1951, and resulting in a profit to the studio of $5,440,000.

Critical reaction

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote in a mixed review, “Here is a staggering combination of cinema brilliance and sheer banality, of visual excitement and verbal boredom, of historical pretentiousness and sex.” Crowther thought that even Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross “had nothing to match the horrendous and morbid spectacles of human brutality and destruction that Director Mervyn LeRoy has got in this. But within and around these visual triumph and rich imagistic displays is tediously twined a hackneyed romance that threatens to set your teeth on edge.”

Variety wrote that the film was “right up there with Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind for box-office performance.

It has size, scope, splash, and dash, giving for the first time in a long while credence to the now-clichéd ‘super-colossal’ term. This is a super-spectacle in all its meaning.“ Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times declared it "one of the most tremendous if not the greatest pictures ever made … Its pictorial lavishness has never been equaled in any other production.” Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post called it “a fabulously entertaining movie. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Contributed by Greg Lynch - dimensional1@bigpond.com