‘O omnivorous powers, hail!’

Abstract

Dialogue in historical films is often the weakest component of the presumed ‘authenticity’ of the vision of the past to which they aspire. Its artificiality is especially evident in productions about ancient worlds, because the historical characters typically speak in a language which has nothing to do with the reality presented on the screen, yet somehow needs to convey the idea of diachronic distance and diversity. This chapter will examine the stylistic strategies used by the screenwriters of Quo Vadis in order to create a dialogue functional to the film’s ideological message, but at the same time sufficiently credible and ‘authentic’. Special attention will be paid to the way the scripts deal with forms of address and with military or honorific titles, as these are usually the most important and evident signals of ‘historicity’ in film dialogues. From this point of view, the verbal strategies of Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis (1951) are rather complex and multilayered, and they will be the focal point of the analysis. Produced in the aftermath of the Second World War, the film relied heavily on the strategy of presentism, clearly audible in large chunks of the dialogue. On the other hand, as part of a ‘trustworthy’ reconstruction of classical antiquity, its cinematographic speech had to be at least superficially compatible with the image of imperial Rome. Finally, Quo Vadis also drew generously on its literary source and adapted for the screen some of the novel’s elegant, literary dialogues. The chapter will also examine the relation between the cinematographic and literary dialogue in two later adaptations to screen: Franco Rossi’s 1985 TV miniseries and Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Polish heritage production (2001).