Androcles and the Lion

Androcles and the Lion (1952)

SPECTACLE, ROMANCE, COMEDY!...as only Shaw could write it and the screen show it!

George Bernard Shaw’s breezy, delightful dramatization of this classic fable—about a Christian slave who pulls a thorn from a lion’s paw and is spared from death in the Colosseum as a result of his kind act—was written as a meditation on modern Christian values. Pascal’s final Shaw production is played broadly, with comic character actor Alan Young as the titular naïf. He’s ably supported by Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Robert Newton, and Elsa Lanchester.

Date of release
1952-12-01
TMDB
5.9 / 10 (16)
Runtime
1h 38m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Chester Erskine

Casting

Interesting facts

Androcles and the Lion is a 1952 RKO Pictures satire film produced by Gabriel Pascal from the 1912 George Bernard Shaw play of the same name. It was Pascal's last film, made two years after the death of Shaw, his longtime friend and mentor, and two years before Pascal's own death.

Production

Harpo Marx was originally signed to play Androcles, and after the first five weeks of shooting, producer Gabriel Pascal was thrilled with the results. However, RKO Pictures head Howard Hughes, who had seen Alan Young on television, hired him for the lead and Marx was replaced. George Sanders intended to play Caesar but another commitment caused him to withdraw. José Ferrer was mentioned for the part of Androcles.

Under Pascal's contract with George Bernard Shaw, the film was required to include at least 75% of Shaw's original dialogue in the screenplay. However, as the play was short, additional material was added for the film version.

When the film opened in American cinemas, audiences did not laugh as much as was expected, so Hughes withdrew the film and shot two weeks of new sequences. Young later recalled: "He put in girls with gauze and a real lion, and it became a blood-and-guts film."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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