I was most interested to see this movie because of the air of the mystique it had by virtue of being made before the infamous Hays Code, leading me (and probably many of others) to wonder how much nudity, profanity, blood or sex a movie from the early 1930s would have.

If you're watching this in the second quarter of the 21st century like I did, you're going to be slightly disappointed. There's a quite risque scene of Claudette Colbert in a bath that would have sent the moral majority who was panicking about the influence of Hollywood pictures into a lather, but its ideas in the premise that are more transgressive than the visuals.

That is apart from the Colosseum scene at the end, which features the beheading of a midget and a woman chained up about to be eaten by crocodiles.

Aside from the then-boundary pushing violence in the climax, it's the story of the early persecution of Christianity in the days of the Roman Empire. As Rome literally burns around him, Nero (Charles Laughton) metaphorically fiddles – singing, strumming his lute and lounging around without a care for the suffering of his subjects.

A trusted lieutenant informs Nero he's suspected of starting the fire, but the Emperor instead decides to blame the Christians, tarring them as a sort of domestic terror cult.

Meanwhile, two elderly apostles are preaching in the town square before being broken up by centurions, the commander of which, Marcus (Fredric March), lets go free. He's lenient on them because of his love for a young Christian woman, Mercia (Elissa Landi), who's harbouring the elder apostles in her house as they prepare for a secret meeting.

But when they send her young brother out to warn other Christians of the venue of the meeting, he's intercepted, thrown into the dungeons and tortured, giving up the meetings location.

When Marcus learns of the torture he races to the site of the meeting, hoping to save Mercia from the slaughter and arrest coming for them all. He does so, taking her back to his palace where he tries to convince her to give up her ways and live with him in all the luxury a Roman senior officer's life affords. But Mercia refuses, choosing enslavement and probably death to stay true to her beliefs.

But just as Marcus wants Mercia, the vampish Empress Poppaea (Colbert) has a soft spot for him, and her jealousy of his desire for the more innocent Mercia dooms the latter even further to her fate.

She convinces Nero to order her arrested and thrown into the arena for the peoples' entertainment along with her brethren, and to Marcus' disbelief and heartbreak, her devotion to Christ is stronger than her will to live and she chooses imprisonment and a probably horrible death rather than life with him.

Just as interesting as the slightly more permissive aesthetic is the example of Golden Years filmmaking, a time when set design and costuming were art forms that are easy to appreciate today when so little care seems to be taken with them (the former mostly outsourced to CGI, for instance).