Steeped in Erotics

These posters are, in fact, steeped in implicit and explicit erotics, with a propensity to present everything in terms of sex and sexual metaphor. This is a genre that sexualizes history, mythology and violence generally. In the poster on the left, the story of the Roman defeat of Carthage is turned into a sexual assault: as the limp and almost naked woman is held aloft, the poster screams "Ravaged by the raging Roman legion," "scene after scene; shock after shock; see the barbaric battle! see the assault of the maiden!"

So the vocabulary of sex and sexual assault suggests the content of the film. But this vocabulary can also be used to describe the effects of the film on the viewer. Not only are we confronted with images of writhing and thrusting bodies, the copy suggests that the viewer will not only see sex but have a virtual sexual experience as well. In the Sign of the Gladiator on the right, for example: "The screen explodes with wondrous spectacle bigger than anything you have ever seen." The bottom half of the poster offers the added promises of "X‑nobia (with an "X")¹ slave queen of the barbarians." "Bathsheba! Virgin Queen of the Orient." Besides seeing "the chase of the 10,000 horseman into the valley of blood" and "the barbarian torture catacombs" the poster promises the "sacrifice of the virgin in the temple of Ra" and "the orgy of the pagan slaves." Sex and violence with no excuses - the poster revels visually and verbally in both. This is history turned into pornography.²

¹ Regarding "X-nobia" - the motion picture rating system including the X rating was introduced in the US after the release of the Sign of the Gladiator (in 1968), but in the United Kingdom the "X certificate" was issued beginning in 1951 to designate a film "suitable for those aged 16 and over" - in other words, here the X may serve as a titillation, a marker suggesting the (supposed) salacious content.

² This movie - the "Sign of the Gladiator" - has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the only movie with "gladiator" in the title without a gladiator in the film itself. It is actually about Queen Zenobia, played by Anita Ekberg of all people. Here, one can see how the female - even the star and presumably hired for her star status - can be "eliminated" from the world of the poster.