“Quo vadis” is Latin for “Where are you going?” and a question posed in the apocryphal Acts of Peter. It forms the centerpiece of MGM’s 1951 epic, inspired by the 1896 eponymous novel by Polish Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz.
The film “Quo Vadis” (“QV”), directed by Mervyn LeRoy, centers around the love of Commander Marcus Vinicius (Robert Taylor) for a former slave, Lygia (an incandescent Deborah Kerr), now an adopted daughter of a Roman family. This story is set during the reign of Nero (an astonishingly young Peter Ustinov, in his 20s), who burns Rome for his own purposes and blames Christians, who are thrown into the Colosseum to be martyred.
