There's really only a shell of the biblical tale of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah where sin went rampant and caused God to strike them down through a truly violent earthquake that mixed its power with an underground volcano. Slave girls with definite Caucasian backgrounds and modern hairstyles indicate that not much research was done into look of the times. Even researching past biblical epics would have been big help in maintaining a realistic view of the actual time period. Stewart Granger is cast as Lot, and unless you are a student of biblical studies, the movie will not give you much detail into the time period or relationship to other more famous biblical persons. The only real sin that the film shows the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah is of violence and certain elements of sexual perversion (all heterosexual) including what seems to be the aftermath of a huge orgy.
Anouk Aimée provides the camp element here as the evil Queen, mistress of slave Pier Angeli who marries Lot and becomes the infamous pillar of salt in the film's closing sequences. It is everything leading up to the destruction of the two cities which seems to take forever to lead up to. Once this occurs though, the special effects are pretty amazing, and the final sequence of Granger shouting out to Angeli to look away is pretty frightening. But this film is one of the reasons why film historians often call the biblical epics poor representations of recorded history, something obviously caused by the presence of a still stiff production code that couldn't allow the elements of the recorded history to be shown on screen.
Anouk Aimée provides the camp element here as the evil Queen, mistress of slave Pier Angeli who marries Lot and becomes the infamous pillar of salt in the film's closing sequences. It is everything leading up to the destruction of the two cities which seems to take forever to lead up to. Once this occurs though, the special effects are pretty amazing, and the final sequence of Granger shouting out to Angeli to look away is pretty frightening. But this film is one of the reasons why film historians often call the biblical epics poor representations of recorded history, something obviously caused by the presence of a still stiff production code that couldn't allow the elements of the recorded history to be shown on screen.