Paramount Pictures, Inc. released "The Sign of the Cross" in December, 1932, with Cecil B. DeMille as director and with one of the first four-star casts: Claudette Colbert, Fredric March, Elissa Landi, Charles Laughton, and thousands of extras. Its reappearance is of interest to students of the cinema art, but by modern standards it is no longer good entertainment.

Originally acclaimed as a spectacle to match "King of Kings," the DeMille production is a melange of religion, sex, and mob scenes. It is slow-moving and stagy, but a lot of people will love it for its bacchanals, its armor-clanking, its Christian-eating lions, and its mob scenes.

The movie's chief advantage over wax-museum showings, such as are to be seen in New York's Museum of Modern Art, is its sound-track perfection. "Sign of the Cross" was remade (God knows why!), not exhumed from the files.

But the "modernization" has been clumsy. Opening with a few scenes of padres flying over the Eternal City of Rome and making appropriate expressions of awe while propaganda leaflets flutter down from bombers, the picture flashes back to the Rome of Nero's day, where Christians were feared and hated as Europe's underground is by the Nazis.

A throw-back to the days of "Ben-Hur," "Sign of the Cross" is a mammoth in the tradition of the twenties, when producers undertook to carry out such colossal, stupendous ideas as filming the Bible. It demonstrates the obvious fact that sensuous revels cannot be mixed with martyrs to produce sincere religious inspiration, and it proves that the genuine fervor of the Passion Play cannot be transferred to the screen. jgt