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Show Love Motivates Mighty Drama in Rivoli Masterpiece Mighty and terrible events from a pagan world centuries ago, are brought to the screen in RKO-Radio's RKO-Radio's spectacle, "The Last Days of Pompeii," at the Rivoli (heater Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. As the picture unfolds, a stark drama, rolls in majestic splendor through vivid pageantry, esaring conflict, and barbaric cruelties, in an epic march that is finally ended bv an enraged Nature dealing death and destruction with earthquakes and a belching volcano. "The Last Days of Pompeii" is a story of a world gone mad with revelry and debauchery. It is told in the life of one man who, placing plac-ing gold and might above all else, rises to heights of power and riches rich-es by wholesale trafficking in human hu-man life. It is a story of splendor and misery, lavishncss and savagery, savag-ery, greed and despair, yet of all the warring emotions, it is love that triumphs in this powerful drama. Everything that Marcus, hrad of the great Pompeiian arena, does is for love of his adopted son. His cruelties, butcheries and greed are motivated by the desire that this boy may have a place among the great and aristoratic of the Roman Ro-man Empire. There is also a tragedy of love in the beginning of the story that starts the great engine of events rolling. As a young blacksmith living happily with his wife and child, Marcus loses them because of his poverty. Believing riches to be the only insurance for happiness, happi-ness, he starts out ruthlessly to acquire them. How Marcus becomes master of the arena, staging fights in which thousands of lives are sacrificed to amuse a debauched populace, provides many of the spectacular, breath-taking highlights of the picture, pic-ture, which ends with the earthquake earth-quake and eruption of Vesuvius that demolished Pompeii in the ' first century. Preston Foster appears as Marcus, Mar-cus, the blacksmith, gladiator, horse thief, slave dealer, and human butcher. Basil fiathbone plays Pontius Pilate, puppet of the Roman law in Judea. |