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Alligators and Crocodiles in Movies   The Sign of the Cross (1932)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is a biblical epic made by Cecil B. DeMille, the king of biblical epics, but it's also a love triangle between Roman Prefect Marcus Superbus (Fredric March) a young Christian woman named Mercia (Elissa Landi) and the roman Empress Poppaea (Claudette Colbert) who we see taking a bath in a huge tub full of fresh donkey milk, as a couple of cats sneak over and drink the milk. The milk bath is certainly the most famous scene in the movie, and the very sexy Colbert steals the show, and there is also a Roman orgy scene that features a woman doing an erotic dance for Mercia that has been called Hollywood's first lesbian scene, but that's not what why we're here. We're here for the particularly gruesome crocodile scene. The movie is set shortly after Rome burned in a great fire. To avoid blame for the disaster, Nero claims that the Christians burned the city and he orders all Christians to be rounded up and killed. He makes a grand spectacle out of it to entertain the Roman people. Before the Christians are marched out and fed to a pack of starving lions, the large audience is entertained by a violent gladiator battle, a fight to the death between Barbarian women and a tribe of pygmies from Africa, and assorted wild beasts, including tigers maiming people, a bear stabbed with a spear, elephants that crush human heads with their massive feet, and a gorilla that is released next to a nearly-nude woman who is chained to a pole. We see another nearly-nude woman, wearing only thin garlands of flowers, tied up and suspended just above the ground as hungry crocodiles are set loose into the arena. The camera cuts back and forth between the crocodiles, the terrified woman, and the shocked audience as an open-mouthed crocodile crawls up behind her closer and closer, until the camera cuts away and we are left to imagine what happens next. Even though this movie was made before the strict censorship under the Hays code, some of the sex and violence was either cut from the original release, or edited out by shocked theater owners. It was put back in the restored version to appease the coliseum... I mean movie... audience.