If Salome is not the height of fifties exploitation kitch, we're not sure we want to see what is. The pretentious all-star spectacle was sold on its mixture of sex and gratuitous religion, and the result is indeed droolingly perverse, unintentionally hilarious, and far more revealing than even it intended to be. Rita Hayworth's “dance” of the seven veils in front of Charles Laughton's pop-eyed Herod is of course the high point of a script that takes extreme liberties with the Biblical intrigue on which it is based. This Salome, for instance, dances to save the life of John the Baptist, and then almost loses her lunch when his grisly pate is served up to her anyway. Eat your heart out with a plastic spoon, Nazimova!