This 1950s big-budget Technicolor version of Salome was produced by Rita Hayworth’s own production company, Beckworth. Although at age thirty-five, Hayworth was too old to be playing the naïve teenager she is supposed to be in the movie, the film at least makes full use of her training as a dancer, during the climactic “Dance of the Seven Veils.” The only problem is that under the Production Code, the hero of the film couldn’t perform a seductive dance to coax Herod into beheading John the Baptist. So the screenwriters arranged the plot so Salome would be dancing to save John the Baptist, in complete contradiction to the biblical story. Charles Laughton as Herod and Judith Anderson as Herodias play deliciously perverse villains.