Spaghetti and Sandals.

Blasetti with Gino Cervi.

Director Alessandro Blasetti appears to have been the
major figure in Italian nineteen thirties film making. His status has come under attack on two fronts. He was an admirer of the fascists and his work has been hard to locate, though diligent foraging in ethnic video outlets did shake loose original language copies of his impressive 1931 Resurrectio, 1933 La tavola dei poveri and 1935 Vecchia guardia to challenge my limited Italian. 

 So interest picked up when a sharp but re-framed version of  Blasetti’s 1938 Ettore Fieramosca appeared on You Tube.  It was derived from the 1833 Massimo D'Azeglio work, which had already been twice filmed. In the Mussolini period, it was considered to have patriotic relevance for showing Italians aligning with Spain to overthrow a Sixteenth Century invasion by France. Unfortunately the film is one of Blasetti’s weaker efforts.

Ettore Fieramosca opens with ravaged peasants streaming into the film's solid looking castle, where the draw bridge is rolled up to provide their safety. Arriving outside, Condottiero Ettore Fieramosca, represented by Blasetti’s regular leading man Gino Cervi still young enough to play a tousle headed juvenile, takes a dim view of this, particularly when a castle archer lets loose an arrow, which takes down one of his horses. He demands hospitality.

Inside the Keep, Cervi is faced by another Blasetti regular, long serving Elisa Cegani as owner Giovanna di Morreale, surounded by schemeing courtiers whose menials fill their wine goblets over their shoulders at diner. As in La tavola dei poveri,  there’s some nice use of twilight filming. Skinny dipping with the castle kids, Gino is shown the secret river entrance to the castle crypt and, through the decorative ventilators, he sees Cegani at prayers.

Opposing armies maneuver on the hills and a battle is mounted, complete with charging cavalry and hand to hand combat - the film’s big set piece. Cervi joins the castle’s ineffectual defense and is smuggled wounded into the crypt by sympathisers. Gegani nurses him back to health. Not content with the outcome, Gino/Ettore mounts the historic Disfida di Barletta, where thirteen Italian knights confront thirteen French knights, their heraldic banners planted at the side of the battle field to be lowered as their owners are overcome in the struggle. Finally, the survivors dismount and face off with drawn swords. Ettore carries Giovanna’s colours and she waits on the battlements to see if he will survive to return them to her.

Ettore Fieramosca - Elisa Cegani

The film doesn’t lack ambition, with big elaborately decorated settings and crowds of dress extras. It draws on two very Italian imageries - Opera with its dancers, decor and costumes and Catholicism, complete with the service with the long candles and taking the knee at the altar. Looking at Cegani in her white cowl, she could be a nun - if she wasn’t plastered with make up. Camp follower Clara Calamai (later in Ossessione and Deep Red) makes a much livelier impression.

A stunt man from Metro’s fifties Ivanhoe, told me that jousting was one of the most difficult forms of action to stage. For this reason, it had been rare in films up till then (think Elvey’s second Wandering Jew) and  there was no experience to draw on. Looking at the Blasetti film - or Alexander Nevsky - it’s impossible to miss the superiority of contemporary Hollywood work - the De Mille The Crusades or the Curtiz - Errol Flynn films. Blasetti’s swashbuckling 1939 Un'aventura di Salvator Rosa, with Cervi again, is a decided advance, though it has some of the same ponderousness, like Henry King’s post war Italian-filmed Prince of Foxes. Salvatore Rosa is one of the director's best films however. It strikingly anticipates the superior Tyrone Power Mark of Zorro of the following year. 

You Tube and TUBI also offer another Italian costume adventure, an old favorite Vittorio Cottafavi's 1961 Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide / Hercules Conquers Atlantis/ Hercules and the Captive Women.  Seeing this again was high on my bucket list. It is still the film, that the few of us who paid these any attention, decided was the pick of the mid Century Pepla, the Italian sword and sandal cycle. It’s easily the best of the half dozen or so (depending on your criteria) that director Vittorio Cottafavi made, generally recognisable from the presence of Ettore Manni, midget Salvatore Furnari and yellow  smoke.

Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide - Reg Park.

 

 

Cottafavi was one of the signatories of the original Neo Realist manifesto along with De Sica, Rossellini and Zavattini, a leading interpreter of the work of Ugo Betti and someone who got a whole issue of “Presence du Cinéma” to himself, before moving to R.A.I. to make accomplished versions of literary classics. Despite a varied and frequently impressive output, Cottafavi's reputation did not travel. Bertrand Tavernier claimed that Communist critics bracketed him and Henri George Clouzot as film makers who did not show sufficient respect to WW2 Resistance movements. I once found myself defending his work to a local academic, who put up a clip of Hercules Conquers Atlantis as a joke - Fay Spain’s “Love me Hercules and together we will rule over men and Gods” scene too.

For Hercules Conquers Atlantis, one of several English speaking versions, they start as they mean to go, running the titles over the tavern number that appears to have been the first scene of the Italian original. This itself is a virtuoso exercise, apparently filmed in a single run of the camera. (possible edit when it briefly moves behind a dark pillar) A brawl breaks out. Manni actually picks up and throws a stunt man out of shot and the clearly classical trained dancing girl continues a strenuous Peter Vander Sloot routine through all the confusion, while imposing former Mr. World Reg Park’s Hercules finishes his meal untroubled. In other versions, the scene exists in a different edit. These films fell into the hands of fringe distributors who saw it as their function to make them over to their own taste.

Hercules is now back home in Thebes, relaxing with wife Luciana Angiolillo and teenage son Luciano Marin. However the sky turns red and a booming voice prophecy rings out. The newly federated Council of Greek Kings is unimpressed. Alessandro Sperli is told by his queen mother not to meddle and the Spartan ruler, a youthful Gian Maria Volonte just making his name, does a spear throw to emphasise his point but more gung ho local Theban royal Manni is determined to sail out and investigate. All those tavern brawlers who have been in training for such a moment are nowhere to be found. Manni has to recruit a crew of mutinous cut throats and Galley Slaves and kidnap his friend Park, who dozes in the sun on deck unaware that his son and midget associate tag along. Don’t expect any of this to make too much sense - not in English at least. 

The production runs to a practical sea going galley, so we face a bit of an anti climax, when the storm at sea is done with a tacky model. The mist clears and Hercules Park finds himself on the beach of the island home of  Proteus, who we are told by maiden Laura Efrikan, being eaten by its rocks, can be “the air that you breathe, the land you walk on” but  is visualised as guys in lizard suits and lion skins, as well as a snake, a stuffed eagle on wires, a gasoline blaze and finally elderly Maurizio Coffarelli. Park of course subdues him, releasing Efrikan from the rock which bleeds - straight out of Dante that.       

Laura says this won’t go down well with the Queen of Atlantis, who devised her sacrifice to maintain the kingdom’s divine protection, so Reg undertakes to explain things - cut to that imposing Atlantis decor with the ten horse chariot being driven through the populous city square. Its giant decors and crowds of extras prevent this from looking like a cheap production, even with a fair amount of hand me down. 

Reg is confronted by Queen Antinea, Fay Spain an odd choice hired in for name recognition in the English speaking market no doubt. She does a surprisingly regal job. He’s about to start his defense when Laura says “Hello mother!”  

At this point, they inject the plot of Pierre Benoît’s “L’Atalantide” with amnesiac Manni wandering the royal palace, before they side line him in a sarcophagus. More giant sets and ballet. Opera is still with us but we have lost the Catholics. This one is explicitly pagan with the malevolent presence of Proteus in conflict with Zeus, who his son Hercules occasionally calls on "Oh, great Zoos..." 

Hercules Conquers Atlantis.

When Hercules looks like he’s not going to go for her power sharing proposal, queen Fay slips him a royal roofie but our hero is too smart for that and escapes to debate with High Priest Mario Petri. It’s not hard to see Petri as a mythological Robert J. Oppenheimer, disclosing the secret of the destructive mineral deposit (the blood of Uranus of course) without sufficient consideration of what it will do in the wrong hands. 

Meanwhile Hercules’ son and Antinea’s daughter have become an item, with talk about incinerating them, before Park and Furnari show up to throw the funeral barge crew overboard. At this point the film starts stretching things with succeeding climaxes - a revolt of the slaves, some not all that impressive large set destruction and squeezed Haroun Tazzieff volcano footage.

Reg Park, who would foster the career of Arnold Scwarzenegger, was the most imposing of the cycle's champion body builder heroes. He manages some quite demanding stunting, including climbing the cave wall and driving the chariot at least once, though we can’t see whether there’s someone out front guiding the horses. Park was not muscle bound like Steeve Reeves, who kept on dropping Mylene Demongeot, while carrying her for The Giant of Marathon.  He was a passable actor - or at least half of one. In the Italian version Ivo Garrani pulls a double shift playing the King of Megalia and voicing Park as well. His timbre isn’t bad but Garrani has the familiar delivery of those busy dubbing actors of the day. Someone who looks like Park really needs James Earl Jones on the track. 

Fay Spain's Antinea & masked albino zombies.

There are traces of other hands in this one. The jokey anachronisms turn up again in screenwriter Ducio Tessari's Son's of Thunder and Mario Bava’s participation in the effects is now noted. These vary from dodgy models to the startling mirror shot in the scarlet passageway, where we get some of the film’s best material, with the black mask armored albino zombies, who are genuinely menacing. Cottafavi's on screen introduction to his TV "Antigone" Includes comment on the Armet masks which differentiate the Chorus from the crowd. Whether Bava and Cottafavi collaborated in person is an intriguing speculation.

Age has diminished this one. Details don’t register on the small screen - perspective adding to foreshortening on the classic sword used as a missile or the red jet of poisoned wine from Park’s inverted face in the blue lit room. The colour is better in the Italian copy but we are still a long way from the glories of the 70mm. version. 

Any notion that this one rates the the kind of restoration effort that is being poured into Rosellini (or Burning an Illusion) would be treated with ridicule. However Hercules Conquers Atlantis deserves its place in popular culture. Even with a few rough edges, it is an immensely entertaining piece and, when you are settling in for a fun ride, it keeps on pulling you up with stylish pieces of staging or surprise references. Few films repay repeated viewing so well.

You can always check these out in Derek Elley's "The Epic Film: Myth and History" (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984) which I have referenced.