BY FRED BLOSSER
I
saw many, many Italian-made sword-and-toga movies as a kid in the early 1960s
at the Kayton, my neighborhood movie house, where they usually played on
mismatched double-bills with B-Westerns, British “Carry On†comedies,
low-budget noir dramas, and fourth-run Elvis movies. Many of these Italian epics were simplistic
and formulaic, as if the producers figured that people had come to see
spectacle, sex, and sword-fights, and never mind anything else. Regardless, more ambitious productions
occasionally surfaced with slightly more dramatic substance and marginally
higher production values. One such entry
was “The Colossus of Rhodes†(1961), Sergio Leone’s first acknowledged
directorial credit preceding his breakthrough success with “A Fistful of
Dollars†in 1964. The Warner Archive
Collection has released the 1961 movie on Blu-ray with audio commentary by Sir
Christopher Frayling, Leone’s biographer and longtime critical champion.
The
script co-written by Leone has plenty of plot -- almost too much, when one
development begins to get in the way of another. As the film opens, an aristocratic Athenian
war hero, Dario (Rory Calhoun), comes to Rhodes to kick back on vacation and
ogle the ladies. Meanwhile, rebellion is
brewing against tyrannical King Serses, who secretly schemes with Phoenicia to
use Rhodes as a base for piratical raids against their mutual rival,
Greece. As part of the deal, Phoenicia
has agreed to provide Serses with a huge contingent of slaves to complete the
300-foot Colossus of Rhodes that straddles the harbor. The king needs the free labor to finish the
construction after losing many of his initial workers -- starved and beaten
political prisoners -- in a mass escape. The imposing statue of Apollo symbolically honors “the strength and
power of our King Serses,†says the unctuous prime minister, Thar, but the two
men also plan to use it to pour burning oil and molten lead on unsuspecting
Greek warships when the enemy attacks in reprisal for Serses’ piracy. In the meantime, Thar schemes to depose
Serses and make himself ruler. With the
connivance of the Russian – oops, Phoenician – ambassador, the “slavesâ€
imported to work on the Colossus are actually foreign mercenaries in disguise,
sneaked in to support Thar’s coup. Got
that? I haven’t even mentioned that Carete,
the elderly, idealistic engineer who designed the monument, is unaware that the
king is reconfiguring it as a war machine. Mirte, the sister of one of the freedom fighters opposing Serses and
Thar, hopes to sway Dario over to the side of the rebels, while Thar’s mistress
Diala (Lea Massari), who also happens to be Carete’s niece, welcomes the
Athenian’s romantic advances for her own purposes. The royalists suspect Dario of being a rebel
sympathizer. The insurrectionists eye
him as a spy for Serses as he cozies up to Diala.
Cineasts
today will recognize several familiar faces in the cast, including the
wistfully beautiful Lea Massari from “L’avventura†and “Murmurs of the Heart,â€
and several actors who would later become Spaghetti Western regulars, including
Roberto Camardiel (Serses), Antonio Casas (the Phoenician ambassador), and
Nello Pazzafini (uncredited as a soldier in one fleeting scene). Back in 1961 on a Saturday night at the
Kayton, Rory Calhoun’s would have been the only familiar face on the screen. The movie’s vintage trailer added as a
supplement to the Blu-ray identifies Calhoun as “the star of ‘The Texan’,†as
if audiences might be slow to remember that they had seen Calhoun on TV as “The
Texan†the night before. As Leone’s
token American star, Calhoun is dark, good-looking, and up to the physical
demands of the chase and swordplay scenes, but his character is more passive
than the usual toga heroes played by Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott. Where Hercules and Goliath usually led the
revolts against evil kings in their movies, Dario is swept up in a plot hatched
by others. Frayling says that Leone
modeled the character on Cary Grant’s urbane Roger Thornhill in “North by
Northwest,†to tease the usual conventions of the genre. Just as Grant’s accidental spy was trapped on
the giant Presidential heads of Mt. Rushmore, Dario scrambles around on the
Colossus to evade pursuing enemies, in what appears to be an impressive matte
effect. The 220 B.C. costuming requires
Calhoun to wear a short skirt and white sandals that Frayling likens to “Go-Go
socks.†In fairness to the actor, he
doesn’t look much sillier than Brad Pitt or Colin Farrell in similar garb in
the more recent epics “Troy†and “Alexander†(both from 2004). There’s plenty
of wrestling and hand-to-hand fighting in the story, with choreography only a little
phonier than the average WWE smackdown, but except for one prolonged scuffle,
it’s mostly executed by the Italian actors and stunt men who play the rebels
and not by Calhoun.
Leone
crams the plot with chariot chases, arenas, duels, secret passageways, torture
chambers, hungry lions, implied orgies, galleys, pagan temples, and other
staples of the genre. All of these
trimmings should give the movie a kinetic charge, but the pace seems sluggish
instead, slowed by uninspired dubbing, dull dance scenes by temple girls,
duller romantic interludes, and unnecessary exposition like the scene where a
bad guy explains, “This is molten lead, Athenian,†when it’s obvious that he’s
pouring molten lead. When an earthquake
destroys Rhodes and brings down the Colossus in the final reel, the disaster is
well staged but seems to come out of nowhere as a rousing afterthought that
Leone felt obliged to add, like the fire that sweeps Rome at the end of “The
Sign of the Cross†(1932), or the eruption of Vesuvius in “The Last Days of
Pompeii,†a 1959 version of which Leone directed without credit. Since an earthquake actually toppled the
Colossus of Rhodes in real life, maybe Leone decided that viewers would know
enough history to anticipate what was coming anyway, so why bother with any
foreshadowing.
Leone
fans will be glad to get the new Blu-ray to complete their collections, and
curious film enthusiasts will be entertained by Frayling’s exhaustive
commentary, which charmingly covers everything from Leone’s career to the
history of the spear-and-sandal school of filmmaking, to the actual story of
the real Colossus. The commentary is
sympathetic to Leone, but as candid about the shortcomings of the journeyman
production as it is about its virtues. The disc presents the film at its intended, 2.35:1 “Supertotalscopeâ€
aspect with acceptable 1080p encoding and SDH captioning.
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