Misc: Sword and Sandal Films

[Mark R. Leeper]

                      Sword and Sandal Films
                (film comment by Mark R. Leeper)

Whatever happened to old Steve Reeves movies?

Turner Classic Movies was running three "pepla" together.  It gave
me a sort of nostalgic feel.  This is a genre of film that seems
all but forgotten.   I do not see books written about them.  You do
not see revival houses playing the films.  I am a little surprised
that Turner saw fit to show them.  How many people today even know
much about the sub-genre of historical fantasy called "pepla," or
in the singular "peplum"?  Taken literally, a peplum is a sort of
clothing worn in ancient Greece and Rome.  It is draped over the
shoulder and then wrapped around the loins. In ancient Rome a
peplum was a robe of state.  In Italy the films are also known as
"fusto" films.  "Fusto" means muscleman.  In this country we tended
to call these films by the English name "Sword and Sandal" films.
When applied to films it is a genre of film set in (usually)
classical historic times with a muscle-man hero.

Today there are just a few rare little revivals.  But back when I
was a teenager there was a lot of pepla on Saturday night
television.  I think the local station called their program
"Medallion Theatre."  The pepla were a sort of film we associate
with 1960s Italy.  Actually most were made in the years from 1958
to 1968, and they were made in the hundreds.  But pepla actually go
back well into the silent era of filmmaking.  CABIRIA (1914) was
probably the first true peplum film.  It had a muscleman hero named
Maciste.  Most of these films were not seen outside of Italy until
the late 1950s.

What really got the ball rolling was Joseph E. Levine finding the
film HERCULES in Italy.  He dubbed it into English and released it
in the United States.  It had cost him next to nothing and he made
a financial killing.  It was not his first coup of that sort, by
the way.  He had previously bought the American rights to show a
big-budget Japanese film called GOJIRA and which he re-cut and
released as GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS.  Hoping that lightning
would strike twice he tried to repeat the trick with Hercules.  And
surely enough he made another killing at the box-office.  HERCULES
and the shortly following HERCULES UNCHAINED were the first real
hits of this genre in this country.  They played separately, I
believe, but when the appeal died down they played together on a
double feature.  How anybody could stand to sit through two of
these films back to back is still a mystery to me.  The films tend
to be these terribly uninvolving stories of not very high quality.
It does not help that they are so poorly dubbed into English.  The
plots are mostly incoherent and usually just end up with the
muscleman hero being imprisoned by a tyrant and then the hero gets
angry and tears apart the kingdom.  He does things like pulling
trees out of the ground by the roots and bopping the tyrant with
them.  He then gets the girl, but he never seems to get very close
because these huge inflated biceps and pectorals seem to get in the
way.

When pepla proved profitable as an international product the
Italian film industry started grinding them out one after another.
We got a lot of the dubbed peplums over here.  Only a few did I
ever see playing in theaters.  Perhaps they played in drive-ins.
However, most went directly to television where stations could show
them on programs like my Medallion Theater.  Many seemed to start
American body builders.  Hercules was played variously by Steve
Reeves, Mark Forest, and Gordon Scott.  Other heroes would be named
for famous strongmen of myth, history, and folklore like Samson,
Goliath, Colossus, and Atlas.  Then there were some with a hero
known mostly only in Italy called Maciste, the fellow from CABIRIA.

Americans did not know Maciste, so frequently he got other names in
the translation.  He might get a name like Colossus or the Son of
Samson.  But if you saw the titles, he was really Maciste.
Initially only Joseph E. Levine could legally release a peplum
about a strongman named Hercules.  But eventually it must have been
decided that he did not own the name and there were several
Hercules films among the pepla.  For example, there was that
classic HERCULES AGAINST THE MOON MEN.  I know what you are
thinking.  That sounds to you like a silly idea for a film.  The
truth was, no, it was not Hercules fighting actual men from the
moon.  That would be ridiculous.  It was Maciste fighting actual
men from the moon.

In waves the Italian film industry would pick a genre that they
thought would be popular and they would just make dozens of films
in that genre until the market was worn out.  When there was no
more demand for muscleman films they moved on to other genres.  I
seem to remember some spy films that were a sort of an imitation of
James Bond films.  In 1977 and 1978 they re-geared and made a lot
of space opera films.  They had been making them since the early
1960s, but STAR WARS gave them a real boost.  However, what they
eventually made their big genre started in 1964 with A FISTFUL OF
DOLLARS.  That film basically killed the pepla film and directors
like Sergio Leone and Mario Bava who had been making beefcake films
switched to making Westerns or horror films.

But somewhere out there are moldering a bunch of really bad but
fitfully fun films.  I am hoping that Turner Classic Movies brings
more of them back.

					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2008 Mark R. Leeper