The 300 Spartans (1962)

THE 300 SPARTANS  (1962)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Rudolph Maté
    Richard Egan, Diane Baker, Ralph Richardson,
    Barry Coe, Donald Houston, David Farrar
When King Xerxes of Persia invades Greece with an army of 20 thousand, Richard Egan and a few hundred Spartan warriors head him off at the pass. A straightforward retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, and a fairly typical early-'60s sand-and-sandal epic. The battle scenes are clumsy and you never get a coherent sense of the terrain, but in its storybook simplicity, it's at least as entertaining as some later, more ambitious movies dealing with ancient Greece. If you sat through Oliver Stone's "Alexander", you know what I mean.