Duel of Champions (1961)

 

DUEL OF CHAMPIONS  (1961)  ¢ ¢

    D: Ferdinando Baldi, Terence Young

    Alan Ladd, Franca Bettoja, Jacques Sernas,

    Robert Keith, Andrea Aurel, Jacqueline Derval, 

    Violette Marceau, Franco Fabrizi, Luciano Marin

Who knew that once upon a time, the fate of the Roman Empire was in the hands of Alan Ladd?

Megalopolis (2024)

 

MEGALOPOLIS  (2024)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Francis Ford Coppola 

    Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel,

    Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Talia Shire,

    Jason Schwartzman, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney,

    Chloe Fineman, Balthazar Getty, Dustin Hoffman

Francis Ford Coppola's grandiose hallucination about fashion, architecture, politics, love, time, greed, arrogance, power and just about everything else is a monument to epic ambition and narrative incoherence. Five minutes in, I was hopelessly lost, and nothing happened in the next two hours to change that. My colleague Ms. Applebaum thought drugs might help. I'm not sure about that. 

Salambo (1911)

 

SALAMBO  (1911)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Arturo Ambrosio

    Gigetta Morano, Giovanni Coppo, Oreste Grandi,

    Alberto Capozzi, Ercole Vaser, Maria Bay

Some mercenaries help the Carthaginians fight off the invading Romans, but then the Carthaginians try to cheat the mercenaries out of their payment in gold, which turns out to be a bad idea. Italian filmmakers were the first to realize there was money to be made (and spent) on grandiose historical epics. This one has hundreds of extras, opulent sets and costumes, horses, camels and a lion. You can bet Cecil B. DeMille was watching and taking notes. 

Helen of Troy (1956)

 

HELEN OF TROY  (1956)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Wise

    Rossana Podesta, Jacques Sernas, Cedric Hardwicke,

    Niall MacGinnis, Torin Thatcher, Harry Andrews,

    Brigitte Bardot, Stanley Baker, Robert Douglas,

    Ronald Lewis, Nora Swinburne, Janette Scott

The Trojan War, with massive battle scenes, lavish production design, thousands of extras and a talky script. Oh, and there's a big, wooden horse. You'll need to brush up on your Homer to keep track of all the characters, but there is an on-screen credit for "Bacchanal Choreography," so at least they got that right. Brigitte Bardot has a supporting role as Andraste, Helen's devoted slave, but if you're making a movie about Helen of Troy and Brigitte Bardot's in it, shouldn't Helen be played by Brigitte Bardot?

Intolerance (1916)

 

INTOLERANCE  (1916)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: D.W. Griffith

    Mae Marsh, Constance Talmadge, Robert Harron,

    Lillian Gish, Miriam Cooper, Bessie Love, 

    Margery Wilson, Eugene Pallette, Alfred Paget,

    Josephine Crowell, Elmer Clifton, Seena Owen

Griffith's monumental silent epic chronicles human bigotry through four different historical eras - ancient Babylon, Palestine at the time of Christ, 16th-century France and contemporary America. Incredibly, all four stories are told simultaneously, intercut to show the dramatic and moral parallels between them. One of the great pioneer works in the history of movies, it looks archaic now, partly because of the director's unrestrained romanticism, but more because of Griffith's primal influence on every other filmmaker who followed. No other filmmaker ever made a movie like this.

Sins of Jezebel (1953)

 

SINS OF JEZEBEL  (1953)  ¢ ¢

    D: Reginald Le Borg

    Paulette Goddard, George Nader, Eduard Franz,

    John Hoyt, Ludwig Donath, Margia Dean, Joe Besser

A biblical B movie about a beautiful temptress who entices the weak-willed king of Israel to shift his allegiance to the pagan god Baal. You can bet the Lord God Jehovah isn't going to stand for that, and sure enough, bad things start to happen to the Chosen People. John Hoyt plays the prophet Elijah and an equally ponderous narrator who delivers on-screen exposition from time to time. Eduard Franz plays the besotted king. Joe Besser (of the Three Stooges) plays a chariotmaker and provides what passes for comic relief. Paulette Goddard, then in her 40s (the exact year of her birth is uncertain)), plays the sinful, seductive Jezebel.

Samson and Delilah (1949)

 

SAMSON AND DELILAH  (1949)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Cecil B. DeMille

    Hedy Lamar, Victor Mature, George Sanders,

    Henry Wilcoxon, Angela Lansbury, Olive Deering,

    Fay Holden, Russ Tamblyn, William Farnum,

    George Reeves, Julia Faye, Mike Mazurki

A legendary biblical strongman kills a lion with his bare hands, fights off an army with the jawbone of an ass, falls into the clutches of a Philistine wench, gets a haircut, loses his eyesight, powers a gristmill and finally brings down the house. If the Lord God Jehovah hadn't made all that stuff happen, Cecil B. DeMille would have. And did.

Slaves of Babylon (1953)

SLAVES OF BABYLON  (1953)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: William Castle

    Richard Conte, Linda Christian, Maurice Schwartz,

    Terrance Kilburn, Michael Ansara, Leslie Bradley,

    Ruth Storey, John Crawford, Julie Newmar

Before he made all those gimmicky, low-budget horror movies, William Castle directed this storybook biblical epic based on the Book of Daniel. It doesn't look too bad, despite the fact that Castle wasn't exactly Cecil B. DeMille and had to get by with a cast of dozens rather than thousands. Richard Conte, who didn't do a lot of period movies, manages to keep a straight face most of the time, though his Jersey City accent slips through now and then, suggesting that maybe he's not from ancient Babylon, after all. The six-pointed stars the slaves all wear have a particular resonance in a film released less than a decade after the end of World War Two.

The Colossus of Rhodes (1961)

THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES  (1961)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Sergio Leone
    Rory Calhoun, Lea Massari, Georges Marchal,
    Conrado San Martin, Ángel Aranda, Mabel Karr
A few years before he went to Spain to make westerns with Clint Eastwood, Sergio Leone directed and co-wrote this sand-and-sandal epic about a slave revolt in the Mediterranean in the third century B.C. Rory Calhoun channels Victor Mature as a Greek war hero who just wants to get back home but ends up joining the rebellion instead. The climax has a lighting storm, an earthquake and the final battle between the slaves and the invading Phoenicians happening all at once. Sergio's budget apparently didn't cover the Phoenician ships. They're mentioned in the script - a thousand of them - but you never see them on the screen. 

Sodom and Gomorrah (1962)

SODOM AND GOMORRAH  (1962)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Aldrich
    Stewart Granger, Pier Angeli, Anouk Aimee,
    Stanley Baker, Rossana Podestà, Rik Battaglia
The Lord God Jehovah smites the Sodomites for being sinful, because if there's one thing the Big Guy hates, it's folks being sinful, and if there's one thing He loves, it's a good smiting. So what I want to know is, if Lot's wife turns into a pillar of salt for looking back at the city, and if we're seeing what she's seeing when she does that, shouldn't we be getting salt-pillarized, too? It'd make sense, right? Just wonderin'.

Spartacus (1960)

SPARTACUS  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Stanley Kubrick
    Kirk Douglas, Jean Simmons, Laurence Olivier,
    Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, Tony Curtis,
    Woody Strode, John Gavin, John Ireland,
    Nina Foch, Charles McGraw, John Dall,
    Herbert Lom, John Hoyt, Harold J. Stone
The movie Kirk Douglas seems likely to be remembered for, a literate, emotionally satisfying epic about the slave revolt against Rome in 73 B.C. Between them, director Stanley Kubrick, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and producer/star Douglas fill the picture with action, humor and romance, while maintaining a level of intelligence and a passionate sense of purpose that big-budget films sometimes lose track of. The scope is massive (Douglas hired 8,000 men from the Spanish army to stage the climactic battle scene), but the focus invariably centers on the everyday workings of human life. A persuasive argument for both the 70mm process and the continued preservation of older movies. (The restored print contains a now-famous exchange between Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis that didn't make the cut in 1960.) Anybody who doesn't consider Jean Simmons one of the screen's great beauties has obviously never seen "Spartacus".

Kirk Douglas

(1916-2020)

Hannibal (1959)

HANNIBAL  (1959)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Edgar G. Ulmer
    Victor Mature, Rita Gam, Gabriele Ferzetti,
    Rik Battaglia, Milly Vitale, Franco Silva
The Great Victor plays the Carthaginian general who famously terrorized Rome by bringing elephants over the Alps. Mature might look (and act) like a figure in a wax museum, but he had the advantage of not taking himself too seriously, and, anyway, somebody had to play Hannibal, so why not Victor Mature?

Barabbas (1961)

BARABBAS  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    Richard Fleischer
    Anthony Quinn, Silvana Mangano, Arthur Kennedy,
    Katy Jurado, Harry Andrews, Vittorio Gassman,
    Valentina Cortese, Jack Palance, Ernest Borgnine
If there's such a thing as a biblical film noir, it's probably this: a speculation on what might've happened to the thief who got reprieved when Christ was sentenced to death. Spared from the gallows for reasons he can never understand, Barabbas becomes convinced he can't be killed, and he does survive an awfully long time, through 20 years as a slave in a Sicilian sulfur mine, gladiatorial combat in the arena and the burning of Rome, till he finally meets his own death, ironically, by crucifixion. Anthony Quinn plays Barabbas as a dark, tortured soul, and darkness, both visual and metaphorical, is a key element in the story. (The recreation of Christ's crucifixion was filmed during a solar eclipse.) Christopher Fry wrote the script from the novel by Pär Lagerkvist, and the mournful main theme (for Catholics who remember the ancient musical past) is the Kyrie from Mass XI. It's a brooding, compelling film with a protagonist who's impulsively violent and barely articulate, which makes it a departure from most Hollywood biblical epics. Like some other historical figures, Barabbas inhabits the shadows, a minor player remembered for his accidental role in a brief, pivotal moment recorded in a line or two of biblical text. When he steps out into the light, he's blinded by it. In the darkness, he's right at home. 

Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World (1961)

SAMSON AND THE SEVEN MIRACLES OF THE WORLD  (1961)  ¢ ¢
    D: Riccardo Freda
    Gordon Scott, Yoko Tani, Hélène Chanel,
    Dante DiPaolo, Gabriele Antonini, Chu Lai Chit
The legendary strongman, roaming the Far East for reasons that are never explained, helps Chinese rebels fight off the invading Mongols. In the interest of concise storytelling, the movie skips most of the seven miracles, but a well-oiled, musclebound Caucasian in a loincloth passing unnoticed through a crowded Chinese city in broad daylight has to qualify as some sort of miracle, don't you think?

Gettysburg (1993)

GETTYSBURG  (1993)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ronald F. Maxwell
    Tom Berenger, Jeff Daniels, Martin Sheen,
    Sam Elliott, Richard Jordan, Stephen Lang,
    C. Thomas Howell, Kevin Conway, Andrew Prine,
    Richard Anderson, George Lazenby, John Diehl
Ted Turner's storybook recreation of the Civil War battle captures the scope of the clash and some of the strategy, while sidestepping its colossal savagery. (Almost as many Americans died at Gettysburg as in the entire Vietnam War. That's a lot of severed limbs and screaming men and corpses on the battlefield.) The acting's quite good, despite a script that favors speech-making over conversation. (Jeff Daniels, playing Union Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, could be apologizing for the entire picture when he ends an address to a group of mutinous soldiers by remarking, "I didn't mean to preach.") Daniels, in fact, gives the movie's most believably heroic performance, and Chamberlain's valiant defense of a strategic hill is the film's most exciting sustained sequence. Martin Sheen looks troubled as Robert E. Lee, the brilliant, charismatic Confederate commander whose misguided stubbornness (and incomplete scouting reports) determined the battle's outcome. (The Confederate charge into the center of the Union line on the last day is sheer suicide, but nobody outranks Lee, and nobody can counteract Lee's command.) The battle scenes are more picturesque than bloody - any movie that depicted the war's real carnage would probably be unwatchable - and the second-unit work looks a little sloppy, with some reenactors standing idly by while others catch bayonets and musket balls a few feet away. But on its own romanticized terms, "Gettysburg" is a significant accomplishment, an illuminating epic that brings history to life and holds your attention, speeches and all, for most of its four-and-a-half-hour running time.

Richard Anderson

(1926-2017)

The Conqueror (1956)

THE CONQUEROR  (1956)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Dick Powell
    John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendariz,
    Agnes Moorehead, Thomas Gomez, John Hoyt,
    William Conrad, Leslie Bradley, Lee Van Cleef
The Mongols take on the Tartars, with John Wayne as Genghis Khan. The production values aren't bad, but the script's a legendary clunker, and there's nothing the miscast Duke or anybody else can do about that. The results are laughable, and Wayne mostly avoided discussing the film for the rest of his life. Agnes Moorehead plays the great warrior's mother, and if you look closely, you might spot Lee Van Cleef. Unfortunate side note: the movie was shot in the Utah desert, close by (and downwind from) a nuclear test site. A scary percentage of those who worked on it, including Wayne, Hayward and Powell, would die of cancer.

The Last Days of Pompeii (1935)

THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII  (1935)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ernest B. Schoedsack
    Preston Foster, Basil Rathbone, Dorothy Wilson,
    David Holt, Alan Hale, John Wood, Louis Calhern
Vesuvius erupts, and that's not a good thing for those who live in the shadow of the volcano. Also, there's Christ's crucifixion, and if you're wondering what's the connection between Golgotha and Pompeii, it's this: Hollywood. Basil Rathbone plays Pontius Pilate, who turns up in both places, or all three, if you count Hollywood. If you don't think Vesuvius was the work of an angry God, watch how many people get buried in the rubble immediately after they do something really bad. 

Salome (1953)

SALOME  (1953)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: William Dieterle
    Rita Hayworth, Stewart Granger, Charles Laughton,
    Judith Anderson, Cedric Hardwick, Alan Badel,
    Basil Sydney, Maurice Schwartz, Arnold Moss
A sanctimonious biblical epic derived from what little is known about history's most famous striptease artist, the one whose reward for a look at her charms was a head on a plate. Charles Laughton plays the lecherous King Herod, and even he sometimes looks like he'd rather be somewhere else. The movie's really just a long, long lead-up to Rita's veil-dropping dance, which is every bit as discreet as you'd expect it to be, coming in a mainstream product out of 1950s Hollywood. 

Solomon and Sheba (1959)

SOLOMON AND SHEBA  (1959)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: King Vidor
    Yul Brynner, Gina Lollobrigida, George Sanders,
    Marisa Pavan, David Farrar, John Crawford,
    Finlay Currie, Harry Andrews, José Nieto
Yul Brynner (with hair) plays the king of Israel. Gina Lollobrigida (with curves) plays the queen of Sheba. George Sanders (with a wink and a sneer) plays Solomon's jealous, spiteful brother. There are battles and orgies and passion and betrayal and lust, but what really pisses off that Old Testament God is when Solomon decides to let the queen practice her own religion. (Jehovah would've vetoed the First Amendment, for sure.) Tyrone Power, who started out playing Solomon, inconveniently died of a heart attack early on, so Brynner replaced him. (Apparently that's Power in some of the more distant shots.) I'm pretty sure nobody in history ever looked better after a stoning than Gina does here.

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.