Swords, Sandals,and Fun
King, Florence
Florence King Swords, Sandals, and Fun JON SOLOMON'S THE ANCIENT WORLD IN THE CINEMA his book may sound like a doctoral dissertation but it doesn't read like one. Jon Solomon, a classics...
...Here the reverence centers on two time-honored conventions of the form: the deus ex machina and the chorus...
...I can't remember when I've enjoyed a book as much as this one...
...Any age, any place that already '~: pointy-bearded tyrant with a boasted of a hero or desperately need~ ~ ~ i i ! ! i i i ! ~ pointy-breasted mistress" He him- ed one was fair game for Italian film...
...In fact, some viewers would no doubt claim that the film was inauthentic...
...In any case,"whether one laughs at it or laughs with it, it can be entertaining, [and] this is what movies are for, sometimes" Jon Solomon is that rarity in academe, a down-to-earth intellectual who is secure enough in his own erudition to offer refreshing respect where it is due, and to criticize without sounding obnoxious...
...The discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1924 during the heyday of silent movies secured what was to be Hollywood's longest-lasting marriage...
...He always out of sync, and jarring trans...
...The hero throws them all off ramparts and balconies, or breaks their necks in a full nelson with his 19-inch biceps...
...Commodus suggests that he would have been a better human if his father had loved him, and Marcus Aurelius admits that his son's faults are the failure of a neglectful father...
...historical accuracy, or even historical ' His nemesis is a sanity...
...This overindulgence in touchy-feely sentiments distorts history...
...Unfortunately, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) was caught in the undertow of the moral and financial debacle of Liz Taylor's Cleopatra (1963), which gave sword-and-sandal movies a bad name...
...s olomon's tongue-in-cheek description of the typical entry is hilarious...
...In matters of historical authenticity the author comes down on the side of common sense...
...Now there's no one left except the pointy-bearded tyrant, who more often than not is dispatched by falling, or Mongols, and even Incans (Hercules Against the Sons of the Sun...
...Many people today dismiss ancient history as "ancient history," but it was all the rage a hundred years ago when movies began...
...Alan Ladd in Duel of Champions...
...she looks more apt to devour him in one bite...
...Bad as Muscleman Movies are, Solomon finds some good things to say about them...
...as the wellspring i:~i of a universally ~iii...
...Lucilla might also take the throne, but her main concern is for her son Lucius Veras...
...Greek myths are "flexible, dynamic tales changed and adjusted by every storyteller, songster, and poet" so low-budget producers are merely doing what has been done through the ages...
...From that day forward the sword-and-sandals genre, as well as its biblical division, tits-and-sand, would never leave the screen...
...their cameras on the Mediterranean . . . . . ~i~~ T h e fir s t...
...Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, wherein Agamemnon becomes Ezra Mannon, a Civil War hero returning home to be murdered in New England, with commentary supplied by a chorus of taciturn Yankees...
...i:ii:::<:~!i big Cleopatra movie ~' in 1908 starred stage great Maurice Costello as Antony...
...Leaving such details to those he calls "Ph.D.'d scholars," he goes on an tOOK REVIEW1 erudite romp through 400 "sword-andsandal" movies, examining such wideranging topics as when historical accuracy is important and when it is disastrous, why moviemakers are forced to "deGreek" Greek tragedies, and what Roman empress's name became the modern Italian word for "chesty...
...He also looks after the innocent, chesty girlfriend while the hero is away on one of his escapades...
...The aphorism was to the ancient world what the one-liner or the wisecrack are to modern-day America...
...Combine these problems with the inherent qualities of Greek tragedy--the lovers...
...Solomon and Sheba is worth seeing because "No one ever played Oriental despots and kings likeYul Brynner," but he chews the scenery over the ending, which has Sheba converting to Judaism...
...There isn't a single supercilious sneer in it..K Yale University Press, 368 pages, cloth: $40...
...Hercules goes everywhere and chesty girlfriend with a (Hercules in New York) and knows...
...Some of his other b&es noires include the casting of Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah: "When this powerful, physical Hebrew is portrayed by the wellmannered, thin-framed, Oxfordian Stewart Granger, the effect is likelier to inspire laughter than awe...
...The author prefers the modern-dress Phaedra (1962) with Melina Mercouri and Tony Perkins...
...They create lovely gifts and then turn them into wives...
...The New Testament eliminates both of these challenges but creates its own special tension between divinity and humanity...
...Solomon believes that authenticity can also be served in small ways that impart the flavor of antiquity, such as the use of aphorisms...
...Late 19th-century culture was awash in antiquity, from serious works such as The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert, and Oscar Wilde's controversial play, Salome, to popular reading fare such as Quo Vadis ?, CivilWar General Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur, and a short story that threw the entire country into a state Of unbearable suspense, "The Lady or the Tiger...
...Imbuing the Christ character with divine ethereality leads to "the type of cheap piety at which many people in a crowded theater are apt to laugh...
...He much prefers an earlier movie set in the same period, The Fall of the Roman Empire, which contains "one of the most atmospheric sets ever used in an historical movie...the icy winter fortress in the barbarized European province [modern Austria] gives us the lonely sense of exile to the ends of civilization...
...Nonetheless, Perkins brings to his awkward role the bizarre intellect and psychological introspection characteristic of his many early roles...
...o er He must have a fight with 'a virgin_~ devouring or Hell-guarding beast, and a Fulvia, who is adept at virtuously bathing his wounds (generally only flesh wounds on the shoulder...
...Biblical movies present the biggest challenge because audiences already know the stories and have visualized the scenes in their imaginations...
...dubbing that is and throw at the rest...
...by Frank Stanton...
...Drawn to their own heritage, and with plenty of Mediterranean scenery for the asking, they had first made their mark in 1957 with the low-budget Hercules starring Steve Reeves...
...Known as "The Test," it might be a chariot race, a wrestling match with some large, semihuman brute, a gladiatorial fight with a giant (one character must have a shaved head and it's usually the giant gladiator), or a battle with lions, gorillas, or crocodiles...
...self has "a charmingly innocent makers...
...Too much bland reverence yields a dramatic void...
...The actual The hero always has a loyal companion who is either almost as manly and meaty as himself, or else a wimpy beta male who can't throw doors but is adept at poking enemies in the behind with his dagger...
...T he conflict between reverence and authenticity takes a secular turn in the filming of classical Greek tragedies...
...She is usually blond, even if she is Egyptian, Greek, or Armenian...
...Clothing a serene, emotionless actor in white robes and crucifying him amid the gentle tears of women" may yield spiritual satisfaction, "but without the banter of the dicethrowing Roman soldiers the scene will not work...
...The moviegoing public was veni-ed, vidi-ed, and vici-ed out, but the genre was kept alive for the next decade by Italian producers...
...They make "improbable Lucilla was so ambitious that she was exiled and then executed, and Marcus Aurelius took Commodus with him on campaigns and entrusted him with important tasks, while Maximus, an invented character, is completely out of chronological sync...
...It cost $120,000 to make and earned $18 million, so with no competition from the bigwigs in the post-Cleopatra hiatus, they filled the gap with Muscleman Movies...
...farmer-turned-general who was twice offered the dictatorship of Rome but turned it down to return to farming...
...Greece and Rome were u n i v e r s a 11 y...
...Her counterpart, the evil mistress of the pointy-bearded tyrant, has dark hair, a lizard's eyes, the charm of a snake, and the hots for the hero" The hero always has a loyal companion who is either almost as manly and meaty as himself, or else a wimpy beta male who can't throw doors but is adept at poking enemies in the behind with his dagger...
...When authenticity is ignored to this extent, "the costumes begin to look silly...
...perfectly constructed plots, the austere settings, the unthinkable events unfolding alongside the prohibition of on-stage violence-and nothing resembling a movie can emerge...
...Religious belief was so widespread that even uneducated people knew the Bible inside out, and best of" all, there was no multiculturalism to worry about...
...As its name implies, the Greek chorus did what all choruses do: sang and danced...
...acknowledged...
...or to throw at his dozen or so opponents, The dialogue consists of the ever:least one of whom he will pick up present "by the Gods...
...Jon Solomon, a classics professor at the University of Arizona, is not one of those pedantic nitpickers who is put off his popcorn by an incorrectly belted tunic or a XVIdynasty headdress on an XV-dynasty mummy...
...The result...
...Maximus is offered the throne of the empire but prefers to return home to his wife and son...
...paper: $22.50 Florence King writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...The hero must engage in a wrestling match to show off his Mr...
...Virginia Mayo in Revolt of the Mercenaries...
...Of the two halves of the Bible, the Old Testament is the harder to film, says Solomon, because the main character is invisible and the miracles "often involve the disruption of the whole planet...
...At the same time, however, "Historical authenticity cannot be allowed to interfere with dramatic necessity or with the traditional understanding of certain biblical events...
...The 1961 King of Kings with Jeffrey Hunter as Christ inspired one critic to dub it "I Was a Teenage Jesus" but Solomon praises it for its fidelity to The Histories of Josephus...
...portrayed Christ, eat and sleep alone for the duration of the filming, only to find that the enforced solitude activated Warner's old drinking problem...
...Although historians know that crucifixion victims had to carry only the horizontal beam of their crosses, changing such familiar iconography can cause shock and uneasiness in some viewers...
...He is patterned on Cincinnams, the 5th-cenmry B.C...
...moviemakers focused...
...Universe build...
...It was also a time of high standards in education, when "Latin through Cicero," the old five-year course, was a high school staple...
...name like Andromeda, Iole, or everybody~Samson, Ulysses, Druids, Solomon, superimposes modern sensitivity and Roman Republican virtues onto the Roman Empire of the second century A.D...
...Equally ridiculous is RAta Hayworth's Salome, who does the Dance of the Seven Veils to save John the Baptist from beheading...
...He didn't like it and takes issue with its "21st-century bias," specifically its trendy emphasis on family values...
...revered Western civ- " .. ilization, so it's no :; wonder that early...
...To lend their efforts a modicum of class, Italian producers always hired a well-known English-speaking actor, either someone distinguished, such as Orson Welles (Saul in David and Goliath), or Robert Morley (Potiphar in Joseph and His Brethren), or else a once-famous American movie star whose career was in decline: Cornel Wilde in Constantine and the Cross...
...In the first, having a god suddenly appear on-stage to sort out everyone's problems would destroy all efforts at realism...
...The solution...
...It's a fine line but Solomon dons his location-scout hat and draws it: Utah with its towering buttes makes a better Judea than the actual but less imposing site" "If Giotto could paint imaginary and inauthentic scenery for his New Testament paintings, why shouldn't moviemakers do the same...
...The Ancient World in the Cinema was originally published in 1978 but Solomon has updated this edition to include his analysis of this year's Oscar-winning Gladiator, set in the second-century reigns of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus...
...The companion always fails at this task and the girl is captured by the pointy-bearded tyrant's soldiers, but fortunately she has "a pipsqueaky little brother who bites his way to freedom and runs to tell the hero that she is about to be ravaged by the pointy beard" To free her, the hero must perform a feat dreamed up by the pointy-bearded tyrant...
...screenwriter George St...
...For some inexplicable reason" writes Solomon, "once all the authentic color and costumes are added to a Greek play on film, the psychological horror behind the murders and the matricide tend to lose some of their primordial impact...
...The painter needed all the figures to face out, but movie characters cannot converse if they are all seated on the same side of the table...
...The author's watchword for all religious movies is "Render unto cinema what belongs to cinema...
...Remove the Greekness...
...Moreover, it is a tension that need not wait for the movie's release before it makes itself felt.When Cecil B. DeMille directed King of Kings in 1927, he made H. B. Warner, the actor who /v" . ~:s i84184184 : 5...
...1 also throws paving lations of ancient-sounding maxims ~ ~// stones, trees, columns, ("He who eats alone, chokes alone...
...ii...
...wine tuns, and vats of oil The script writers pay no attention to ~, I~ on fallen torches...
...The most famous of the early Cleopatras was a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn named Theodosia Goodman, who as Theda Bara inspired the observation,"One costume cost $1,000 but Theda wore only ten cents' worth...
...It was his farm, not his wife and children, that Cincinnatus missed...
...Transforming them into robed and bearded elders speaking in unison is like filming Top Hat without the dancing and having Fred Astaire recite the lyrics to "I'm Putting on my Top Hat...
...He also takes exception to Robert Ryan as John the Baptist, who seems more like "a pious preacher from Ohio" than a man crying in the wilderness...
...94 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 June 2001...
...In the second, it is impossible to render the chorus in its original form without distracting the audience...
...On the other hand, he o objects to the "DaVinci syndrome" in = < the seating arrangements at the Last _~ 92 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 June 2001 Supper...
...George coined several originals for The 300 Spartans, e.g.,"Who can understand the ways of the gods...
...What he objects to is the trial scene showing Christ being represented by a Roman lawyer, which "undermines the meaning and purpose of the Passion...
...his firm rejection of power in favor of the simple life of the soil is what made him a paragon of virtue to latterday republican idealists like the Founding Fathers, who would not have understood or respected the modern politician's showy emotional need to "spend more nine with my family"To portray the character of Maximus in this way, says THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 June 2001 93 fight in an inn to provide him with an more likely, being thrown, into his own eight-foot solid oak table to use as a shield, crocodile pit...
Vol. 34 • June 2001 • No. 5
