PEPLUM

FLESH, BLOOD, SPECTACLE – How Peplum solidified European co-productions.

Growing up in the UK during the 1960’s, the new 70mm epics gave me a taste for big budget spectacle. American studios only provided 3 or 4 a year. While waiting for the next big release, I could always slake my thirst with lower budget European derivatives.

Such movies, some with fading US stars, played as co-features supporting US or British films.

Critics were rarely kind to Sword and Sandal,  dubbed Toga Movies, or Peplum, so named after the Greek and Roman short tunic worn by many characters. The term “peplum”, Latin for the ancient Greek garment ” peplos “, was introduced by snooty French film critics.  My affection for Sword and Sandal is explained here.

Much of Revolt of the Slaves was derived from Italy’s 1948 Fabiola, an early Italian French co-production.

The poster colorized the black and white photography, but the production scale attracted Hollywood.

Quo Vadis would be filmed in color in Rome in 1950, followed by Attila (1954)  starring Anthony Quinn in the title role, and introducing Sophia Loren to mainstream American audiences.

Significant Hollywood stars were now accepting well paid roles in Italian productions. Kirk Douglas had a sold hit with Ulysses.

With the multi award winner Ben Hur in 1959, Rome became Europe’s major production center

What caused the Peplum genre to catch on in English language cinemas was Hercules Unchained, which starred American body builder and Mr. Universe winner Steve Reeves.  .

Spectacle, violence, gorgeous women, mighty men!  Cultural Manna from Heaven to a fourteen year old like myself when it opened in the August school holidays.

It became the third most popular movie at the British box office in 1960.  In America, Hercules Unchained opened in 200 theaters, grossed 500K in one week, finally delivering 10 million at the box office. The body builder craze of the 1950’s had found perfect expression in Peplum and a new genre was born. A flood of Hercules titles followed. Some incorporated elements of science fiction and horror..

A subset of the muscle man craze were Gladiator movies. The Spartacus slave rebellion had been the subject of several Italian films in the 1920’s & 30’s. Pioneer Peplum writer director Ricardo Freda made his version in 1953, in black and white.  It was released in the US as Sins of Rome, poorly dubbed and cut by 40 minutes. Universal Studios later bought all rights and existing copies of Freda’s film to prevent a re-release that could dilute profits from the forthcoming Kirk Douglas production of Spartacus. Freda’s version vanished for 30 years.

The 1960 box office success of both Hercules and  Spartacus triggered a wave of new gladiator movies.

After a glut of Hercules and Gladiator titles, new  heroes were minted, some mythologcally sourced, others from popular fiction. Maciste ( born of rock), an Italian nickname for Hercules, was a hero of 27 Italian silent films, starting with Cabiria in 1913, an epic of Hannibal’s invasion of Rome, in which Maciste, a  huge slave with unexplained strength, rescues the innocent girl of the title Cabiria.

Between 1958 – 1964, Italy made 25 more Maciste movies, where the muscular hero overthrew tyrants across the Mediterranean.

US distributors renamed the unfamiliar sounding Maciste variously: Ursus, Samson  Goliath, Atlas, Colossus, depicting giants with rippling muscles.

By the end of the cycle (1966), Peplum’s heroes were operating in a variety of historical periods. No legenday figure was off limits: Ali Baba, Julius Caesar,  Theseus, Perseus, Achilles, Cleopatra, the Three Musketeers, Zorro, Morgan the Pirate, Sandokan the Great. Even Robin Hood.

Vitorio Cottafavi, director of several Peplum, described the approach as ” Neo-mythologism”.

Peplum has been satirized by Mystery Theater 3000, amongst others. An Australian movie, Hercules Returns, explored the comic possibilities of cinema staff having to live – dub an Italian print into English.

By 1965 the body builder craze had faded. Audiences wanted a change of costume The hero traded his sword for a gun.  Peplum paved the way for Spaghetti Westerns, and Euro Spy then Euro Crime and Giallo.

Peplum’s success was a key accelerant to European Co-Productions, demonstrating a successful business model of collaborative trade behavior between countries. In a way, it was a proof of concept for the EU; the shape of things to come.

A deep dive into Peplum would make a fascinating series.

What follows would be my approach.  Working title:

Flesh, Blood & A Fistful of Dollars! 

A Clip Show/dramatized documentary series: 6 x 30 minutes for streaming.

In essence, the show is a wild ride through the eye-candy store of the “Peplum” movie cycle and the genre hybrids which created production centers in Rome and Madrid.

The pioneer of post war Peplum was Riccardo Freda. He directed 47 movies and wrote 43 screenplays across multiple genres . He made only one western.

Riccardo Freda was born in Alexandria, Egypt, of wealthy Italian parents. Before moving at age 14 to Milan for education, he grew up watching silent movies alongside highly vocal Arab audiences. Their emotional reaction to the storytelling influenced his style and choice of material.  As Freda recalled in his autobiography, ” The Egyptians gesticulated, shouted and cursed the outlaws on the screen, shaking their fists in the air. For a kid, It was an incredible sight. I very quickly realized the magical impact of cinema on the audience. ”  Initially Freda became a sculptor, then a newspaper art critic, before entering the Italian film industy in 1937, as a writer. He began directing in 1942, with Don Cesare De Bazan.

When Mussolini’s regime fell,  the Allies saw the wisdom of supporting Italian cinema to maintain social cohesion.  Freda was soon working. While directors Vitorio De Sica, Roberto Rossollini, Luchino Visconti pioneered Neo-Realist Cinema with stories of the hard lives of ordinary people in post war Italy, Freda was drawn to the swashbucklers and historical dramas he had seen growing up.

The Black Eagle, released in 1946,  was based on the  Alexander Pushkin’s unfinished 1832 Russian novel Dubrovsky.

In 1948 he again turned to classic literature, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.

Revenge of Black Eagle, a sequel to The Black Eagle,  was in essence a James Bond movie in 18th Century dress. Sword fights, a lavish Imperial ball, a bear hunt in the snow, and a breakneck chase on sleighs demonstated Freda’s flair for action and spectacle.  In 1948’s war weary Europe, it was just what audiences wanted and it established Freda’s brand. A grisly torture scene foreshadows the day when Freda finally left the swashbuckling genre to become via Vampiri and The Horrible Doctor Hitchcock the first pioneer of Italian horror.

Freda’s first color movie Theodora, Slave Empress in 1954 is available on Utube in Italian without subtitles, cut to 88 minutes by the US distributor prior to poor  English dubbing, but its stylish visualization is evident.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUao1oxhEN4

The chariot race, (@ 35 minutes) impressed Hollywood. The sequence served as the visual template for the 1959 Ben Hur chariot race.

Freda’s career provides a road map for a series on Peplum, showing  how this particular sub-genre solidified European co-production treaties. The show would be packed with clips, supported by sections on Mario Bava, a director Freda mentored, and on Freda’s friends and competitors – Vittorio Cottafavi, Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, Umberto Lenzi, Enzo G Castellari, followed by Dario Argento.

Peplum provides a window into the early careers of top producers Carlo Ponti and Dino de Laurentiis.

For comparison: Titans of Hollywood, the  6 part Apple TV series about the competing moguls who built Hollywood.  I found it visually repetitive, due to a lack of clips, and using one location for all re-enactments. Though it wasted the potential of its subject matter, the show none the less drew a world wide streaming audience.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22245664/

What I have in mind has the depth, humor, and visual energy of Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood, the iconic documentary on Ozploitation.

Like NQH, the show will have an abundance of clips full of spectacle, meyhem, glamor, comedy, and be supported by animated artwork, archival interviews, with actors portraying the key figures speaking anecdotally from their memoirs. An Italian actor, known to European broadcast audiences, should play the key character of Riccardo Freda. Some stories will trigger reenactments.  These comedy/drama vignettes illustrate a variety of issues: work practices, personality conflicts, industrial relations.

Re-enactments

These would be staged in economically created sets on the virtual stage, using period movie equipment and crew as background.  Integration of actors playing directors or stars into  backgrounds captured from each designated film is planned. For instance, Sergio Leone would be integrated into backgrounds captured  from The Colossus of Rhodes.

Reenactments would be dramatized with key figures recalling significant moments taken from their recorded statements about a variety of issues.

One of the sub themes running through the series will be a celebration of the movie technology of the day. These vignettes can reflect the practical challenges of low budget spectacle, and visual effects.

Notable re-enactment moments:

Imagine: the safety meeting with actors, camera team and stuntmen before shooting the subterranean horse stampede in Theodora, Slave Empress, Freda’s first film in color.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUao1oxhEN4

@ 1.24 check out this somewhat dangerous sequence for the actors, stunt men, and horses, and imagine a scene in which Riccado Freda briefs the crew and his wife, co star Gianna Maria Canale, in avoiding horses and fire.

One of the sub themes running through the series will be a celebration of the movie technology of the day; short vignettes that reflect the practical challenges of low budget spectacle and stuntwork.

Another re-enactment is the firing of Hollywood star John Derek ( Joshua in  De Mille’s 1956 The Ten Commandments) by new director Sergio Leone on Day 1 of  The Colossus of Rhodes.  How did Leone and his producer persuaded MGM to approve John Derek’s replacement by Rory Calhoun, a star of B- Westerns, and had Calhoun working within 24 hours?

Rory Calhoun happened to be in Rome that day. Unlike other Peplum leading men, he declined to shave his armpits.

Another segment will deconstruct Robert Aldrich’s The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah (1962), a troubled production that almost bankrupted a major Italian studio. Weather delays, sets burned down, political upheavals in Morocco, plus Pier Angeli telling one time lover and now co star Stewart Granger that she was going to sleep with every attractive man in the cast and crew except him.

A complimentary reenactment would feature Robert Aldrich firing co- director Sergio Leone and Leone’s response. These European posters show Leone’s role, subsequently modified in US credits as 2nd Unit director.

One segment of the show would cover Peplum vs. censorship. The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah received an ‘X’ certificate for release in the UK., rare for Peplum, even after cuts in torture scenes. A provocative dance in front of Anouk Aimee’s lesbian Queen is as far as the sins of Sodom are allowed to be shown.

To maximize box office, UK distributors  needed to get a ‘U’ Certificate from the BBFC, which was stricter on violence than US censors. Action was meant to be  bloodless in ‘U’ certificate releases,  2nd Unit director/cameraman Mario Bava’s excellent battle scenes were trimmed for the UK.  Impalement by flaming spears, and blood flowing underwater from arrow and stab wounds would have given the film an ‘A’ Certificate, denying it holiday playing time.

Bava’s uncut battles can be seen in this 4K render on Utube.

The underwater battle sequence @1.17. was shot by Freda’s ace cinematographer Mario Bava himself, Inspired by the 1926 Douglas Fairbanks silent movie The Black Pirate, Freda’s staging undoubedly influenced Terence Young’s  underwater battle in Thunderball. Freda mentored Mario Bava, helping Bava’s move to director’s chair, with his ground breaking Masque Du Demon/Black Sunday, banned  in the UK for a decade.

It could be said that Riccardo Freda, the pioneer of post war Peplum, was both the hero and the self sabotaging villain in his own story.

As a former art critic with considerable self esteem,  Freda was freely critical of  films and fellow directors he did not like..  He said he could make an Antonioni film in a week, at a time when Antonioni’s films were at their commercial and critical peak. Freda was strong willed, energetic, assertive, and goal-oriented. His ” notorious” choleric temperament during filming sometimes led to heated arguments, with Freda walking off the set.   He was a paradox, according to Titanus producer Geoffredo Lombardo.  “Freda was very rich at several point in his life. He spent a lot of money on gambling, ladies, and fast cars, the rest he just squandered,”  Despite his controlling nature and volatile temperament, Freda maintained the affection and loyalty of many of his collaborators, including  Gianna Maria Canale, his wife for 10 years and a star in 12 of his movies.

English language audiences  were unaware of Freda’s body of work because US distributors wanted American sounding names in the credits and advertising. Freda was variously credited as “Robert Hampton”, “Dick Jordan”, “George Lincoln” and “Robert Davidson”, etc. The British Film Institute Monthly Bulletin  would nominate the actual Italian director behind the pseudonym. As I saw more and more Peplum during the early 1960’s, the visual flair of four directors stood out Mario Bava, Sergio Leone (uncredited for The Last Days of Pompeii) and Riccado Freda. I noticed Freda’s mobile camera style and his fondness for lateral tracking shots.

Freda was an ” auteur ” at a time when the term was beginning to be coined. Italian critics dismissed the spectacle and technical values of his work as entertainment for the masses, though  French critics subsequently dubbed him ” the Raoul Walsh of European cinema.” As Freda himself put it:  “I was too American for the Italians, and too Italian to make movies in America.”

Freda’s contribution to Peplum and European post war cinema is featured in a number of books, and cinema journals. In Geoffedo Lombardo’s opinion, Freda could have been a Visconti or a Fellini if one of his films had been a hit in America, rather than Europe. “He had the talent, but he did not have Visconti’s luck.”

Six half hour episodes of Flesh, Blood and A Fistful of Dollars would be economical to produce, and entertain a worldwide audience of movie fans.