Lava Affairs

Recent entertainment news report a renewed interest in sword-and-sandal motion pictures, a genre originally popularized in Italian-made muscleman epics of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Brett Ratner, the director of the "Rush Hour" films, as well as "X-Men: The Last Stand" and "Tower Heist," is reportedly developing a "Hercules" movie to star Dwayne Johnson, while Angelina Jolie is rumored as a possibility to portray Cleopatra in a future production.

Kiefer Sutherland recently joined the cast of a project currently titled "Pompeii," a 3-D epic centered on  the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, a filmmaker best known for putting Milla Jovovich (and her active stunt double) through the paces as a distaff action figure in the "Resident Evil" franchise (not to mention the recent 3-D "The Three Musketeers"). Sutherland’s costars include Emily Browning (Babydoll in "Sucker Punch"), Kit Harrington (Jan Snow in HBO’s "Game of Thrones"), Jared Harris (son of the late actor Richard Harris who played General Ulysses S. Grant in Steven Spielberg’s "Lincoln"), and Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity in the "Matrix" films). The director’s muse, Jovovich, is, to date, nowhere in sight, but there is a dread in the moviehouse that Anderson will dumb down the title by spelling it "Pompey."

On the topic of volcanic eruptions, Italy’s Mount Etna made its volatile presence known in the 1914 Italian silent film "Cabiria," set in ancient Sicily and Carthage during the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC). Regarded as the granddaddy of sword-and-sandal cinema, the melodrama introduced a massively muscled Roman slave called Maciste, portrayed by a bulky stevedore named Bartolomeo Pagano who was discovered while working at the port of Genoa. Pagano played the same character in a series of sequels for fourteen years and even legally changed his name to Maciste.

Bartolomeo Pagano as Maciste in "Cabiria" (1914)

Flash-forward three decades, and we come to Steve Reeves, a Montana-born winner of five bodybuilding championships (including Mr. America, Mr. World, and Mr. Universe) and occasional Hollywood extra (including "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell) who catapulted to international stardom in the back-to-back Italian productions "Hercules" and "Hercules Unchained" in the late 1950s.

Steve Reeves as Hercules

Springboarding from the phenomenal box-office success of the "Hercules" films, sword-and-sandal adventures glutted the Italian movie industry until being replaced in the mid-1960s by the insatiable hunger for Spaghetti Westerns. In an attempt to compete with, or, at least, emulate such big-budget spectacles as "Samson and Delilah," "Quo Vadis," "Ben-Hur" and "Spartacus," the Italian epics embraced Biblical tales, ancient Egypt, Greek mythology, Roman gladiators, invading barbarians, Vikings, and pirates.

Buddy Baer as Ursus in "Quo Vadis"

Steve Reeves would star in at least a dozen more sword-and-sandal films from 1959 to 1964. Meanwhile, the aforementioned character of Maciste resurfaced in several Italian movies of the 1960s, although the name, unfamiliar in the U.S., was often changed for American release to Hercules, Samson, Ulysses, Atlas, Goliath, Colossus, or Ursus, the latter based on the imposing Christian slave in ancient Rome in the 1951 film "Quo Vadis" (based on the creaky 1896 novel).

Peter Lupus

Dan Vadis

Besides Steve Reeves, among the Hollywood expatriates who emigrated overseas for muscle-bound celebrity, if only briefly, was Peter Lupus, who starred in a handful of Herculean tasks using the name "Rock Stevens" before landing a stateside gig as a regular on TV’s "Mission: Impossible." Dan Vadis, a former U.S. Navy sailor and member of Mae West’s Musclemen Revue in the late 1950s, starred in several sword-and-sandal films, then drifted into Spaghetti Westerns before hooking up with Clint Eastwood in "High Plains Drifter," "The Gauntlet," "Bronco Billy," "Every Which Way But Loose," and "Any Which Way You Can."

"The Sons of Hercules" was a syndicated television series that aired in the Saturday afternoons of our youth on a Twin Cities TV program called "Epic Theatre." The series repackaged and retitled any of a number of Italian musclemen-in-togas sagas featuring a new voice-over introduction attempting to connect the hero, no matter how desperately, to Hercules and book-ended with a snappy unifying opening and end credits theme song:

"The Mighty Sons of Hercules
Once thundered through the years;
These men of steel could never feel
The curse of a coward’s fears!

The Mighty Sons of Hercules
Were men as men should be;
They burned with dreams and turned their dreams
Into history!"

Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan

In 1982, the box-office success of "Conan the Barbarian," starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, initiated a brief renaissance of sword-and-sandal pictures. Schwarzenegger unsheathed his mighty Atlantean sword again in "Conan the Destroyer" and "Red Sonja," the latter costarring Brigitte Nielsen (a hulking presence on reality TV’s "The Surreal Life" and "Celebrity Rehab with Dr, Drew").

Lou Ferrigno as Hercules

Meanwhile, Lou Ferrigno, Schwarzenegger’s onetime bodybuilding rival and costar of the late 1970s TV series "The Incredible Hulk," went to Rome to star in "Hercules" (1983), "The Adventures of Hercules" (1984), and "Seven Magnificent Gladiators" (1985). Like Steve Reeves before him, his voice was dubbed.

Reeves was, not surprisingly, an idol and role model for both Ferrigno and Schwarzenegger in their youth. When Reeves died in 2000, Schwarzenegger commented, "His remarkable accomplishments allowed me a sense of what was possible, when others around me didn’t always understand my dreams. Steve Reeves has been a part of everything I’ve ever been fortunate enough to achieve."

Kevin Sorbo, Michael Hurst in "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys"

The sword-and-sandal revival of the 1980s led to the popular TV series "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys," starring Kevin Sorbo. The show, which ran from 1995 to 1999, was noted for anachronistic in-jokes and for depicting Hercules in pants. (Michael J. Nelson, onetime host of TV’s "Mystery Science Theater 3000," noted in his book Mike Nelson’s Movie Megacheese, "Perhaps it’s the hair, but [Sorbo] doesn’t look so much like a hero bent on righting wrongs as he does a guy wearing animal print Zubaz cruising around Glendale in his van looking for used stereo gear.")

Ryan Gosling in "Young Hercules"

A single season spin-off, "Young Hercules," featured Ryan Gosling (future star of "Gangster Squad" and "The Place Beyond the Pines") as the youthful demigod…in pants.

Russell Crowe (right) in "Gladiator"

Director Ridley Scott’s "Gladiator" (2000), a retooling of the plotline from the 1964 thinking-person’s epic "The Fall of the Roman Empire," re-energized once again the sword-and-sandal film, this time with exorbitant budgets and special effects, as displayed in "Troy," "300," and "Clash of the Titans." At the same time, cable television series such as HBO’s "Rome" and Starz channel’s "Spartacus" allowed for depictions of gory violence, graphic sex, homoeroticism, and profanity previously unthinkable by Italian studios in the 1960s.

"Spartacus" then (1960) with Woody Strode and Kirk Douglas

"Spartacus" now (2010) with the late Andy Whitfield

For every "Gladiator," "Troy," and "Clash of the Titans," however, there was a "Prince of Persia," "Immortals," and "Wrath of the Titans," disappointments which raise doubts over audience interest in new sword-and-sandal epics about Hercules, Cleopatra, and, in particular, Pompeii.

"The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius" painted in 1817 by J.M.W. Turner

Not surprisingly, Italian silent films were the first motion pictures dramatizing the volcanic destruction of ancient Pompeii, a thriving town near modern Naples, which was buried under fifteen to twenty feet of ash and pumice when Mount Vesuvius erupted on August 24, 79 AD, just one day after Vulcanalia, the festival of the Roman god of fire (including fire from volcanoes). The volcano had been dormant for 1500 years, and as far as the local citizenry knew, Vesuvius was just a hill.

The volcano spewed out more than ten billion tons of pumice, rock, and ash to a height of over twenty miles, at the astonishing rate of one-and-a-half tons per second. Subsequent pyroclastic surges unleashed heat surges of at least 482 degrees Fahrenheit across a distance of over six miles, a hundred thousand times the thermal energy released by the Hiroshima bombing. Pompeii and the neighboring town of Herculaneum, as well as surrounding villas, were destroyed by the pyroclastic flows and the ruins were buried under dozens of feet of rock fragments, which preserved, in situ, several citizens in their death throes (below). Altogether, an estimated 16,000 people perished.

Garden of Fugitives in Pompeii

Mount Vesuvius erupted some three dozen times since and is the only volcano on European mainland to have erupted within the last 100 years, the most recent occurring in 1944. Vesuvius is still regarded as one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes because of the surrounding population of three million.

Mount Vesuvius erupting in 1944

Once very widely read but now virtually neglected, The Last Days of Pompeii was a novel written in 1835 (a year after Vesuvius again erupted) by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, an English baron whose writings coined such phrases as "the great unwashed," "pursuit of the almighty dollar," and "the pen is mightier than the sword," as well as the famous opening line, "It was a dark and stormy night." The book centers on Glaucus, a handsome Athenian nobleman, whose love for the patrician maiden Ione is thwarted by an evil Egyptian sorceror called Arbaces. Add a poor, blind flower girl named Nydia with an unrequited love for Glaucus, throw in a love potion that drives the victim mad, a murder frame-up, lions in the arena, and a last-minute rescue, then cap it off with Vesuvius blowing its top and a heartbreaking sacrifice, and you have the makings of a 19th-century best seller which played upon a widespread British fascination in the 1830s with fantastic natural catastrophes and moral lessons learned from them.

"Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii"
sculpted in 1856 by Randolph Rogers

Bulwer-Lytton was initially inspired by the 1833 painting "The Last Day of Pompeii" by Russian artist Karl Briullov. Sir Walter Scott declared that it was not an ordinary painting but an epic in colors.

"The Last Day of Pompeii" painted in 1833 by Karl Briullov

In 1858, an opera based on Bulwer-Lytton’s novel titled "Jone" (an Italian translation of "Ione") premiered at the world famous opera house La Scala in Milan and was most recently performed in 1981. An ambitious theatrical adaptation of the book was staged in London in 1877 that was supposed to depict the eruption and an earthquake, but the earth did not quake, the volcano failed to erupt, airborne acrobats fell and landed on cast members below, and the production was a flop.

Scene from the 1908 production of "The Last Days of Pompeii"

Not much is known about the 1900 British silent production "The Last Days of Pompeii," but Italian filmmakers subsequently cranked out three silent movies with the same title in 1908, 1913, and 1926. 

Fernanda Negri Pouget as Nydia in "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1913)

There’s little spectacle but plenty of stationary, stage-bound tableaux in the 1913 production, which revolves around the character of the forlorn blind flower peddler and her unrequited love for the cultured aristocrat Glaucus. When it finally arrives, the climactic eruption of Mount Vesuvius is depicted by tinting the film red with scatterings of dirt and dust drifting past the lens and lingering (way too lingering) shots of smoldering foliage.

Scene from the 1926 production of "The Last Days of Pompeii"

The 1926 screen version was remarkable for utilizing actual Pompeiian ruins and for using Pathéchrome, a mechanical stencil-based process of color-tinting frames of film.

One of the tamer surviving wall frescoes from Pompeii

Eighteenth-century excavations of Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum uncovered a number of erotic frescoes and phallic household items (originally deemed pornographic by the excavators), which may have inspired the 1926 film’s depictions of naked slave girls at an orgiastic banquet, statues of bare-breasted sphinxes coming to life, and figures of dancing muses stepping from a fresco on a wall.

In 1935, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper, two adventurous, globe-trotting documentary filmmakers who co-directed the original "King Kong" (1933), focused their fantastical vision on Vesuvius in "The Last Days of Pompeii." The screenplay, written by Ruth Rose (Shoedsack’s wife who also scripted "King Kong," "Son of Kong," and "Mighty Joe Young"), jettisoned Bulwer-Lytton’s plot in favor of a Christian-themed melodrama set in the time of Jesus, centering on Marcus, a humble blacksmith turned by tragedy into an embittered gladiator, portrayed by Preston Foster, a ruggedly built leading man busy in the 1930s into the 1940s.

John Wood, Preston Foster, and Alan Hale with a very flimsy prop sword

The supporting cast features Alan Hale (father of "Gilligan’s Island" Skipper, Alan Hale Jr., and a frequent screen sidekick of Errol Flynn, such as Little John in 1938’s "The Adventures of Robin Hood") as Marcus’ steadfast servant, Basil Rathbone (the screen’s favorite "Sherlock Holmes") as a repentant Pontius Pilate, Louis Calhern (best known as Marilyn Monroe’s sugar daddy in director John Huston’s "The Asphalt Jungle" and for his title role in the 1953 MGM production of Shakespeare’s "Julius Caesar," with Marlon Brando as Mark Antony) as a Roman prefect, and Ward Bond as a gladiator. Bit players included Jason Robards Sr. (father of the Oscar-Emmy-Tony-award-winning actor) as a tax collector and Jim Thorpe (Native American gold medal-winning athlete at the 1912 Olympics) as an arena spectator.

The 1950 French film "Sins of Pompeii"  (above) over-simplified the original novel’s plot but reportedly boasted impressive cinematography, opulent sets, and memorable special effects. It was the last feature film directed by Marcel L’Herbier, renowned for his imaginative work in several silent films of the 1920s.

"SEE the yawning jaws of the flesh-ripping allligator death pit -
the martyred Christians thrown to the gaping fangs of crazed lions -
the Centurion Colossus, in battle with the blood hungry beasts -
the shameless orgy as drunken Pompeii abandons itself to the Goddess Isis -
the pillaging, plundering, black-hooded death riders...
THE VERY SUMMIT OF SPECTACLE!"

The 1959 Italian production of "The Last Days of Pompeii" (produced by Paolo Moffa, who worked with Marcel L’Herbier on the aforementioned "Sins of Pompeii") was initially conceived as a combination of the Christian martyr theme of the 1935 film with the original novel’s emphasis on the evil plotting of Arbaces, the high priest of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Enter Steve Reeves, who, after starring in two "Hercules" pictures, was ready for what he thought would be a dramatic challenge (in preparation for which , he shaved off his Hercules goatee), and suddenly, Glaucus was transformed from a noble Athenian into a Roman centurion, and the result, in the words of The Ancient World in the Cinema author Jon Solomon, was "a muscleman epic from start to finish," as Reeves races a chariot, pulls chains out of rock walls, bends prison bars, battles crocodiles (not alligators, as promised in  the poster), and strangles a lion in the arena.

The screenplay was written by, among others, Sergio Leone (future director of the so-called "Man With No Name" Spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood, as well as the epic "Once Upon a Time in the West") and Sergio Corbucci (future director of the original "Django"). Shortly into shooting "The Last Days of Pompeii," director Mario Bonnard was sidelined with a liver ailment, and Sergio Leone found himself in charge of finishing the film.

Leone, who nicknamed Steve Reeves "Mr. Muscle Culture," recalled the star as "a gentle sort of fellow. He applied himself to flexing his muscles. He applied himself a lot less to exercising his brains. When he got on a horse on one side, he fell off the other. His physique created a certain problem of balance. But he was manageable as an actor. Not at all pretentious. No real strength, though. He had to have stunt doubles for everything."

In fact, Reeves injured a shoulder filming an early scene when he saves young costar Christine Kaufmann (as Ione) from a runaway chariot, an injury further aggravated in a scene of an underwater fight with a crocodile. The injury effectively put an end to his bodybuilding career and would ultimately force him to retire from acting after 1967.

German-born Christine Kaufmann (above), who was a mere 14 years old when she portrayed Ione, was briefly married to Tony Curtis (her costar in 1962’s "Taras Bulba") in the 1960s. Their daughters (and half-sisters of Jamie Lee Curtis), Allegra Curtis and Alexandra Curtis, both became actresses.

The part of the sinister Arbaces was played by Fernando Rey, a debonair actor best known for his roles in Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel’s "Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "That Obscure Object of Desire," as well as drug lord "Frog One" in "The French Connection."

(We couldn't find a picture of Fernando Rey from "The Last Days of Pompeii"
so this pose from "The French Connection" will have to do)

"The Last Days of Pompeii" was a runaway box-office success. Sergio Leone, however, would later downplay his involvement in directing the finished film, deeming it just a job and insisting that it belonged to Mario Bonnard. Leone said, "I was thirty years old and couldn’t have cared less."

(Do not judge a video rental by its cover...
There's nothing like this in the movie)

Scenes of the volcanic mayhem from the Steve Reeves movie reappeared in the climax of 1987’s "Warrior Queen," a sleazy, subterranean-budgeted slab of softcore T&A topped with cheesy bloodletting, starring Austrian-born Sybil Danning, a five-foot seven-inch buxom, leggy actress "known for her many roles," as cited in Wikipedia, "in European films, B movies, cult films, science fiction films, and action films."

Directed (putting it politely) by Chuck Vincent, a schlocky filmmaker who slogged from hardcore porn to such R-rated titillation as "Hot T-Shirts," "Hollywood Hot Tubs," and "Slammer Girls," "Warrior Queen" features a dialogue-starved Danning (for which she was probably grateful considering her visible embarrassment) as the mistress (or something like that) of the Roman emperor who visits Pompeii just in time for the fireworks.

Sybil Danning and Donald Pleasance demonstrate the movie's wear-your-own-
bedsheets wardrobe; Danny Peary, author of Cult Movie Stars, wrote of Danning,
"It's no wonder that when her appearance is...clothed...her fans feel gypped."

In a personal orgy of overacting, Donald Pleasence (best known as Dr. Loomis, the nine-lived antagonist of the indefatigable Michael Myers in five "Halloween" films) is a hoot as the loony ruler of Pompeii who literally chases flitting doves with a butterfly net. His wife is portrayed by Samantha Fox - not the busty ‘80s British pop star who sang "Touch Me (I Want Your Body)" and "Do Ya Do Ya (Wanna Please Me)," but the ‘80s adult movie star of "Dracula Exotica" and "This Lady Is a Tramp."

Samantha Fox -
pop star

Samantha Fox -
porn star

"Up Pompeii!" was a British sitcom, with ancient Pompeii serving as nothing more than a backdrop for endless lewd gags and double entendres, not unlike the risqué burlesque comedy of the popular English "Carry On" movies and obviously influenced by the successful musical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." The series, featuring venerable British comic actor Frankie Howerd (who had starred in the London stage run of "A Funny Thing"), ran from 1969 to 1970 and was revived in 1975 and 1991.

Frankie Howard in "Up Pompeii!"

The sitcom was adapted to the 1971 film "Up Pompeii," which ended with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and an anachronistic appearance by Nero, who had been dead for over a decade when the volcano erupted. (For history buffs, Titus Flavius Caesar Vespasianus Augustus was the Roman emperor at the time; Titus died of a fever only two years into his reign.)

Julie Ege as Voluptua in "Up Pompeii"

The three-part 1984 miniseries "The Last Days of Pompeii," directed by Peter R. Hunt ("On Her Majesty’s Secret Service"), has been acclaimed as the most faithful version of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel. Nicholas Clay (best known as Lancelot in director John Boorman’s "Excalibur") portrays Glaucus, with Olivia Hussey (forever endearing as the breathless Juliet in 1968’s "Romeo and Juliet") as Ione, Franco Nero (the screen’s first "Django") as the evil high priest Arbaces, and Linda Purl (who played Jenna Fischer’s mother on the series "The Office") as Nydia.

Linda Purl, Nicholas Clay in "The Last Days of Pompeii"

The star-studded supporting cast boasted Ned Beatty, Brian Blessed, Ernest Borgnine, Lesley-Anne Down, Laurence Olivier, and Anthony Quayle. (Italian television aired a miniseries titled "Pompeii," not based on Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, in 2007.)

Surprisingly, the most emotionally involving dramatization of the destruction of Pompeii came in a sixty-minute docudrama produced for BBC-TV aptly titled "Pompeii: The Last Day" (above), depicting the fateful eighteen hours in the lives of a local politician and his family and slaves; a town tradesman and his wife; a pair of gladiators; as well as Pliny the Elder, a naturalist and Roman naval commander who perished in an attempt to rescue survivors of the disaster, and his nephew, Pliny the Younger, whose writings remain the sole eyewitness account of the eruption. (Among the cast of faces probably familiar to British television audiences, one actor American moviegoers might recognize is Tim Pigott-Smith, as Pliny the Elder, who portrayed Lord Ascot in Tim Burton’s "Alice in Wonderland," the Foreign Secretary in "Quantum of Solace," Creedy in "V for Vendetta," and Thallo in 1981’s "Clash of the Titans.")

Unlike any of the films mentioned, "Pompeii: The Last Day" placed genuinely sympathetic faces on the victims, bringing a heretofore unseen humanity to the deaths and devastation. The filmmakers also cleverly juxtaposed period props and jewelry worked into the script with images of actual artifacts recovered from the ruins, as well as - and most poignantly - the last reposes of the characters with the plaster casts of the actual victims, whose bodies, in the chilling words of narrator Alisdair Simpson - made all the more moving by the heartbreaking music score by Ty Unwin ("Vikings") - "decayed, leaving only their shapes in the ash that smothered them, their final moments immortalized."