THE SLAVE (Il figlio di Spartacus, 1962)

When Kirk Douglas's dying Spartacus is shown his infant son and told he's free at the end of Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film, producer Douglas perhaps didn't realize but most likely didn't care that he'd left a door open for a sequel. Stars like him didn't do sequels, after all, so it would be left to the Italians to exploit the opportunity. The opportunity went to Sergio Corbucci, a busy young director who had just directed the top American peplum stars, Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott, in Duel of the Titans. Reeves returned for the new project. which included some location work in the shadow of the Sphinx and Great Pyramid in Egypt. Since Spartacus was a historical figure, Corbucci and his writers didn't have to worry about anyone protesting his exploitation of the Douglas film. For what it's worth, though, they did poach one bit that could be considered Douglas's, or novelist Howard Fast's, intellectual property. History doesn't name Spartacus's wife, but The Slave identifies its hero's mom as Varinia, the name Fast coined. A small detail, but one that might have helped impressionable 1962 audiences believe that Corbucci's film actually was a continuation of Douglas and Kubrick's.

In The Slave, the son of Spartacus and Varinia is named Randus and raised to be a Roman soldier. By 48 B.C. he's a centurion in Julius Caesar's army as it occupies Egypt. Caesar (Ivo Garrani) gives him a sensitive mission to spy on Marcus Licinius Crassus (Claudio Gora), Spartacus's nemesis and one of Caesar's few remaining rivals for dominion over the Roman world, in his power base in Zeugma. In the English dub, Crassus's voice actor seems to make an effort to imitate Lawrence Olivier at times. More intriguingly, Randus has a Germanic sidekick (Franco Balducci) who resembles Kirk Douglas a good deal more than Steve Reeves does, as if Corbucci wanted us to think for awhile that that guy might be the son of Spartacus.

Nevertheless, Randus learns of his true heritage, and the meaning of the Thracian trinket he's worn around his neck since childhood, after an accident at sea strands him and slave girl Saida (Ombretta Colli) in a strange country where they are promptly captured and enslaved. A fellow slave is a veteran of Spartacus's rebel army who recognizes the trinket as the sign of the son of Spartacus. Whether Randus believes this or not, he doesn't care to be enslaved and leads a successful rebellion just before his erstwhile shipmates arrive to rescue him and fetch him to Zeugma.

Randus is possessed of innate compassion. We saw it displayed early in the picture when he mercifully stabbed a rebel to death in mid-crucifixion. He despises cruelty and so comes to despise slavery. After visiting Spartacus's grave -- we're told his remaining followers stole the great man's body from the cross and took it to the City of the Sun -- he embraces fully the role of Son of Spartacus, appropriating the helmet, breastplate and sword that conveniently have been left atop the old man's sarcophagus, unmarred by time or desert climate. Randus becomes a masked avenger, part Moses, part Zorro down to signing his work with a big S, though the more immediate model was the recent Reeves vehicle Goliath and the Barbarians. By harassing Crassus he continues to do Caesar's work as well as his father's. Once that work is done, however, Randus and Caesar's interests inevitably diverge.

 Steve Reeves performs tremendous feats of strength as the Son of Spartacus

Corbucci makes the most of his picturesque locations and clearly knows his way around the widescreen frame, but he's not as good at peplum action as he would be at spaghetti western gunplay. He's good at horseback chases through the desert, but like most peplum directors he never really figures out how to make swordplay as dynamic as contemporary Asian filmmakers could. The Slave is the same sort of episodic, essentially juvenile adventure that Hollywood made ad nauseum in the 1950s, only with superior art direction if not a higher budget.

 

Above, Crassus faces his comeuppance.

Below, Randus is about to get his from Caesar.

 The story skids to a halt rather than reaching a proper climax. After Crassus is killed -- the real man died five years earlier, but the film follows the legend of his conquerors forcing him to drink molten gold -- Caesar arrives and Randus surrenders himself for crucifixion, hoping that the other escaped slaves will be spared. The film leads us to expect an attack from some of Crassus's erstwhile allies, who are pissed over the death of one of their royals during a Randus raid on the Roman's palace. If you're not going to take history seriously, the sensible ending would have been for Caesar and Randus to join forces to repel this attack, and for Randus to earn his life and freedom from a grateful Caesar. But this attack never takes place. Instead, a bunch of people show up to protest Randus's crucifixion until Caesar decides that the execution isn't worth the trouble. Randus gets the happy ending that his dad didn't, but then again, his picture was made for a different audience, at once less and more demanding, than his dad's. If you don't demand too much in plot or acting you'll probably appreciate such spectacle as The Slave offers, especially  if you, like its target audience, demand a happy ending.

On the Big Screen: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962-88)

Turner Classic Movies is playing David Lean's Oscar winner tomorrow (2 March 2014) and I own a DVD copy already, but you don't miss a chance to see Lawrence in its proper setting in a movie theater. The Madison Theater in Albany is doing a festival of Oscar winners this week and Lawrence was the main attraction, for me at least. The screen isn't necessarily as vast as the film deserves, but it makes its impression just the same. You can appreciate Lean's compositions and Freddie Young's cinematography on any scale as long as you have the proper aspect ratio, but only on the big screen are you transported to another place. You really feel far away from anything familiar in the desert scenes, but you also better appreciate the density of production design when Lean takes us through the corridors of British imperial power. Size helps, too, during the movie's most famous moment -- at least for film buffs: the seeming materialization of Sherif Ali out of nowhere from the desert horizon. Someone watching on a tablet or, Allah preserve us, a smartphone must wonder what's so special about the moment, but when Omar Sharif makes his entrance into global stardom as something more than a dot, when you can see the distant image shimmering yet plain, then you get it. Sharif is now the last man standing of the principal cast, and at the risk of heresy I feel he comes off better than the late Peter O'Toole, if only because the Egyptian isn't forced into the occasionally questionable facial contortions his co-star needs to see Lawrence's increasingly conflicted attitude toward war and his historical role. By comparison, Sharif is often O'Toole's straight man, but Ali's character-arc toward political responsibility, paralleling Lawrence's self-loathing descent toward barbarism, makes the token Arab among the stars a more recognizably heroic figure. Add that to Sharif's good looks and you can understand why, with much further help from Lean, the all-purpose ethnic actor was arguably a bigger star than O'Toole for much of the 1960s. Still, give O'Toole his due. He may overdo it sometimes as Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson's concept of Lawrence seems to get away from Lean, but his is the giant performance the role demands, and moments of ham are quite excusable, if not necessary, when your subject is as self-dramatizing a figure as Lawrence.

Lawrence of Arabia is very much a film of its time, a fact that became more apparent as the Sixties wore on, and it remains a very relevant picture on many levels. How different is T.E. Lawrence from Che Guevara, for instance? Both were revolutionary interlopers whose pretensions to disinterested benevolence were certainly suspect. But at the same time he reminded me to some extent of Graham Greene's Quiet American in his ambiguity, his uncertain balance of cynicism and self-delusion. In the film, at least, Lawrence dislikes the idea that Great Britain will step in once the Arab Revolt succeeds and assume rulership, shared with France, over the erstwhile subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Yet every step he takes furthers the Anglo-French agenda so long as the Arabs are ill-equipped or temperamentally disinclined to fill the power vacuum after the Ottoman defeat, as their disastrous occupation of Damascus appears to prove. Lawrence's heroic endeavors only enable the Arabs to exchange one master for another, though Faisal (Alec Guinness) at least will get a throne out of it -- he ended up King of Iraq. Between the British and the Ottomans, Lawrence idealizes Arab autonomy much as the Quiet American wishfully promotes a "third force" in Vietnam that would escape that country's Cold War dichotomy. That idealization serves to justify Lawrence's opportunity to live out a fantasy of adventure and heroism, but it also can be appealed to in order to overcome his growing abhorrence of his own growing bloodlust or his demoralization after he actually fails in one of his impossible missions and suffers unspeakable humiliation (rape?) on top of torture at the hands of Jose Ferrer.

All the major Arab characters suspect Lawrence of using their land as a personal playground, their people as playthings. At the same time, the three principal Arabs are mirrors of Lawrence's conflicted state of mind. Ali is the most obvious mirror in the sense that he seems to develop in the opposite direction, toward civilization (or at least toward politics) as Lawrence slips toward savagery. Ali is the character most likely to throw back at Lawrence some argument Lawrence had made to him, and in that sense he serves as Lawrence's conscience after the bad first impression he makes by shooting Lawrence's guide at the well. Faisal is the focus of Lawrence's idealization of the Arab Revolt, but also as aware as Lawrence is (or should be) of the tension between political ideals and raisons d'etat. But in the end the film seems to argue that the Arab most like Lawrence is Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn), who is the most dismissive of idealism and the most overtly self-interested. Lawrence must appeal to Auda's greed and vanity to get him to join the attack on Aqaba, and seems a liar to Auda after Aqaba proves not to have gold but only paper money, but at the end of the story it's Auda who invites Lawrence to stay in the desert with him, who tells Lawrence that there's nothing but the desert left for him. Auda is the least sophisticated of the principal Arabs -- he has a superstitious aversion to cameras and poor taste in plunder -- but in manipulating Auda Lawrence gives us the key to understanding him, or the best clue to that understanding. He gets Auda to join the Revolt and attack Aqaba not for gold, not for politics, but "because it is his pleasure." So with Lawrence, as the man himself sometimes seems to understand. He inspires the Revolt not for Britain, not for the Arabs, but because it is his pleasure -- whether he's romping in his new Bedouin costume like a child playing Superman or slaughtering Turkish troops trying to surrender.

That "pleasure" is the irreducible element that compromises all similar "humanitarian" interventions in the defense of the oppressed against oppressors; we never do it just for them or their sake. Even if we deny to ourselves any selfish motives and protest when others perceive them, they're still there or else we wouldn't be there. If you're watching the news and feel that someone ought to kick the Russians out of the Crimea, and you get furious if someone suggests that you just want your country rather than Russia to dominate Ukraine, you probably feel a little like Lawrence did -- or at least the Lawrence of the film. So there's your relevance, without even taking into account the ongoing consequences of Lawrence's campaign and the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. But Lawrence is great enough as an epic adventure film and a showcase for its two young stars that relevance is a bonus -- or if you prefer, irrelevant. No matter what you think of the world and its recent history, you ought to regard David Lean's pre-CGI achievements with some sort of awe.

DVR Diary: HOUSE OF WOMEN (1962)

They should have called it House of Women and Children. Nothing quite kills the buzz of a women-in-prison picture like a bunch of toddling brats, but the maternal bond is a big deal in this latter-day social-problem picture from Warner Bros., credited to Walter Doniger but mostly shot by writer Crane Wilbur. It worried me at first to see stock footage from (I believe) the pre-Code prison picture Ladies They Talk About over the opening credits, but Doniger and Wilbur were able to assemble a respectable number of she-cons for a B picture, just not as many as were available to a studio director thirty years earlier. The story here is that Erica (Shirley Knight) is doing five years as an accomplice to robbery -- we later learn that she was essentially innocent -- but arrived in the clink without the authorities knowing she was pregnant with her dead husband's baby. When the compassionate, alcoholic prison doctor (Jason Evers) discovers this, Erica expresses her hope that she'll lose the baby. Little does she known that a women's prison is practically a government-run nursery. She'll get to keep her little girl until the child turns three, and she'll be up for parole shortly after that birthday. If she plays her cards right, she should be able to keep her baby once she becomes a free woman. One factor complicates things: the male warden (an unusually mustachioed Andrew Duggan) is a misogynist who dislikes the idea of babies in prison, yet falls for Erica when she works as a maid at his home as a trustee. The warden's bitter because, back when he ran a men's prison, his wife ran off with a parolee. Not trusting Erica to be faithful, or even to think of him, once she's free, he works to deny her parole, not long after her daughter has been taken away while Erica was planning a big birthday party for her with all the convict mommies and their kiddies. Add to that somebody else's unsupervised brat taking a dive off a roof and we're gonna have ourselves a riot....

The women are all quite demure if not chic in their prison dresses, their semi-sensible shoes and their thoroughly styled and sprayed Sixties hair -- except for the token pants-wearing "butch" whose idea of harassing a straight con is defacing her photo of Troy Donahue. Action takes second place to melodrama here, which is probably for the best given the big action scenes we get. The most memorable of these is the riot that breaks up that aborted birthday party. While Erica faints to retain her innocence, her convict pals turn on the guards, throwing chairs, presents and the birthday cake at them. Whoever directed this scene breaks it down to a bunch of sight gags, whether they intended them to be funny or not, intercut with shots of crying or inert children. For this kind of picture an earnest speech is part of the camp value and we get one on the disadvantages of the parole system from one of Erica's friends (Barbara Nichols), an ex-stripper who refuses parole because it hardly qualifies as freedom when she can't associate with her friends and "can't die without asking permission." Overall there's too much playing for pathos and too many damn kids laying around for House of Women to rise to guilty pleasure level. This has to be one of the last WIP pictures before changing production standards allowed more honest sleaze, and it proves that the change was probably overdue when it came.

Now Playing: DEC. 31, 1962

Our visit to the moviegoing world of fifty years ago draws to a close with a night of New Year's Eve previews and premieres. There's a "First Night" quality to the newest offerings touted as the first hits of 1963. As opposed to many of the prestige pictures and roadshows that opened in December, these last and first pictures are wide releases opening all over the place. Here are two such new arrivals in Toledo.

In Milwaukee, one theater chain has both pictures and advertises them together.

Comedy predominates this festive night, and Pittsburgh doesn't buck that trend.

Miami does, however. In some places, any holiday is the right time for this kind of show ... and maybe it still is comedy, after all.

Some people may welcome 2013 at the movies tonight, but I'm not aware of any new releases to herald the new year. In theory, of course, a TV station could schedule a marathon of the sort of movies Miami was seeing, but most stations aren't quite that imaginative. A different kind of showmanship prevailed in 1962, as our trip back in time has amply shown. Where -- or when -- will we end up next? Watch this space to find out!...

Now Playing: DEC. 28, 1962

Outside of New York City, Miami is probably the biggest movie market we've been visiting regularly this year. You could deduce that from the fact that Miami is getting Lawrence of Arabia before the other places. Check out all the live ballyhoo that came with a roadshow premiere in a big city fifty years ago.

Nowadays, I suppose, no one thinks any of this necessary to sell an "event" movie. Who in 2012 can imagine a parade and a boys' choir, or even the appearance of a beauty queen, to open any movie, even something in 3-D and IMAX. Of course, there's no point to any one theater in any community going to such trouble when the same movie's going to play on possibly dozens of screens in the general vicinity. Here, the Colony theater will probably have Lawrence exclusively, on a reserved-seat basis, for the next several months, and the eventual Best Picture Oscar winner may not reach some markets at "popular prices" for another year. That kind of slow rollout is alien to our moviegoing mentality today, when everything's about setting some opening-weekend record. Some people like the modern way better because the old way seems like a class system and they don't want to wait months to see the most-hyped films. There's justice to that argument, but there's something to be said for the ballyhoo, too. It was part of the publicity of movies, by which I mean not just the advertising but the sense that a movie was a public event that brought people together for a memorable shared experience, not something to be handed out to each person who then runs off to enjoy it in private -- which seems to be the way our culture is headed. Change always brings trade-offs, of course, but what's lost is sometimes as much worth noting as whatever we gain.

* * * 

There'll be one more "Now Playing: 1962" entry on Monday featuring the New Year's Eve showings of various "first hits of 1963," but I don't plan to continue into that particular year. I do intend to do something along "Now Playing" lines in 2013. Right now I'm leaning toward merging it with another regular feature on Mondo 70. I have a year in mind but I'm still looking for a specific place and specific content on the Google News Archive to realize my objective: one year at the movies in a single American city. Drop in next Tuesday or Wednesday to see what I come up with.

Now Playing: DEC. 21, 1962.

Holiday releases continue at a festive pace this weekend. Here's a movie page from the Milwaukee Journal to give you some idea of the big pictures in play.

And here's some of the advertising close-up.

I should count Taras Bulba among the big holiday wide releases along with Billy Rose's Jumbo, Gypsy, In Search of the Castaways and It's Only Money. It's definitely the one I'd most likely see of the five, if I didn't live within reach of Lawrence of Arabia. I'm not saying Taras is a good movie -- just that it's my type of movie. Let's take a closer look thanks to soapbxprod.



Also in Milwaukee:

Disney made Jules Verne a viable movie brand with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1954. That film arguably started the whole trend of classics-illustrated movies, if you will, that resulted in Roger Corman's Poe cycle and some H. G. Wells pictures as well. I don't recall Castaways making as big an impression as 20,000 Leagues, however.

Here are the musicals I've mentioned this week, one in Cape Girardeau, MO.

And in Miami:

Not everyplace is limited to these choices. Here are some alternatives opening today in Schenectady.

Tale as old as time? Song as old as...? No, I suppose not.

Why popular prices for a Cinerama attraction? Probably because it's actually a blown-up re-release of the legendary Scent of Mystery, the one and only feature made in the equally legendary Smell-O-Vision process. Yes, that's what they called it. So what format would you rather see it in???...

Meanwhile, what's opening in the biggest showcase of all? Here's three new attractions in New York City.

This is one is sure to sway the sophisticates!

Now Playing: DEC. 20, 1962

The biggest cities get reserved-seat roadshow events like Lawrence of Arabia, while more modest markets get stuff like It's Only Money. Some places in the middle, probably leaning toward large, get this.

While Nicholas Ray's King of Kings is coming back for an encore in many cities, Richard Fleischer's spectacle is the "Bible movie" for 1962, albeit one derived from a Swedish novel. As Sixties Bible spectacles go, this one is pretty good, or so I thought back in 2009.

Meanwhile, here's Bounty opening in Miami with live attractions and alleged celebrities on hand.

Of course, NYC is where it's really happening this month, and here's the latest arthouse event, just eight months after its Italian opening.

I've never reviewed this one, but I've seen it and it's good stuff.

Now Playing: DEC. 19, 1962

We're in the homestretch now. From today through the 25th theaters will be bringing in their big Christmas attractions. Across the country the wide releases include two musicals -- Gyspy and Billy Rose's Jumbo -- and Disney's latest Jules Verne adaptation, In Search of the Castaways ... along with this, opening in Schenectady.

While these four dominate the medium-sized markets, with Lawrence of Arabia and Mutiny on the Bounty playing the big cities in limited, reserved-seat release, there's still room in some cities for alternate entertainment. Here's a one-of-a-kind picture opening in Milwaukee: Toshiro Mifune playing a Mexican, in a Mexican film.

Here's some curious exploitation in Daytona Beach.

Gordon Scott's peplum vehicle is promoted as "Tarzan as Samson," even though Scott no longer was Tarzan, having surrendered the role to Jock Mahoney, who had played the bad guy in Scott's last Tarzan film. Mahoney starred in Tarzan Goes to India earlier this year, and it's probably a measure of that film's success, ironically, that Scott is identified as "Tarzan" here.

Bad guys are asking for trouble in this U.S. trailer, uploaded by SomethingWeirdVideo.



Finally for today, here's piracy Hammer style in Charleston.

And here's a trailer from horrorfictionmovies.

Now Playing: DEC. 16, 1962

Here's the big one, this year's eventual Oscar winner, opening in New York City.

And here's the original trailer, with the same shadowy face for a logo, uploaded by Ray Acton.

Now Playing: DEC. 14, 1962

Cinema's Christmas gift to America arrives in Schenectady NY.

Given this Mexican import's present reputation, we can assume that a generation is about to be scarred for life.

Meanwhile, the build-up for The Longest Day continues in Milwaukee.

And here's a long, long trailer for it from TCM.com.

Now Playing: DEC. 13, 1962

Another of the big year-end roadshow pictures arrives in Pittsburgh.

This remake of the 1935 Oscar winner is one of the year's most controversial films if only because it was still novel for Marlon Brando to make an ass of himself on a shoot, but it wasn't the kind of controversy that made anyone want to see the picture.

Elsewhere, the new attractions aren't quite as prestigious. Here's a double-feature opening in Spokane....

...and in Miami.

Paul Frees pitches Varan in this trailer uploaded by Batmandingo007.

Now Playing: DEC. 12, 1962

Then as now, December is Oscar-bait season. Here's a would-be front-runner opening in New York City.

A biopic like this might have better luck today, but we had a Freud movie last year -- sort of -- that didn't get very far, either.

The following doesn't fall strictly into the "Now Playing" category, but the year's big war epic is already playing in the biggest cities at the time this teaser campaign starts up in Milwaukee. It's a neat way to emphasize the film's all-star element, though the player featured below wasn't exactly a star. We'll see a few more of these before the year is out.

Now Playing: DECEMBER 5,1962

Opening wide today is a picture I saw a few weeks ago on Turner Classic Movies. Here's an ad from Eugene OR.

And here's one from Miami.

Etienne Perier's picture is an old-school swashbuckler -- the term also applies to its star, Stewart Granger -- set in Spanish-occupied Italy in the 16th century. Like many films from this period when the Europeans were aping American genre conventions instead of finding their own ways to express them, Swordsman suffers from a certain stodginess. Working in Europe was a step down for Granger, who would soon be starring in German westerns, but he delivers what's expected of him as a roguish English soldier of fortune. In its original French version this was called The Mercenary, but as I've noted elsewhere Americans seemed uncomfortable with the M-word until around the 1970s. Whatever you call it, the movie's tale of conspiracy and insurrection builds to a climax tied to Siena's famous annual Palio horse race, though Perier stages a rather pallid imitation of the actual event. It's a rather uninspired film but better than many similar Euro-swashbucklers from the period imported by U.S. exhibitors -- and none of them hold a candle to the more thoroughly Euro Cartouche, made in France this same year but not seen in America until 1964.

Here's the M-G-M trailer for Swordsman, from the TCM website.


Also opening wide is an UA double-bill, topped by Roger Corman and Vincent Price wandering off the AIP rez.  Here they are in Baltimore.

And, more equitably, in Reading PA.

Here's what's perhaps now a better-known double bill, thanks to the wonders of public domain and MST3K, opening in Toledo.

And here's a "twisted" triple-bill in Charleston.

Now Playing: NOV. 30, 1962

How about some drive-in marathons this weekend? In Lucasville OH, a heated ozoner tests patrons' courage with a free "Object of Terror" giveaway.

A Sparansburg SC theater makes a similar pitch more simply: