Helen of Troy

HELEN OF TROY is a very respectable Hollywood sword and sandal effort from the 1950s, with a strong international cast and very good production values. Except ...

Why does every popular culture effort at retelling the Trojan War myth have to make Paris the hero? In the Illiad, by far the most significant and authoritative source of the story, at best shows Paris to be an ambiguous figure--the best looking man of his generation, but often a coward in battle. Helen expresses extraordinary contempt for him in one extended passage. In one or two brief sequences, Paris fights valiantly, but in his major appearance, his winner-take-all-and-Helen duel with Menaleus, after bragging and crowing about his prowess, he completely wimps out in the battle, and, once defeated, is transported by Aphrodite back to Troy to hide in his bedroom.

HELEN OF TROY is not the only effort to mis-read the Illiad into a Paris-and-Helen "runaway" love story. Perhaps in writing a commercial screenplay, that's what any writer would be forced to do. But that doesn't speak well for our popular culture, one that can't sustain the ambiguity and complexity of another culture--of 2700 years ago!

Still, the movie has its strong parts, particularly Stanley Baker as Achilles. Watch for Brigitte Bardot in an early, pre-star role as Helen's handmaiden.

Based on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, it's the story of the Trojan War. It's a grand old Hollywood epic from Warner Bros. They are shooting in Italy. The cast is international. The lead character is Paris which is a little odd. He always struck me as a bratty teenager. Of course, that's not the Paris in this movie. They are making him the hero and the Greeks as the villains. It's love against the world. I don't buy it, but that's what they're selling. The dialogue is a bit stiff. It's trying to be a Shakespearean tragedy. On top of that, the production is big. It's huge in fact. It's an old Hollywood epic in that sense. They really have ships and war engines. They have some big sets. They have masses of extras. It's very big and the battles are big. Whatever flaws this has, it's worth it to see all the construction and destruction.

Come on, IMDb'ers! Get your stuff right. Warner Brothers was the studio and they usually forced their producer/directors around this period to use their own proprietary single-strip color process, rather than Technicolor, which by 1956 had already abandoned its own more expensive to use and cumbersome to handle three-strip process. Somehow Robert Wise and his technicians managed to get more variety and warmer tones while using Warnercolor in this film than what was usually achieved stateside on W.B.'s Burbank sound stages and on various U.S. locations. Maybe it was, as Franco Zeffirelli is fond of calling it, "the golden-ah light" of Italy. Anyway this film is quite an eye-filling visual achievement. And Max Steiner's score is one of his better ones, pumping up the spectacle aspect quite effectively.

A couple of trivia notes: The Walls of Troy set accidentally caught fire before the company was finished with it, but Wise and his technicians were on the spot and managed to get some usable footage out of that disaster. (I don't know if they had to reconstruct it or rewrite some scenes that were originally supposed to have taken place on its ramparts.) And TIME magazine in its review complained that Signorina Podesta's vaccination scar (and I think that of Monsieur Sernas as well) is clearly visible in a love scene. Without computers to fix such gaffes back then, and probably not noticing that little "oops!" until examining footage in a U.S. screening room when the company returned home for editing, the studio probably figured they'd just let it pass. But forty-foot wide CinemaScope screens were quite merciless when it came to audiences' perceptions of the obvious.

The first thing I read about this movie was that it was terrible and that the first lady even though very gifted as far as bust is concerned was a nightmare when it comes to acting. However when I saw this film I had to disagree with those critics who tried to ruin a good movie. Even though the sets are nothing to those of "Ben-Hur", "Cleopatra" and other screen giants the sets of Cinecitta are stupendous. The colour is magnificent and the acting is quite good. It is true that the part of the heroine could have portrayed some more fragility, still Ms. Podesta' was quite satisfying. The cinematography is very good and the story never lingers. It is action-packed and is bound to marvel anyone who likes this genre.

As most people probably know from reading the Iliad by Homer, "Helen" (Rossana Podesta) was the most beautiful woman in the world and happened to be married to "King Menelaus" (Niall MacGinnis) of Sparta. "Paris" (Jacques Sernas) was a Trojan prince who got shipwrecked near Sparta and upon seeing Helen fell in love and then managed to take her back to Troy with him. Some accounts say that Helen was kidnapped by Paris but others say she left of her own choosing. In any case this abduction resulted in all of the Greek city-states joining forces to besiege the city of Troy in order to return Helen back to Sparta. Now, as I stated earlier, since most people are probably familiar with the story of the Trojan War I probably don't need to elaborate any further. That said although this movie isn't completely true to the Iliad it is an interesting interpretation of the Trojan War and since there are other Greek sources with slightly different variations I suppose this version is as acceptable as anything else. Be that as it may I thought the casting of both Helen and Paris were good choices and each of them played their parts quite well. I also liked the cinematography which was excellent for its time. Accordingly, I believe that viewers who appreciate epic adventures of this type will thoroughly enjoy this particular movie and I rate it as above average.