Past Misdeeds: Gladiators 7 (1962)

Original title: I sette gladiatori

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


After being let go from a Roman arena thanks to a very tenacious performance during a fight that was supposed to kill him for helping in the escape of five other gladiators, noble Spartan Darius (Richard Harrison) returns home, fully expecting a more pleasant rest of his life.

But things have changed in Darius's years of absence: his father - a very democratically minded leader beloved by all - has been murdered by the evil would-be tyrant Hiarba (Gérard Tichy) who made the whole thing look like a suicide committed because Dad was supposed to have ambitions on becoming a tyrant. Before Darius has even really arrived home, and has been warned off by his wet nurse, Hiarba sends some of his men to secretly assassinate the ex-gladiator. The blackguard, however, has not counted on his enemy's superior fighting abilities, nor on the fact that the son of Darius's wet nurse suddenly pops out to lend a sword.

Hiarba is a flexible guy, though, and, once he's realized Darius has the curious yet strangely plot-convenient habit of letting his sword - even if it's the only thing he inherited from his father - stick in the dead bodies of his enemies, changes his plans to frame Darius for murder, the sword standing as proof enough for the young upstart’s clear evil. While he's at it, Hiarba also uses said weapon to kill the father (also a co-conspirator in changing the murder of Darius's father into a suicide who now starts to develop a conscience) of Darius's childhood love and woman-Hiarba-would-like-to-marry-if-she-just-weren't-so-devoted-to-Darius Aglaia (Loredana Nusciak). Getting rid of a less than enthusiastic confidant, giving Aglaia reason to hate Darius, and framing his rival for murder all in one stroke is not a bad result of a failed assassination attempt, or so Hiarba smirks to himself while trying to woo the now Darius-averse Aglaia standing next to her father's corpse. In a surprise to sociopaths all over the world, that wooing attempt does not endear him to Aglaia very much.

Of course, the tyrant may be smirking too soon anyhow, for Darius escapes all attempts at arresting him, and spends the next half hour riding through the countryside, recruiting the five former gladiators (remember them?) who owe him their freedom as his own, private, tyrant-crushing fighting force. These five - the thief, the pretty one, the strong one, the alcoholic, and the bald one who doesn't like shirts - plus Darius and wet nurse Junior make up the seven gladiators of the title (even though wet nurse Junior technically never was a gladiator), and are all too capable of fighting through whatever Hiarba throws at them.

The title of Spanish director Pedro Lazaga's Gladiators 7 (an Italian-Spanish co-production that for once really seems to belong to both countries on a creative level, too) may suggest a peplum variation of the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven school of film, but it's not a tale that keeps so close to the structures and motives of its predecessors all of the time as to be called a rip-off. Sure, there's the number of heroes, and the ritual assemblage of the group by Darius well-known from other movies of this type. The rest of the plot, however, is more in a typical peplum vein than in that of a Whatever Seven film; there is, at least, no poor village that needs protecting.

And, unlike those other films, Gladiators 7 is strictly centred around its hero Darius, with the rest of the gang getting somewhat effective one-note character types and no character development whatsoever. Six of these seven are strictly there to have characteristic fighting styles that make the action sequences more interesting and let Darius seem like a more rounded character. Look, he even has friends!

While I prefer the slightly more egalitarian ways of those other Seven movies, as well as their interest in questions of personal morality (something the film at hand just waves away with a disinterested expression), I'm certainly not going to call Gladiators 7 a bad movie, for it is a film doing perfectly well what it actually sets out to do: using the story of one shirt-hating guy's personal vendetta against an evil tyrant to show off some quite exciting, diverse, and often shirtless action sequences in front of very photogenic sets and locations, spiced up with scenes of genre typical, competent melodrama. The film fulfils the action part of its agenda without much visible effort. There's an obvious influence of the fights from swashbuckling adventure movies on display, so there is none of the lame action choreography many peplums suffer from (alas also none of the pillar wrestling), and instead there's a lot of jumping, swashing, and buckling, all performed by actors who may not be the greatest thespians on Earth, yet sure know how to look as if they knew how to handle a sword. Which, of course, is something you expect from a film starring Richard Harrison, who has never been known to be much of an actor, but always was quite an action actor.


Gladiators 7 also features manly belly-laughs, jokes that aren't completely horrible, and an entertaining bad guy whose particularly evil brand of evilness I attribute to Bruno Corbucci, one of the Scriptwriters Five responsible here. If someone wanted to call Gladiators 7 the platonic ideal of the non-mythological peplum (for alas, gods, rubber monsters and destructible buildings have no place in it), I would not have it in me to disagree.