aka
Minotaur, the Wild Beast of Crete
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.
Life isn't pleasant in Ancient Crete. For a generation or so, the Cretans
have made yearly human sacrifices to the Minotaur, whom its priesthood sees as a
protective godhood rather than a monster with a tragic backstory roaming a
labyrinth. Crete's king Minos (Carlo Tamberlani) changes his mind about the
whole human sacrifice thing when his wife begs him on her deathbed to abolish
the practice. After all, she even has proof the gods don't care about these
sacrifices, seeing as she secretly hid away one of their twin daughters with
foreign peasants to protect her from being sacrificed as the later born of every
twin pair in Crete should be, and was not punished by the gods for it.
That argument is enough to convince Minos, and while he's planning on
breaking with traditions, he also decides to bring that twin daughter, Ariadne
(Rosanna Schiaffino), to court. Alas, his other daughter Phaedra is not very
happy with another claimant on a throne she already sees at hers, and the man
Minos sends out to find Ariadne, Chiron (Alberto Lupo), is all too willing to
fulfil her wish to see her sister dead rather than rescued.
Chiron's tactics as a political assassin are bad, though, for instead of
locating Ariadne and then silently letting her disappear, he hires a horde of
bandits to snuff out the whole village where she lives. Fortunately for the
forces of justice, hero and prince of Athens Theseus (Bob Mathias) and his best
buddy, the Cretan noble Demetrius (Rik Battaglia), are in the area. As Greek
heroes, they are quite willing and able to push back a mere horde of bandits,
even though Ariadne's adoptive parents and a lot of villagers die in the attack
before the duo can get in on the action.
Since Ariadne is a bit of a stunner, and Theseus really a nice guy, he takes
the now orphaned girl to Athens to be taken into his father's house and
romanced. Demetrius's confused reaction to the girl looking exactly like his
princess our hero just laughs off.
Of course, this won't be the last attempt on Ariadne's life, and of course
Theseus and Demetrius will sooner or later have to set out to set things right
in Crete. However, things will become more dangerous and complicated than anyone
could have expected, with Phaedra falling in love with Theseus, the involvement
of the Cretan resistance of people who sit around drinking wine instead of
acting, and war and doom coming for Athens.
Silvio Amadio's
Teseo came as a bit of a positive surprise to me. I
do love my peplums, but I generally don't expect too much of them, so when a
film delivers as much of interest as this one does, I tend to get a little
giddy. It's only fair, too, for there is much to be giddy about here.
Some of the film's positive aspects are easily explained by the fact that it
came relatively early in the peplum cycle, when the budgets for films of the
genre often were a bit higher, so the productions could afford to hire extras
for mass scenes and put more effort into their production design, which is
always helpful in films as soundstage based yet in need of spectacle as these
tend to be. Consequently, there are often more people on screen here when the
script needs it than one would expect, giving the handful of battle scenes and
the obligatory storming of the bad guys' throne room (though it's the sacrifice
chamber here) a bit more weight and believability through the sheer number of
participants. Compared to classical Hollywood monumental epics, there aren't
still all that many participants, but when you have seen enough of these films,
you become rather thankful when an army consists of more than ten people.
Depending on your taste in historians, you may even see the not quite as large
armies as more realistic, though I doubt anyone involved here was interested in
historical authenticity as much as in producing as much of a visual spectacle as
the budget allowed.
Weight and a bit more believability seem to have been important when it came
to the production design too, for every set and every costume is created with a
love for telling details, from the walls of the houses of nobles actually being
adorned with pictures and wall hangings, to the ubiquitous minotaur and bull
depictions in Crete. This extra effort helps make the film's Mythical Greece
feel more like a world with its own coherence and its own rules than a series of
sets.
Yet even an army of extras and the most beautiful production design in the
world need a director equal to the task of using them properly. Amadio is more
than equal to it, with a sometimes painterly eye for the staging of scenes to
the greatest visual effect, and a wonderful sense for the use of vivid colours.
Amadio's Mythical Greece may not be as dream-like and magical as that of Mario
Bava, but it never is bland or colourless, and always vivid and larger than
life.
The word "bland" unfortunately does lead me to the film's greatest weakness,
Bob Mathias as Theseus. His performance isn't bad at all, but rather painfully
neutral, as if that awesome (in the classic sense of the word) hero Theseus the
other characters are speaking of had just stepped out for a moment only leaving
his body there. Mathias's blandness isn't enough to ruin the film or even to
annoy me much, yet it may be a stumbling block for some.
The rest of the cast is much stronger, with Schiaffino able to play her
double role well enough to keep Phaedra and Ariadne believable as two
distinctively different persons; even though the script tends to make Ariadne a
bit too virtuous and Phaedra a bit too evil for my tastes. But that sort of
thing is part of the genre, and on the other hand, Ariadne is a bit spunkier
than peplum heroines usually are. It's probably not necessary to mention that
Alberto Lupo could play the type of heel he's playing here in his sleep; he's
clearly not asleep here.
On the script side, the film underplays the mythological elements of the
story for most of its running time, making this a very entertaining and
melodramatic story of Mythical Greek palace intrigues with an influx of
swashbuckling, that just happens to include a surprise rescue by Amphitrite, and
the battle against a not very threatening but rather lovely Minotaur with a very
mobile but also very confused looking face. I also have to applaud the writers
for their use of interesting and not always the most obvious parts of Greek myth
here. They take their freedoms with it, but they sure do seem to know what they
are doing and why.
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