AKA: Le fatiche di Ercole – The Labors of Hercules
Also,
on the menu of my DVD, it's "Hurcules"
(classy,
Vina Distributor, very classy)
Directed by Pietro Francisci
Produced by Joseph E. Levine
Written by Ennio De Concini, Pietro
Francisci, Gaio Frattini
Supposedly based on: the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes
(To
give a little back to Vina, they gave Apollonius a writing credit on the box
Presented
by Lux Film (Italy) and Warner Bros. (U.S.)
Favorite
taglines:
See the heroic Hercules rip down the
Age of Orgy's lavish palace of lustful pleasure!See the seductive Amazons lure men to voluptuous revels and violent deaths!
The stupendous saga of the mightiest of mortals! Half god...half pagan!
Our Hero: Hercules, of course
Played by:
The one and only Steve Reeves! This is the guy. For whole a lot of people, this
is what Hercules looks like.Where do we lay our scene: Ancient Greece, specifically Iolcos, pronounced here as "Jolco." A note on pronunciation: the DVD box (and IMDB) may say Iolcus, but the actors are clearly saying Jolco. So I'm gonna write it like the actors say it.
The
Labor: There are a few here. Herc kills a
lion (though it doesn't seem to be either the Cithaeron or the Nemean Lion),
and Herc kills the Cretan Bull. BUT the big job here is putting Jason on the
throne of Jolco by questing for the Golden Fleece.
"What?" you might say. And
you might go on, "I saw the original Jason
and the Argonauts from the ‘60s (or the way less good made-for-tv version
from 2000), and isn't that Jason's story? I thought Hercules was just a minor
character in that." OK, yes but, just like those other movies, Hercules is, in its own special way, an
adaptation of the Argonautica by
third century BCE poet Apollonius of Rhodes. The Argonautica, the last and least of the Greek epic poems, is the
story of Jason and the Argonauts (of which Herc was one), who sailed to Colchis
to win the Golden Fleece and to win Jason a throne.
Some background. First, we should
establish that there were two major generations of Greek heroes. The Argonauts
were the first generation. The Argo is where you find your Castor & Pollux
and your Theseus and your Orpheus, and so on. A lot of those guys had kids in
the second generation, the Trojan War generation. There you got your Achilles
(and your Ajax) and your Agamemnon and your Odysseus. Hercules, being of the
first generation of heroes, sailed on the Argo. And while Hercules was, as you
might expect, the baddest motherfucker on the boat, the quest was really
Jason's show. In Apollonius, Jason proposes that Hercules head up the
expedition, but Hercules (and all the other Argonauts) vote to elect Jason
leader. It's Jason's story. It's Jason who gets the heroes together, Jason who
captains the Argo, and Jason who wins the Fleece. Hercules doesn't even last
the whole journey, leaving the quest before they even get to Colchis. Jason
might be kind of a prick, but a certain level of prickishness is standard for
Greek heroes. Jason is still The Man in his own story. In this version, Jason
is more of The Boy. So, instead of this being the story of how Jason quested to
get his groove kingdom back, it's the story of how Hercules got Jason
his throne and bagged some sweet, sweet action on the side.
Other
characters:
The Sidekick – Jason and Ulysses sort
of switch off to fill the role of sidekick.
That's not so bad for Ulysses.
He's just a kid here, which isn't too far from the mythology (Ulysses, aka
Odysseus, is part of the Trojan War generation, remember?). In this version of
the Fleece story, Ulysses subs in for the mythological Hylas, one of Herc's
many, many eromenoi or
"little friends." Actually, an eromenos was the younger counterpart
to the erastes in Ancient Greek pederasty. For Hercules… Well, imagine if Jimmy
Olsen's series had been Superman's "Special" Pal. For the
purposes of the film, the Jimmy Olsen comparison (without the
"special") is pretty apt. Ulysses even looks like a Jimmy Olsen, a
comparison which does nothing to decreepify the scene on the Argo in which the
kid Ulysses tries to trade sexual innuendo with Herc about Iole. Jason
is the other sidekick, quickly acquired and then gradually elevated to co-hero.Doing time as a sidekick may be fine for the young Ulysses, but you have to feel a little sorry for Jason. Hercules is the star of a thousand and one stories, and no one is ever going to pitch the show Jason: The Legendary Journeys. Jason only made the one trip, and the ending of that one trip is super shitty. Even for a classical Greek hero, Jason finishes life on a depressing note. First, he doesn't actually get his kingdom back. The Argonautica doesn't go quite that far. In the most famous version of the story, Jason ends up chased out of his home to Corinth, where he cheats on Medea (prick, remember?). If you don't know the story of Medea, she's the hot foreign chick who betrays her own country, Cholchis, to help the Greek hero. This is totally normal; it's a thing hot foreign chicks do in Greek mythology. She's also a witch, and not to be trifled with, though dumping your hot foreign helper-woman is also a common feature of Greek mythology.
After Jason betrays her, Medea kills their children and flies away on a chariot drawn by dragons.
Medea is the woman who reminds the Greeks that there are consequences to using women.
This initiates a downward spiral for the hero that ends with an aged, washed-up Jason sitting under the rotting hulk of his old ship, mourning his lost youth and wondering where it all went wrong. His reverie is broken when a piece of wood falls from the ship onto his head and kills him. (I've seen several variations on this around the net, with the wood coming from either the stem or the stern of the ship, but the stem/prow makes the most poetic sense to me, as that piece of wood was supposedly a prophetic timber from Zeus' grove on Dodona. The poet William Morris apparently agrees with me, as this is how he kills Jason in his late-Victorian epic poem The Life and Death of Jason.) That's the sort of thing you try not to think about when watching Argonaut movies. It's a little sad that Jason's only adventure is being used here as just a platform for one of Herc's bajillion and a half B-movies.
Above: the ending no one in Hollywood is ever going to film ever
The Girl – Iole
Iole (that's "Iole," NOT
"Jole," for some reason, despite the fact that they're pronouncing
her home as "Jolco") is the aforementioned "sweet, sweet
action." Iole is given a few nearly feministy moments, but her primary
purpose is to be the stereotypical princess, a role she performs with aplomb.
Iole takes the Olympic gold in the 40-yard running-away-crying and the silver
in fainting. To be sure, Iole has her reasons for drama: she suspects her
father killed her uncle and ran off her cousin. Yet, at the risk of coming off
as a chauvinist myself, Herc has an even more obvious reason to overlook Iole's
tendency to suffer from fits and vapors, and that reason is Sylva Koscina.
Sylva Koscina was an actress of Yugoslavian but supposedly Greek/Polish descent
who had a long Italian film career with a movie or two in Hollywood, and she
was an absolute bombshell. Take a Google Image Search break right now. No one
will know, and if they find out, no one will blame you.
Seriously, go look. There are nudes.
Iole's character may be (very) loosely based on a mythological Iole, a princess whose hand Hercules won but was refused by her father—probably on account of Herc having killed his first wife (that's Magera, sorry Disney fans) and their children when Hera sent a madness on him. Hercules ended up marrying someone else, but he came back later to sack the city, kill the girl's family, and make her his concubine. He had anger management problems.
The Villain – Another duet here, almost
a trio.
Villainous duties in Hercules are shared between Pelias
(pronounced Pelius here) and his evil advisor/henchman Eurysteus. Pelias, Jason's
uncle previously ordered the death of his brother (Jason's father), King Aeson, to
get the throne of Jolco. Eurysteus, the man who actually wielded the dagger,
seems to be a bastardization of Euryteus, a known Argonaut, and/or possibly of
Eurytus, the father of the aforementioned mythological version of Iole. He may
also be named after Herc's mythological old nemesis Eurystheus (that's
Eurystheus, with a "th"). Eurystheus was Herc's cousin, whom the gods
trusted to think up all those nigh-impossible labors like killing the Hydra,
pilfering apples from the Hesperides, and cleaning the Augean Stables, and
getting him out of his contract with Bally's Total Fitness. Oh, there's also
Iphitus, Pelias' son, possibly named after the brother of the mythological
Iole. Iphitus is sort of the "Rod Nelson" of Hercules. If he were less laughable, he'd be the third villain, but
he's more an object of fun than fear. He has perhaps the funniest death face
I've ever seen in a movie.
Other Players? – SO MANY!
Remember about the two generations of
heroes? The Argonautica, like the Iliad, is an all-star ensemble.
Everybody who's anybody from Herc's generation is there, and as an adaptation
of the Argonautica, Hercules rightly calls in a lot of big
names for the show. Several of the mythological Argonauts are introduced and
play small but semi-noteworthy roles. Castor and Pollux are there, as are
Laertes the father of Ulysses, Aesculapius the physician, Argo the shipbuilder
(of course), and Orpheus the musician. Antea, Queen of the Amazons, is another
character of note, as is (to a lesser extent) Chiron, who raises Jason in
exile. It's worth mentioning here, in case you're picturing the original
Chiron, that this Chiron who raises
Jason is a wise old Iolcan (Jolcan) general, and not a wise old centaur.
The Movie:
Some context:
Hercules is far from the first classically themed movie to make a splash in the U.S., but it's the movie that jumpstarted peplum as a fad in Italy-to-America cinema. For a time, the genre had same role spaghetti western came to fill in the mid-‘60s. That essentially makes, Hercules the A Fistful of Dollars of peplum. (And yes, there were Italo-westerns before Sergio Leone's, but who really cared about them over here?) "So why," you might ask, "didn't peplum take off like the spaghetti western?"
Whoa, there! That's a big question, Mr. or Ms. Imaginary Friend (my imaginary friends are often genderless shadow-people), and it's a question better answered in its own essay rather than a couple of paragraphs. BUT, since you asked so nice, I'll try to tell it quick. There are a few reasons, and Hercules showcases most of them.
I try not to think too hard about my imaginary friends' sex lives.
First and foremost, money. Even cheaply made peplum isn't as cheap as westerns can be. Spectacle movies, like peplum flicks usually are, demand spectacles—special effects, and animals, and fight scenes with lots of extras, and so on—and that means time and lire. If I were being rude about it, I'd also point out that when you've only got a small amount of cash, and you need some of that cash for fake marble ruins and big scaly monsters, you may not spend a ton of money on acting chops. Not that you need big names for great acting, and Eastwood wasn't exactly a household name before the spaghetti western, but known actors are an audience draw to which you've got less access. You've got a different consideration for your leads in a peplum. Namely, musculature.
Acting? Maybe.
Calendar? Just 3 photos away!
The second reason is the distance of the subject matter. Peplum doesn't take advantage of Americans the way spaghetti westerns do. Westerns are, after all, about us. They are our own personal mythology, and we love to role-play in our own mythology. Little boys play cowboys and Indians way more often than they play Greeks and Trojans. (The Romans, who believed they were descended from the Trojans, did use to have little boys play Trojans. Being Romans, it was all official, and they made kind of a to-do about it, the Ludus/Lusus Troiae or "Troy Game.") Spaghetti westerns even came a long at a time when the western as a genre was prime for a revision. Anyway, the point is that, while peplum taps into a larger and more shared mythologized past, the spaghetti western dramatized America's own personal and quite recent mythology.
To classicists, everything after 1400 A.D happened "a little while ago."
And, along with the immediacy, there's an ego boost. Hey, that's us being all badass up there on the screen! And it's even better that (aside from the leads, who were often played by Americans) the us are foreigners! To watch someone else play-act as our mythologized selves, well that's a heady brew of ego juice you're knocking back, Mr. or Ms. Imaginary Friend (who is apparently American, though I think most of my imaginary friends are British. That's probably a topic best left to another day).
That's... That's creepier, isn't it?
There are probably also some issues with the changes in Italian cinema and our interest (and studios' expertise) in the importation and distribution of foreign films. Peplum movies, like Hong Kong films, were often shoddily dubbed, and the prints generally looked terrible. That poor-quality look and sound made it hard to take them seriously. Then there's the matter of what the good Italian directors were into. Sergio Leone made some peplum before he started on the Man With No Name films. One of those films, The Last Days of Pompeii (which Leone adapted and did some directing for), even starred Steve Reeves, but Leone never made another peplum after he started making westerns.
Which brings us to another reason peplum never reached the heights of the spaghetti western, also tied to peplum's status as a vehicle for spectacle. A Fistful of Dollars, to return to our original parallel, enjoys a well justified 8.0 out of 10 on IMDB. Meanwhile, Hercules enjoys a well justified 5.4 out of 10 on IMDB. Those scores aren't entirely due to crummy importing techniques. There's an entertaining grit to spaghetti westerns that makes for better (as well as cheaper) drama than the marble of peplum. And, frankly, spectacle doesn't always bring the best filmmaking in terms of story and character, nor does it always require those things in order to make money (ask James Cameron). There was never a Sergio Leone of peplum. At least, not after Sergio Leone.
But none of that is to suggest that peplum didn't have an audience. Peplum was, and continues to be, a money making genre. Hercules, due in part to an incredible advertising campaign by its American producer Joseph E. Levine, enjoyed no small success at the box office. Levine, the innovating producer who also brought Godzilla to the U.S., designed a landmark saturation-marketing campaign for the film that included a comic book.
Merchandizing! Merchandizing! Hercules the magazine! Hercules the comic book!
Merchandizing! We put the picture's name on everything!
IMDB lists the gross as $5 million, which isn't too shabby in 1958 dollars. Then again, IMDB also shows a first-release gross for A Fistful of Dollars of $11 million, which is, you know, more. Still, Gladiator, 300, Class of the Titans, Alexander, Troy, and Spartacus and Rome on HBO, the list goes on, and those are just the biggest of the big budget projects (and only a couple of them were awful). We continue to return to the Classics at the movies. Remakes of remakes of adaptations, But before all of that, there was Hercules with Steve Reeves.
Peplum may not have a Sergio Leone, but it did sort of have a Clint Eastood, thought it didn't keep him too long either. If Hercules is the A Fistful of Dollars of the Italian peplum boom, then Steve Reeves is definitely Clint Eastwood of the sword and sandal set. Reeves, like many Hercules portrayers, was a bodybuilder—Mr. Universe 1950, in fact. Reeves, who pursued an acting career after military service in WWII, didn't have the sheer freakish astounditude achieved by the Schwarzenegger pectorals, but he could certainly fill out a tunic. Plus, the man was tall, head and shoulders above most of the rest of the cast. More important, Reeves had the combination of physique and charisma that makes for a good Hercules, and—bonus—he had an excellent beard.
Just look at it.
Luxurious.
Despite his legendary status as the Hercules of Hercules, Reeves and his beard only played the titular demigod twice—first in Hercules and then in the sequel, Hercules Unchained—though he did feature in some other peplum flicks. Reeves, who passed away at 74 in 2000, was sort of the Schwarzenegger-who-wasn't. According to his obituary in the Guardian, Reeves passed on the lead role in both A Fistful of Dollars and Dr. No. So the Clint Eastwood of peplum was almost the Clint Eastwood of spaghetti westerns, which would have ruined my analogy.
The Sean Connery of peplum? The Hercules of spy movies?
Still, though he never made it to that level of superstardom, Reeves laid down a bodybuilding-to-acting career path for later action and peplum mainstays like Reg Park and Lou Ferrigno and even for big Hollywood muckety-mucks like Stallone and Schwarzenegger, and he did it by playing the Hercules no one could forget.
Coming
right now...
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