Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (1959)

The Last Days of Pompeii is one of the Italian sword-and-sandal movies - also known as pepla - which were produced from the late fifties to the mid sixties. It is a genre largely characterised by beautiful women in clingy, tiny tunics lusting after muscle-bound men in even clingier and tinier tunics.

Despite the success of such movies at the time, and their sheer quantity, their memory has largely faded from the public consciousness, replaced by the more acclaimed genre of the Italian spaghetti western which immediately followed. This particular feature is noteable to fans of both genres, since reportedly it was largely directed by a fellow named Sergio Leone, stepping in for director Mario Bonnard who had fallen ill during production.

Last Days is also among the first of these movies to be set in Ancient Rome. It stars beefcake Steve Reeves, an American bodybuilder who predated Clint Eastwood in crossing the atlantic to become the highest paid actor in Europe. His performances in Hercules and Hercules Unchained more or less created the whole peplum fad at the time.

Problem is, Steve Reeves hadn't really escaped his Hercules persona. That means this outing sees his character, Centurion Glaucus, slaying dozens of enemies and consistently performing superhuman feats of strength (even while spending most of the film with a rather nasty arrow wound). Though to be fair, Russell Crowe pretty much repeated this trick forty years later in Gladiator.

Other noteables in the movie include a 14-year-old Christine Kaufmann, who a few years later would become the second of Tony Curtis' six wives (incidentally, Spartacus himself Kirk Douglas was the best man at the wedding). Spanish actor Fernando Rey - known for The French Connection - also appears as a devious high priest.

The film begins rather brutally, with a nasty-looking gang of black-hooded men storming a villa, stealing treasures and slaughtering men, women and children. As these brutes set the place aflame and gallop away with their loot, the camera pans to the terrible mark the bandits have left behind - *gasp* - a sign of the cross!

Fear not, though, for this movie is rather aggressively pro-Christian. And we all know there is no way Christians would ever don hoods and go around slaughtering innocent folk, especially not in such an innocent time as the 1950s. So, it's up to the Centurion Glaucus and friends to figure out what's really going on in Pompeii, while the rest of us wait breathlessly (and often impatiently) for the inevitable finale.

The pagans, naturally, are generally portrayed as decadent, ammoral wankers, while all of the Christians in the movie are fucking saints. This skewed plot apparently bears little resemblance to the Bulwer-Lytton novel of the same name, though it does feature the same characters. Aside from other early adapatations, there is a 1984 TV version which is apparently much closer to the original source material.

The Pompeii sets built for this movie are very fine indeed. The portrayl of day-to-day Roman life is also rather good - there are even some subtle references to the many brothels and whorehouses which graced every corner of the doomed city. One of the final scenes takes place in an amphitheatre, which is probably the most impressive set of all.

For the time, the climatic special effects are quite incredible, and you wonder if a late-fifties Hollywood epic would have done it any better. The sheer quantity of sparkling pyrotechnics and crumbling sets on display must have cost a pretty penny indeed.

Steve Reeves also picked up a rather nasty real-life injury during this movie, when his chariot crashed into a tree. This injury effectively put an end to his bodybuilding career, as well as ultimately forcing his early retirement from the movie business a few years later. What a huge pansy he was.