Peplum Films (Study Guide) - Sword and Sandal, Maciste, Hercules, Il Colosso Di Rodi, Hercules Unchained, the Sons of Hercules (Paperback)

This is nonfiction commentary. Chapters: Sword and Sandal, Maciste, Hercules, Il Colosso Di Rodi, Hercules Unchained, the Sons of Hercules, Hercules in the Haunted World, Ulysses, Goliath and the Dragon. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 57. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Sword and sandal films, or pepla (singular peplum) are a class of Italian-made adventure or fantasy films that have subjects set in Biblical or classical antiquity, often with contrived plots based very loosely on mythology or Greco-Roman history, or the surrounding cultures of the same era (Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Minoans), etc. The "peplum" (or Sword-and-Sandal film) is a sub-category of the genre of Hollywood Historical epics, much the same way that "spaghetti westerns" are a sub-category of the Hollywood Western. Some people feel the peplum category should encompass such diverse Period films as Ben-Hur, Cleopatra, Titus, Gladiator, King Arthur or The Ten Commandments. More specifically, however, the sword and sandal film genre (or peplum) generally refers to a low-budget Italian movie on a gladiatorial, Biblical or mythological subject, often with a professional bodybuilder in the principal role, in much the same way as the term "spaghetti Western" refers only to Italian westerns filmed in Europe and which were later dubbed in English. The 1914 Italian silent film Cabiria was important in the development of the art of cinematography, and was one of the first sword-and-sandal films to make use of a massively muscled character (Maciste), played by actor Bartolomeo Pagano who served as the hero's strong but sullen sidekick and later appeared in at least 26 unrelated movies from 1915 through 1926, in all of which he played a protagonist named Maciste but each film was set in a different time frame. The peplum ...http: //booksllc.net/?id=253655