Damon Knight

Mark Damon, now a producer (MONSTER), then a rakishly handsome movie star big in Italy, stars in Vittorio Cottafavi’s last feature, I CENTI CAVALIERI (THE HUNDRED HORSEMEN, 1964), screened in Bologna in Techniscope and Technicolor, looking fantastic.

After an ennervating start (the traditional bickering lovers turned up to eleven, Italian style) this turned out to be really interesting. Cottafavi appears in Richard Roud’s cinema dictionary alongside Bava, suggesting one who presents as an amusing pictorialist, so it was a surprise to find him quoted in the festival programme describing his Brechtian intentions, and almost a bigger surprise to find them carried out in this jaunty peplum-type historical romp.

The Moors ride into a neutral Spanish town and take over, behaving like Nazis (they’re led by Dr. Mabuse, Wolfgang Preiss). Farmmboy Damon becomes a warrior, aided by his militaristic uncle, the mayor’s feisty daughter, a bandit gang led by a comedy dwarf (verfremdungseffekt!), and a wily priest (Gaston Moschin, of whom we needed more).

Well, there’s a lot of dumb comedy and action in this film, but also strange thoughtful moments. As a for-instance: when someone demonstrates a newly invented suit of armour, visor down, a priest speculates that the warrior of the future will be even more unseen, striking at a distance, with civilians, property, whole cities destroyed in this “clean” manner. And before the spirited Robin Hoodery gets going, we pay a visit to a spectacular castle (the scenery in this is Lean-worthy, animated by Cottafavi’s athletic camerawork) populated entirely by amputees, shut away in anticipation of war, lest the sight of their varied mutilations sap the peasants’ martial spirit. This skeptical attitude to war seems forgotten until the climax, another clangorous, Wellesian montage, suddenly plunged into monochrome with chilling effect…

Not as successful overall as DONNE E SOLDATI (the comedy too broad and not often funny — but arguably its true purpose is to disrupt, not amuse) this incredible bargain-bin EL CID is still fascinating and betrays an intellectual ambition utterly lacking in Cinecitta’s usual he-man spectacles.

Hercules Versus Everybody

Italian peplum specialist Vittorio Cottafavi gets a sympathetic airing in Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (which is an excellent book: pick up both volumes secondhand TODAY), considered along with Mario Bava and, as I recall, Riccardo Freda. But I’ve never managed to see anything by VC that matched up to the description of his work, all swirling mists and translucent veils. The stuff I’ve seen has been colourful but kind of flat and not very interesting. (In Luc Moullet’s LES SIEGES DE L’ALCAZAR, the film critic hero is held up to ridicule for being a Cottafavi completist.)

But LA VENDETTA DI ERCOLI (THE REVENGE OF HERCULES), a 1960 nonsense with he-man Mark Forest, is somewhat endearing, just because it’s so preposterous. It stands head and muscly shoulders above the average sword-and-sandal slugfest in stupidity, which is saying a very great deal. If you’re not interested in Cottafavi, you would be likeliest to have checked this movie out in order to appreciate the sight of Broderick Crawford in a skirt, since Larry Cohen ommitted that image from THE PRIVATE FILES OF J. EDGAR HOOVER, but I’m here to tell you, come for the skirt, stay for the animal punching.

Hercules, a truly obnoxious character, kills everything he sees in this movie. In Scene One he stabs a dog to death. Admittedly, it’s Cerberus, the three-headed guard donkey dog of the Underworld. But it’s actually chained up, and seems incapable of movement being as he’s an unconvincing automaton. The stabbing goes on for a very long time indeed: maybe even longer than Willem Dafoe spends punching that poor crow in ANTICHRIST, and that’s a LOOONG time.

In his second scene, Hercules, who still hasn’t actually spoken, murders a… well, I’m not sure what it is. It’s a man on a wire, obviously, dressed in some kind of furry costume with bat wings. I was assuming it was one of the Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys, but when Cottafavi finally dares to grant it a post-mortem closeup, it has the face of a cat. The flying cat-monkey is my favourite character in the film, and I call him Alan.

Later, Hercules wrestles a real elephant, and you’ll be glad to know the elephant probably quite enjoyed it and doesn’t seem to be harmed.

Then (or was it earlier?) he strangles a bear. The bear is definitely not real. He’s a man in a bear costume, and he’s so unconvincing I’m not even convinced he’s a REAL man. Not like Mark Forest, who, as Hercules the enemy of the entire animal kingdom, chokes the life out of him without hesitation.

There’s also a centaur/faun — in defiance of Greek mythological classification, the character is both goat-legged and horse-legged, depending on mood, I guess. Hercules apparently causes his death, in some mysterious magical way. I didn’t fully understand it. But if anything drops dead in this film, by this point I’m quite prepared to assume Hercules is responsible.

“Hey, quit it!”

About the only animals not killed by our hero are the horses, and the snakes in the snake pit, though I don’t give great odds for their survival after Brod the Broad falls into the snakepit. I’m laying their deaths at Herc’s door too, unless further information comes to light.

The US release features a stop-motion dragon animated by the great Jim Danforth. I think it’s safe to assume Hercules kills it.

Oh hey, that whole version is online, in pan-and-scan, washed-out pinkoscope. Dragon at 1:07:56.

The vivid animation alternates with some goofy moronimatronic full-scale puppetry. I guess the big fellow is an advance on the dragon from Lang’s NIBELUNGEN because it doesn’t have its eyes in the front of its head like a person (fun fact: Debra Paget’s partner in the snake-dance in Lang’s much-much-later THE INDIAN TOMB *also* has stereoscopic vision, proving that these inaccurate reptiles are not a mistake but an authorial signature… Lang referred to himself as a dinosaur and had faulty vision, so we’re halfway to a theory already…) but we have to deduct points since it only exists from the neck up, like Benedict Cumberbatch. But it’s a long neck. Like Benedict Cumberbatch.