Michael Mordine – ‘A Thousand Tempting Beauties!’: Women in Sword-and-Sandal Movie Posters of the 1950s and ’60s

The sword-and-sandal movies of the 1950s and 60s were a world-wide phenomenon, perhaps most familiar to us as "high-end" A-movies like Spartacus and Quo Vadis which were, in part, inspired by the success of this low-budget genre.

The plots are mythological or historical adventures, predominantly set in a more or less recognizable ancient Greece and Rome, and feature heroes derived from classical mythology such as Hercules or Ulysses, as well as Samson and the Italian hero Maciste, and historical figures such as Caesar and Spartacus. However, while these sword and sandal movies regularly employ the mythological or historical repertoire surrounding these figures as inspiration for their own stories, the connection to the classical past as we would understand it is often dim and garbled. Instead, they present a kind of ersatz-mythology or history, a pastiche of recognizable elements which take on a life of their own divorced from their classical models. In this regard, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is the rightful heir to the sword-and-sandal legacy.

These films were mainly Italian productions with international casts, favoring an Anglo‑American muscleman in the lead. The stars had names to fit their physical status: rugged, strong, manly: names like Ed Fury, Alan Steel and Rock Stevens. Akin to those actors with their speaking names, the central male character seems often to have been given the name of those famous mythological heroes for easy recognizability. So we find a Hercules, a Samson, a Goliath - or a son of Hercules or of Samson, etc. - whose story has virtually no discernable connection to the eponymous hero. The character’s name then becomes a shorthand for "heroic strongman," tapping into the audience’s vague familiarity with such figures. Indeed, the same movie could be - and was - titled "The Fury of Hercules" or "The Fury of Samson" with the dialogue dubbed appropriately.

Just as the producers drew upon the easily recognizable names, if not the stories, of Hercules, Spartacus, Ulysses, and so on for the central male character in order to create a generic strong-man hero, women are also drawn from a similar short-list of historical and mythological figures - Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Messalina - and they play comparable roles as generic female types with parallels from classical mythology - the virtuous wife, the evil sorceress, the threatening Amazon. The depiction of female figures on the poster art of the sword-and-sandal pictures is the focus of my talk today. How do they fit into, shape and contest this realm of hyper‑masculinity?