Amazons

The other great threat (also familiar from classical mythology) is the non-sexual female in an extreme form: the Amazon, the woman who acts like a man. The posters represent such women with a countervailing duality, on the one hand operating in the male realms of fighting and warfare yet with an ultimately reassuring physical vulnerability. On the left the Amazon (or Gladiatrix) - the terms are interchangeable for the producers of this film - raises her sword to strike in a pose which exactly mirrors male fighters we have seen, while the woman on the right is trapped and vulnerable, her back exposed to arrows. In the poster on the right, at the top there are hordes of ferocious armed women on horseback or, as the poster says titillatingly, "a thousand tempting beauties; they fought like ten thousand unchained tigers,"; while the main image has the Amazon grappling with Louis Jourdan. Note the faint visual evocation of the single‑breasted classical Amazon through the dress off the right shoulder. The hairstyle also reinforces her identity and connotes her defeminized character. The women in the sword-and-sandal movies always have long, luxurious hair, and their hairstyles are often elaborate: indeed, the more elaborate the hairstyle the more sexually dangerous the woman. But here the Amazon has, fittingly, a kind of modern "bob": a no-nonsense, manageable style for the working woman. And this, I think, is how she was meant to be read: this is the threat of the modern woman come to life - the woman who rejects her female role, has a job and, so, acts like a man.