Good Girls and Seductresses

One of the remarkable features of these movies and their posters is how often they mirror the classical paradigms and divide women into set types, presenting them as exemplars of good and evil. Both of these posters are for "Hercules and the Queen of Lydia" released in the US as "Hercules Unchained." In the poster on the left, Hercules is framed by the typical female extremes of the genre: on the left, the seductive, powerful, sorceress queen; on the right the faithful, chaste wife. Their identities are delineated by their physical appearance: on the left, the fancier hairdo, the red hair, more makeup (note the catlike eyes), on the right blond, fair - the one sinister, the other innocent.

In particular, we see a repetition of classical prejudices and fascination with the foreign, exotic, sexual temptress. In the right she takes over the image, rather unusually appearing twice - once seducing Hercules and again sexually posed on the bed and, in effect, seducing the viewer. Here, there are striking reversals of visual convention: the female is the central focus while the male as action figure is relegated to a monochromatic periphery at the upper right.