The movie Hercules starring Steve Reeves - who went on to do a series of
these films - was a world-wide box-office success and effectively started the sword-and-sandal
craze. The movie and its posters established the standards and parameters of
this burgeoning genre and served as a model for other subsequent films and their
posters. It is, thus, a good index of the preoccupations of these movies and of
the poster art, and, so, a good place to begin my discussion.
The centrality of the male figure is obvious: he
ripples with muscles, displaying a, literally, outsized masculinity. This is a fetishization
of the male body and its muscularity, a worship of hyper‑masculinity.
1 Here,
the muscle man is the central - indeed only - focus: the image is obsessed with
this object of physical strength and virility which fills the space of the
poster, visually overwhelming the viewer of the poster just as, one might say,
he overwhelms his enemies. But this is an image which fixates upon and
celebrates not just physical virility but sexual virility in particular. The male
body is the center of attention but, more than that, the groin is arguably the
center of attention of that body, placed at the exact center of the poster and
its bulge indicating the actual genitalia underneath the skimpy garment. This
is true of both images, while the poster on the right adds the additional,
crucial image of the female. The woman in this sort of schema serves as the internal
viewer of the hero - eroticizing him through her gaze, and modeling the
external viewer’s response - if not of lust, of admiration. Note in the poster
on the right, the woman, indeed both women, are looking not just at the hero
but at his groin.
1 Note the
very Samson-like pose - pulling pillars with chains (Sampson and Delilah was
released in1949). Like the interchangeability of names, the posters display an
ecumenical array of references and allusions, producing a hodgepodge effect in
their visual language.
