{"id":27463,"date":"2024-02-10T21:03:54","date_gmt":"2024-02-11T02:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=27463"},"modified":"2024-02-10T21:03:54","modified_gmt":"2024-02-11T02:03:54","slug":"helen-of-troy-1956-a-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/10\/helen-of-troy-1956-a-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Helen of Troy (1956) \u2013 A Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

No spoiler alert needed.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that bad.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read chunks of the Iliad in Homeric Greek.\u00a0 Unlike some of my professors who preferred it to the Odyssey I\u2019m more partial to that more human scale sequel.\u00a0 But I profess that there are scenes in the War Poem that are evocative and stirring.<\/p>\n

I watched a 1950\u2019s sword and sandal \u201cepic\u201d called \u201cHelen of Troy.\u201d\u00a0 They somehow roped in Sir Cedric Hardwicke to play Priam in this spectacle.\u00a0 I guess his salary ate up most of the salary budget because not another name of an actor or actress was recognizable to me except a very young Brigitte Bardot who played \u201cthe slave girl Andraste\u201d mostly with her clothes on.<\/p>\n

The movie had a budget of $6 million and in 1956 that was a lotta dough.\u00a0 And you can see where they spent it.\u00a0 There was a cast of extras that must have numbered in the thousands for the battle scenes and the elaborate props like siege towers and war engines not to mention the walls of Troy and the giant horse must have cost a bunch to make and then burn which of course they did in the last scene.<\/p>\n

And it made about $3 million at the box office so it lost a lotta dough.\u00a0 And I can see why.\u00a0 The acting is shockingly wooden.\u00a0 The script is laughably bad and the fight scenes look as if the combatants had never seen a sword or a spear used, even in movies.\u00a0 My favorite fight is the duel between Achilles and Hector.\u00a0 Instead of hurling their spears at each other they use the butt ends as cudgels and only after pounding away at each other for a while does Achilles skewer Hector as if he were a pork roast.<\/p>\n

Mercifully the gods are completely omitted from this remarkable cinematic monument.\u00a0 That surely would have been too much.\u00a0 But humans suffered enough here.\u00a0 Some of the Trojans are portrayed sympathetically.\u00a0 Unfortunately, none of the Greeks were.\u00a0 Achilles, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax and Patroclus are all presented as swine of one variety or another.<\/p>\n

The action of the war is compressed from ten years to something like a weekend.\u00a0 Hector and Achilles are finished off within five minutes of each other and before you know it the wooden horse is unloading its deadly cargo of Hellenic hoplites.\u00a0 As the final credits are rolling Helen is on the trireme headed back to Sparta and she muses how even though Paris was just brutally murdered by her once and future husband Menelaus and his henchmen in the preceding scene and died the beautiful death, in a sense he would always be there with her.\u00a0 Or something.<\/p>\n

You know I like bad old genre movies.\u00a0 If I\u2019m in the mood I can watch Demetrius and the Gladiators or Quo Vadis.\u00a0 They\u2019re full of bad acting and historical inaccuracies but somehow, they manage to allow me not to suspend disbelief but rather, to revel in the conceit that I and the moviemaker both get to wink at each other and still enjoy a fake Age of Caesar or Bronze Age Greece that he\u2019s conjured up.\u00a0 But this thing is not that.\u00a0 It\u2019s too completely pointless and the characters are too unlikeable.\u00a0 Pass!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No spoiler alert needed.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that bad. I\u2019ve read chunks of the Iliad in Homeric Greek.\u00a0 Unlike some of my professors who preferred it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[1439,1299,831,43,38,1355],"class_list":["post-27463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-cedric-hardwicke","tag-greece","tag-homer","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\nHelen of Troy (1956) \u2013 A Movie Review - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/10\/helen-of-troy-1956-a-movie-review\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Helen of Troy (1956) \u2013 A Movie Review - Orion's Cold Fire\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"No spoiler alert needed.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that bad. 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