You may have heard the story that Mario Bava was first approached to direct 5 DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON on a Friday—in fact, on the Friday before the Monday when shooting began. He was approached in desperation because the contracted director fell ill (perhaps conveniently so) just before production was scheduled to begin. Trooper that he was, Bava stepped in and brought all his stylistic skills to bear and somehow miraculously averting disaster. He didn't care for the film, but his fans tend to like it a good deal, for which we can also be grateful to an uncommonly infectious score by Piero Umiliani, one of his very best.
The same anecdotal circumstances also once befell Bava's mentor Riccardo Freda. A short time after completing the Maciste film that became SAMSON AND THE 7 MIRACLES OF THE WORLD for Panda film, Freda received a call from Panda associates Luigi Carpentieri and Ermano Donati, who had also been his producers on 1957's breakthrough horror film I VAMPIRI. They were looking forward to producing their next Maciste film, MACISTE ALL'INFERNO ("Maciste in Hell," rebooting a title from Italy's silent days) when its unnamed director suddenly fell ill. (Perhaps he saw Bava's HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD, released around this time, which managed to do everything one could accomplish in such a Hadean setting as well as it could possibly be done at Cinecittà.) Freda got the call and, professional worker for hire that he was, he accepted the job. There wasn't a lot of time to prepare, and the resulting film is hardly a resounding success, but it is a fascinating and picturesque piece of work especially when seen in its proper widescreen dimensions. I grew up seeing the film on late night television, cropped down to fit the square screen in that special way of imposing side-to-side edits on shots that were meant to be stationary and uncut.
As you can see from these frames below, the entire frame must be visible to convey the emotions of any given scene.
I recently recorded an audio commentary for SAMSON AND THE 7 MIRACLES IN THE WORLD, which required me to take a crash course into the tangled history of Panda's Maciste series, which would seem to have no film-to-film continuity whatsoever as the lead actor in these films is constantly changing. They began with Mark Forest in SON OF SAMSON (Maciste nella valle del Rei, 1960), continued with Gordon Mitchell in ATLAS IN THE LAND OF THE CYCLOPS (Maciste nella terra dei ciclopi, 1961), and then Freda's film (originally known as Maciste alla corte del gran Khan, 1961). Each of these films is set in different areas of the globe and also in different eras of history. Each film ends with Maciste saving the day, being invited to stay, and explaining that he must move on to find and correct the injustices of the world and the plights of the oppressed.
In MACISTE IN HELL (the title I prefer to use for Freda's emergency rescue), a new Maciste—Kirk Morris, a former Venetian gondolier named Adriano Bellini who won the 1961 Mr. Italia bodybuilding competition—suddenly appears on horseback in 17th century Scotland, Loch Laird no less. As before, he appears to have been summoned out of thin air, out of Time itself, by the need for a champion. It is 100 years after the burning there of an accused witch, Martha Gaunt (the beautiful and sultry Hélène Chanel, made to look hideous), at the merciless hands of Judge Paris (Andrea Bosić), whose romantic overtures she rejected in their youth. The local villagers are already in superstitious overdrive from the anniversary and the fact that the dead tree where the witch was burned recently burst into bloom when a decendant of Judge Paris hung herself from one of its branches. When it is announced that a new bride by the name of Martha Gaunt (Vira Silenti) is honeymooning at the local castle, the locals ram the barricades down and put the innocent Martha on trial as an accused witch. When she is invited to swear her innocence on a Bible, the accursed memory of the witch Martha Gaunt causes the sacred book to burst into flames.
It's a powerful set of images, and the movie offers them in spades. To save the woman before she can be executed, Maciste wrests the wicked tree out of the ground and finds a passage leading straight down to Hell, where he is challenged by numerous obstacles—a lion, a giant, a large vulture (interrupted while lunching on the liver of a screaming Prometheus, no less), a gigantic door of flame, and even the distractions of love and amnesia—before finding and destroying the previous Martha Gaunt. Hell is played, in large part, by the Grotte di Castellana—a popular tourist attraction in southern Italy.
Seen today, it is impossible to miss the debt of the film's opening sequence to the opening of Bava's BLACK SUNDAY (La maschera del demonio, 1960) but Freda had the decency not to steal more than was courteous. He approaches the sequence from a radically different angle: the scene is not filmed in black-and-white but in autumnal color; it is not set at night but in overcast daylight; and the witch is ugly not beautiful. While Bava's film inspired a number of pictures (Roger Corman's THE HAUNTED PALACE, 1963, for example) to open with an execution and a curse pronounced across time, it is the look of Freda's sequence (as photographed by Riccardo Pallottini) that would have the greater influence on such films as Michael Reeves' THE SHE BEAST (1965) and WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968), Michael Armstrong's MARK OF THE DEVIL (1970), and Adrian Hoven's MARK OF THE DEVIL II (1971). The specific difference between the Bava and Freda films is enough to posit MACISTE IN HELL, moreso than the spookier BLACK SUNDAY, in the context of what is now being recognized as Folk Horror.
It should be noted that MACISTE IN HELL was Kirk Morris' third stab at the role, preceded by Il trionfo di Maciste (1960, called THE TRIUMPH OF THE SON OF HERCULES on US TV) and Maciste contra Ercole nella valle dei guai (HERCULES IN THE VALLEY OF WOE (both 1961)—neither of which were produced by Panda Film, who would appear to have not secured the exclusive rights to the Maciste character, at least at that time. For me, one of the most fascinating and surprising aspects of MACISTE IN HELL is that screenwriters Oreste Biancoli (whose idea it was to resurrect the strongman hero of 1914's CABIRIA for the peplum era) and Piero Pierotti (who I suspect was the Freda film's original intended director) seize the opportunity to assert this Maciste adventure as the latest in Panda's ongoing series. At one point, Prometheus advises Maciste—who has been placed under an amnesiac spell by taking a bite of the witch's apple—to refresh his memory of himself and his purpose by seeking out his reflection in the Pool of Fire. When Kirk Morris does this, the film treats us to a "Maciste's Greatest Hits" reflection that dares to insert Morris into Mark Forest's, Gordon Mitchell's, and Gordon Scott's scenes from Panda's previous three Maciste pictures. When I recorded my recent commentary, I noted that the series with its many different Maciste actors had no real continuity, possibly because the name Maciste had no resonance outside Italy. (Hence the renaming of this character on all English export versions—even in THE TRIUMPH OF THE SON OF HERCULES, that son is named Machistus rather than Maciste!)
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| Kirk Morris replacing Mark Forest in a scene from SON OF SAMSON... |
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... Gordon Mitchell in a scene from ATLAS AGAINST THE CYCLOPS...
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All in all, eleven well-muscled actors would inherit the role of Maciste from its originator Bartolomeo Pagano (1878-1947), who would follow CABIRIA with no less than 28 (!) Maciste adventures of all kinds. (There is now an English-language book devoted to Pagono's story, THE MACISTE FILMS OF ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA by Jacqueline Reich, which I whole-heartedly reccommend.) Eight of these heroes supreme would play the role only once: Alan Steel (real name: Sergio Ciani), Gordon Mitchell, Reg Park, Ed Fury (real name: Rupert Holovchik), Reg Lewis, Samson Burke, Renato Rossini, and Richard Lloyd. Then there was the great Gordon Scott, who played him twice. Kirk Morris would ultimately play Maciste six times, and Mark Forest (real name: Lou Degni) would top them all—in terms of quantity anyway—with no less than seven Maciste pictures.
Not everything in the film works, of course. The drugged lion (courtesy of Circo Cipriano's) meekly challenging our hero matches poorly with the heavily-maned, fierce-looking stuffed head with which he grapples in closeups; the ratty vulture is obviously stuffed; the giant obviously isn't; and the cameo by Prometheus (though an intriguing lesson for Maciste about interfering in other people's karma) is risible. Also, Maciste isn't given any lines to speak (nor is he mentioned by name) until we're well into the picture, apparently Freda's way of circumventing his star's inability to handle dialogue. But the name of the game is cinema, and this film is undeniably a visual treat—not on the level of mystic fantasmagorical illusion (which was Bava's game in HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD) but in terms of Freda's command of art history and his ability to quote with conviction the work of such netherworld explorers as Hieronymus Bosch, Gustave Doré, and William Blake—as well as the great artisans responsible for the scenic splendor of Guido Brignone's original MACISTE IN HELL made for the silent cinema of 1925. Bottom line: it's much more beautiful and entertaining than I remembered.
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