The Colossus of Rhodes

Another of the movies that I recorded some time back because it sounded like it might be fun was the sword-and-sandal epic The Colossus of Rhodes.

A pre-credits sequences shows people laboring away in an underground cavern, starting a fire to try to get away. They're clearly slave labor, but the ruse doesn't quite work. Then after the credits, we learn that this is the island of Rhodes, east of the mainland of what is now Greece, and that it's 280 BC. The king has just had a giant statue of Apollo built to guard the harbor, and an Athenian, Dario (Rory Calhoun), is visiting. The ceremony to christen the statue doesn't go well, however, as someone who opposes slavery tries to stop it and gets killed for his efforts. The King doesn't realize that there are a lot of people who aren't happy with the political situation on the island.

Worse, however, is that those people aren't quite united. Instead, they're in two factions. One faction is the good people who don't want slavery; they try to convince Dario to help them. Then there's a second faction, led by the prime minister Thar. Thar wants to ally with the Phoenicians against the rest of the Greeks, and it should be no surprise that the Greeks aren't pleased with this, especially because it will have a terrible effect on their shipping.

So the king responds by basically not allowing anybody to enter or leave the island, including people like poor Dario who was just a visitor here but is suspected by some of being a spy, something that's not an unnatural suspicion. Dario, for his part, is seeing Diala (Lea Massari), who is the daughter of the designer of the Colossus, trying to get information on it in the hopes he can use this to smuggle people out of Rhodes. He doesn't realize that she's also been sing Thar. Amusingly, when the anti-Phoenicians try to get out of Rhodes, we see what effective defenses the Colossus has, something I won't spoil here.

Many of the remaining anti-Phoenicians are arrested and sentenced to death, although since Dario is one of them we know he's going to escape because a movie like this wouldn't do with killing off its hero. Eventually he and the rest of the good Greeks try to take over the Colossus to prevent the Phoenicians from taking Rhodes themsevles. The Phoenicians arrive at just about the same time as an earthquake, so we get not just a sword-and-sandal movie, but a disaster film as well.

The Colossus of Rhodes is a movie that's probably remembered for only one thing, which is that it was directed by Sergio Leone early in his career, not that he made that many movies. It's a Spanish/Italian co-production, with Rory Calhoun only brought in because the production companies wanted an American name to get the picture onto American screens. One of the results is that everybody but Calhoun is dubbed into English, with very limited success.

The plot and exectuion of The Colossus of Rhodes is much to complex for the movie's own good; it runs a little over two hours and feels every bit of that two hours. It also doesn't help that the acting is for the most part not very good. But being a sword-and-sandal movie, there's still entertainment to be had even when it's a bad sword-and-sandal movie.