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.

Once Upon a Time in America

I've had Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America on my DVR for a long time, since TCM ran it as part of the spotlight on the Roaring 20s two years ago. I'd been a bit reluctant to sit through another four-hour movie, but it's on TV today, at 10:49 PM on StarzEncore Suspense, so I gritted and bore it to do a review here.

The movie starts with a prologue, in 1933. Somebody's looking for "Noodles" (Robert DeNiro) in New York City. They're so desperate to find him they're willing to kill people who won't give them the information leading to his whereabouts. It turns out that Noodles has picked up a yen for opium at some point along the way, and he's in an opium den (in Chinatown, I'd guess), where the proprietors are willing to usher him out to keep the bad guys from finding him. Noodles makes his way to a bar owned by "Fat Moe", who has been keeping a key there for some time. Noodles gets the key, goes to the train station, and eventually takes the first train out of town.

Flash forward to 1968. Noodles is returning, because he's gotten a letter from the local synagogue that the place has been sold off, necessitating the removal of the graves to someplace else. And since this creates obvious religious issues, the survivors need to be notified. However, while the synagogue and cemetery were sold off, this actually happened some months earlier, leading Noodles to realize that somebody has found where he's been hiding all these years and wants him back in New York for, well, reasons. Also in 1968, there's a cabinet secretary David Bailey who is about to get into serious legal problems due to his relations with a corrupt Teamster boss Jimmy O'Donnell (Treat Williams).

We then flash back to around 1920, when Prohibition was about to be introduced, which really jumpstarted organized crime in America. Noodles is young and one of those street thugs who would work for the somewhat higher-up people in the syndicate. Together with friends Patsy (James Hayden), Cockeye (William Forsythe), Dominic, and Max (James Woods), the five start a sort of mini-gang of their own that's going to become bigger as Prohibition and the 1920s roar on.

But it's not all a bed of roses. Noodles has a girl his loves in the form of Fat Moe's sister Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern), but she has dreams of becoming an actress. Meanwhile, Max falls in love with platinum blonde Carol (Tuesday Weld), who Noodles thinks is going to mess up all of the gang's operations.

The movie keeps switching back and forth between the Prohibition era and 1968, until Prohibition is repealed and the gang has to pull one last job which winds up breaking up the gang and leads to Noodles' leaving town which we saw in the opening. Then we spend the last bit of the movie in 1968 where Noodles has been invited to a party at Bailey's Long Island mansion which should wrap up all of the loose ends.

It didn't really occur to me until about the time the movie was ending that I was also reminded of Whistle Stop, which I blogged about a few days ago. The reason is that both movies start off very slowly until the get to the finale that is supposed to be the main conflict of the movie. Whistle Stop is a B movie, but also only 81 minutes. Once Upon a Time in America, however, is about 229 minutes, at least the 2012 restoration print which is what I believed TCM showed and what is likely showing up on StarzEncore this evening and was pretty darn close to the original European theatrical release. That means there's a lot to sit through. Once Upon a Time in America, however, has much stronger production values, as well as much stronger acting, none of which should be surprised since this wasn't conceived as a B movie at all.

But is Once Upon a Time in America good? Well, there's the rub. Apparently when it was first set to be released in the US, the studio was antsy about releasing a movie that long, so they cut out a lot and then re-edited everything else into chronological order, winding up with a movie that ran about 140 minutes, and was a box-office flop. Critics who get paid to do this stuff, pretentious lot that they mostly are, had seen the 229-minute version and unsurprisingly praised it. I, however, am somewhere decidedly in the middle.

It's easy to understand why some people would love this. And the movie is clearly of a high technical standard. But at the time time, I can also see that the movie needed a much tighter script. I'm reminded of the comment I made about Erich von Stroheim's Greed: there was a good 140-minute movie to be made from the story, but Stroheim gave the studio a 10-hour film, making editing it down to 140 minutes a near impossible task. Likewise, Sergio Leone originally came up with something a lot longer than even the 229-minute cut, and that too probably made it extremely difficult to cut it down. Also to be fair to the studio, there are two rape scenes that probably would have required editing to avoid an X rating in the 1980s.

So certainly, give Once Upon a Time in America a go, but be warned that it's not going to be for everybody.