If men, according to the internet, simply cannot stop thinking about the Roman empire, then Hollywood remains a largely male-brained enterprise. Storytelling trends come and go, but the Roman epic has been a recurring fixture of blockbuster cinema for more than a century. Twenty-five years ago, Ridley Scott’s beefy, lavishly appointed action film Gladiator marked a resurgence in the genre after some time off, winning a best picture Oscar and spawning a new wave of sweeping, grunting imitators.
Now, Gladiator II is among them. Scott’s surprisingly belated follow-up substitutes Paul Mescal’s brooding glower for Russell Crowe’s brawny roar, but otherwise follows the template of its predecessor in a way that renders it as much remake as sequel. Playing the son (thanks to some blatant narrative revisionism) of Crowe’s Roman general turned gladiator Maximus, Mescal’s Lucius follows the same trajectory through capture, imprisonment and revenge via some grisly theatrics in the Colosseum. The film is missing the hungry intensity of Crowe’s star presence, while its aesthetic is muddier than the blood-and-gold spectacle of the original, but it’s enjoyable just the same. Piling on the gore and the absurdity (sharks in a Roman arena? Why not?), Scott directs it like a sword-and-sandal B-movie with an A-movie budget.
Strictly speaking, “sword-and-sandal” refers to a specific class of Italian-made classical or biblical adventures that were churned out in the mid-20th century as a cheap and cheerful response to Hollywood’s heftier exercises in the same genre. Now, though, the term usefully covers any historical action epic that conforms to its stated dress code and has an underlying spirit of violent gladiatorial entertainment. A film such as Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia’s ludicrous Ursus in the Valley of the Lions (1961; free on TubiTV) is true and quintessential sword-and-sandal fare: hot nonsense mixing a vaguely ancient milieu with outright fantasy involving an eye-poppingly bodybuilt, raised-by-lions hero.
It’s practically superhero stuff – a million miles removed from the more notionally high-minded American togafests then ruling the box office. The 1951 success of Quo Vadis, a stiffly written but dazzlingly produced trip to the last days of emperor Nero (hilariously played by Peter Ustinov), had opened the floodgates for a genre perfectly suited to new industry innovations in widescreen Technicolor imagery. In endlessly unfurling CinemaScope, The Robe gave us Richard Burton as a Roman centurion turned follower of Jesus, while Ben-Hur racked up 11 Oscars in 1960 for an even more grand-scale fusion of Roman empire lore and modern American Christian values. The same year, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus injected the genre with a bit more political wit while staying true to the oiled-up macho physicality of it all. Still, its flourishes of winking homoeroticism remain on the tastefully restrained side compared with the pectoral ogling of Italian outings such as Son of Samson (1960; Amazon), in which Hercules-like strongman Maciste lifts and flexes his way to revolutionary glory.
In 1964, however, the box-office failure of The Fall of the Roman Empire (currently on BBC iPlayer) – an intelligent, underrated evocation of the same Roman administration later fictionalised by Gladiator, with Christopher Plummer as a fabulously venal Commodus – effectively called time on the prestige sword-and-sandal epic. More lo-fi sensibilities took over the genre: the relative success of the independent epic Jason and the Argonauts, with its distinctive Ray Harryhausen creature effects, paved the way for films that meshed the lurid spirit of Italian fare with earnest Hollywood heroism. See 1981’s Clash of the Titans, a likable, bone-headed riff on the Perseus myth, transitioning into the pulpy sword-and-sorcery fantasy of Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja: no history to contend with, just flesh and weaponry.
Gladiator might have pulled the genre back toward Rome and respectability, but it always finds its way back toward hokum. Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007) loosely portrayed the Greco-Persian wars with a wildly stylised comic-book aesthetic and limited palette that stressed bloodshed above all else, as did Neil Marshall’s stormily handsome Centurion, starring Michael Fassbender as a cool-blooded Roman gladiatorial descendant. But it’s Tarsem Singh’s utterly daft, gorgeous Immortals (2011) that I remember most fondly from the post-Gladiator era: Greek mythology chopped and splattered into a kind of body-beautiful fever dream. If we’re not going to learn anything, the best sword-and-sandal films should always offer an excess of things to look at.
All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified.
Also new on streaming and DVD
Anora (Apple TV+) Hitting VOD platforms just in time for the Oscar nominations, Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner is a rowdy, raucous exercise in screwball realism. At once dizzily entertaining and mournful, it follows a Brooklyn lapdancer (Mikey Madison) through the ringer as she charms a Russian oligarch and finds herself in over her head.
The Mother and the Whore (Criterion Collection) A high-end Blu-ray release for this peculiar, funny, erotic, obtuse doorstop of French art cinema. Jean Eustache’s nearly four-hour love triangle navigates the social and sexual politics of an awakened, embittered 1970s France with a specificity that makes the film both a time capsule and a still-resonant document.
Smile 2 If you’re wondering why Wendy Ide and I both put Naomi Scott’s performance in this unexpectedly inventive horror sequel on our best actress list in the Observer’s Oscar ballot earlier this month, find out for yourself. Playing a pop star on the brink of psychological meltdown whether or not she’s in mortal peril, she’s daringly abrasive and thrillingly on-edge.
