The Mondo Esoterica Guide to:

The term Peplum (from the Latin for a Robe of State - the 'over-the-shoulder' robe that Hercules et. al. sport throughout the genre) is most commonly applied to the mass of muscle-man movies that sprung up in the 1960s after the success of Hercules (1958). However, like most euro-cult expressions it has become confused and re-used heavily down the years - most often interchangably with the generic term 'Sword and Sandal' leading to many American made films being rather incorrectly classified as Pepla. For this feature we will classify a Peplum as any varient of the 'Sword and Sandal' era adventure film but specifically that was produced in Europe and not just filmed there - thus incorporating the traditional muscleman films as well as historical epics and adventure pictures with a Classical setting but not including more modern-set historical epics and muscleman films or the Biblical epics of which the Italians shot many during the 1960s. The Peplum should also not be confused with the later 'Sword and Scorcery' genre that arose from the success of Conan the Barbarian (1982) and although there is a lot of overlap the latter distinctly employed more high fantasy and magical elements.


The History

From the very beginning the Italian cinema industry has been producing Sword and Sandal films with an epic spectacle - Quo Valdis (1912), The Last Days of Pompeii (1913) and Cabria (1914) were among the first and most successful Italian silent films. The latter is most notable for the introduction of the Maciste character a musclebound hero in the Hercules mould, played by actor Batolomeo Pagano. He went on to play the character in twenty-six more films up until 1926, with a mix of Sword and Sandal and more contemporary settings. The genre began to wane however, with the Italian cinema genre as a whole, in the aftermath of the First World War - one exception being Mussolini's pet project Scipione l'africano (1937) considered to be the largest scale epic ever helmed. The Second World War did even more damage to the Italian film industry but it quickly strove to return and alongside the art-house favourite Neo-Realist films the more popular genres began to remerge with dozens of low budget comedies and soon enough another retelling of the classic Last Days of Pompeii (1950), followed by Riccardo Freda's epic Sins of Rome (1952) and Anthony Quinn in Attila (1954).

Most important however, was the relatively small scale Fatiche di Ercole (1958) - a re-telling of the classic tale of the Argonauts (made 5 years before the famous Hollywood version) with American body builder Steve Reeves in the lead role. The film was a big success in Italy and in America, where the rights were purchased by Joseph Levine (who had previously distributed the American edit of Godzilla (1954)) - thanks to his aggressive promotion the film was one of the highest grossing of the year, outperforming Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). The a sequel quickly followed, Ercole e la regina di Lidia (1959) with Steve Reeves returning in the lead role and the scale suitably increased. The film was another success and the way was set for the first of the Italian exploitation booms. Over the next six years, the Italian film industry produced almost a hundred Pepla until the genre began to die out in the mid-1960s when Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci heralded the Spaghetti Western and the swords and sandals became rifles and whisky bottles...

The Style and Subgenres

The pure or 'traditional' Peplum is of course the one that most people will associate with the genre, namely the musclebound fantasy hero films. The subgenre was born with Maciste in 1914 but most influenced by Hercules (1958) and duly, Steve Reeves. The films focus around a central hero, be he Hercules, Maciste, or one of the multitude of heroic figures that the film-makers plucked from both history and the bible for their productions. Generally these stories would be unrelated to the actual legends surrounding the hero to the extent that the characters often became interchangable and in different dubs of the films Hercules would become Samson and Goliath would become Hercules without any other changes needed to the script.

The majority of the films follow the same basic pattern. Set during some generic period of ancient Roman or Greek history, with the hero discovering a 'wrong', and in setting out to right it upsetting the evil villain who will sent waves of cannon fodder soldiers at the hero, all building up to a climactic confrontation with a nice happy ending. This last point is most notable when comparing the Pepla to many of the later Euro-cult genres, from the Western to the Giallo, in which nihilism and tragic endings were all too common - the Traditional Peplums were almost invariably light in tone and although not always resorting to all out comedy, this was often a feature of the genre and the productions could generally be considered family friendly, at least by modern standards. A few distinct entries, notably Mario Bava's haunting Hercules at the Centre of the Earth (1962) did emerge, but they were infrequent.

Less common, due largely due to their much higher cost, was the Historical Epic Peplum. Usually quite accurately based on real historical events, or well known legends, these films were often much darker and grimmer than the Traditional Peplum, although a happy ending would usually be provided. Influenced by the American epics, these Italian productions would usually revolve around some key battle scenes with small scale characterisation inbetween. Depending on the production budget, some genuinely large scale battle scenes could be staged, most notably in The Wooden Horse of Troy (1961) and The Battle of Marathon (1959). In contrast to Hollywood's output however, even the largest scale films would rarely exceed 90 minutes run-time and the overblown excesses of such productions as Cleopatra (1963) were avoided.

Not all of the more historically themed Pepla were epics however, and the Historical Adventure Peplum was one of the more common subgenres, combining real historical settings with fictional stories, they ranged from the small scale Ten Gladiators series, to the near epic spectacle of The Collosus of Rhodes (1961) with many of the smaller scale entries in particular being essentially a Traditional Peplum without the Hercules. Probably furthest removed from the normal definition of a Peplum was Messalina (1960) which is packed with enough court intrigue and murder to make a thespian happy would be better classified as a Historical Drama Peplum, with its focus much more on dialogue and plot than action scenes.


The People

Steve Reeves is by far the best known of the Peplum stars - after appearing in the original Hercules and its sequel he was called in for dozens of similar roles, both in traditional and historical epic Pepla. After a serious accident during the filming of Last Days of Pompeii (1959) he was forced to stop his heavy workout routines and tone down considerably - but by then his name was permanently attached to the genre, and he continued to work through until the end in the mid-1960s. The massive demand for muscle-bound heros during the genre's heyday meant that Reeves himself could not handle all of the roles, and so producers scoured tough man competitions, importing dozens of musclebound Americans to play their lead roles - at the time, as was still the case many years later, an American actor was considered essential the help the film sell. Thus performers like Brad Harris, Richard Harrison, Ed Fury, Mark Damon, as well as British born Reg Park all played their parts in the Peplum boom. Only a couple of native actors appeared in the musclebound lead roles, although they appeared under Anglicised names to help sell the films, the best known being Alan Steel (Mario Caiano) and Kirk Morris (Adriano Bellini).

On the directoral side, the genre never boasted any iconic names of its own, although it did prove to be a starting block for many directors who became iconic in their own fields. Future Spaghetti Western auteurs Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Leone got their first breaks in the genre, working together on The Last Days of Pompeii (1959) while many of the cult favourite Western directors, including Gianfranco Parolini and Ferdinando Baldi, made their debuts in the Peplum. Italian Master of Horror Mario Bava got a big start as a cinematographer on both Hercules (1958) and its sequel, and it was his work filling in for the uninterested Jacques Tourner on Giant of Marathon (1959) that got him noticed and lead to his first directoral break - Black Sunday (1960). His mentor Riccardo Freda worked on several genre entries, including the pre-boom Sins of Rome (1952), and later The Giants of Thessaly (1961) and Maciste in Hell (1963).

All text on this page written by Timothy Young - October 2007 - January 2008.
Text from this site not to be used without authorization.

Please contact: