Hélène de Troie

In comparing this version of Helen Of Troy with the more recent Troy it's quite the tossup. Both didn't quite live up to expectations, the casting in a few places doesn't quite work. There was also different emphasis placed on the classical figures in each film. This version also uses a cast of thousands and in the current version, computer graphics are used to show the mass armies of both sides.

I never understood why 20th Century Fox never thought to film this with Tyrone Power, the role of Paris seems like such a good fit for him. Jacques Sernas was adequate, but not more than that. Rosanna Podesta is one magnificent looking Helen in a role that asks nothing more than being the first celebrity romance in history.

I'd be hard pressed to choose between Peter O'Toole in Troy and Cedric Hardwicke. Each so well portrays the world weary and war weary Priam so well. Hecuba is reduced to a cipher in the current version. But Nora Swinburne is not just a magnificent queen, but a caring mother for her rambunctious brood of Trojan princes and one princess.

My favorite as he's likely to be in any film he's in is Stanley Baker. There is quite a difference between him and Brad Pitt. Brad was a reluctant warrior as in Homer's epic. But Achilles as Baker realizes him is just a warrior who likes battle with the zest of a warrior who knows the gods have given him near invincibility. Baker brings so much passion to anything he does, he usually blows me away with any performance.

Next to the stories of the Bible, Homer's epics are probably the most universally known tales and everyone is a critic. For me this Helen Of Troy is a good if not great retelling of the tale.

I loved "Helen of Troy" when I was a young girl in the 50's. Paris, played by Jacques Sernas, was the most gorgeous man I had ever seen and to me, made his character come alive. I wondered how I would feel about Jacques' performance after seeing Orlando Bloom play a rather wimpy Paris in "Troy". Sadly, there didn't seem to be any chemistry between Paris and Helen in the new version. When comparing the original, classic version, I was pleased to find that it still remains an exciting and dynamic story and could not be improved with extravagant special effects. "Helen of Troy" has a romantic, poignant warmth and the audience is compelled to hope that Helen and Paris can have a happy life together. In the new version, it didn't seem to matter if they stayed together or not, their story almost felt secondary to the glorious story of Brad Pitts' Achilles. Needless to say, I highly recommend the remastered DVD of "Helen of Troy, 1956" for the discerning movie viewer.

Based on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, it's the story of the Trojan War. It's a grand old Hollywood epic from Warner Bros. They are shooting in Italy. The cast is international. The lead character is Paris which is a little odd. He always struck me as a bratty teenager. Of course, that's not the Paris in this movie. They are making him the hero and the Greeks as the villains. It's love against the world. I don't buy it, but that's what they're selling. The dialogue is a bit stiff. It's trying to be a Shakespearean tragedy. On top of that, the production is big. It's huge in fact. It's an old Hollywood epic in that sense. They really have ships and war engines. They have some big sets. They have masses of extras. It's very big and the battles are big. Whatever flaws this has, it's worth it to see all the construction and destruction.

HELEN OF TROY is a very respectable Hollywood sword and sandal effort from the 1950s, with a strong international cast and very good production values. Except ...

Why does every popular culture effort at retelling the Trojan War myth have to make Paris the hero? In the Illiad, by far the most significant and authoritative source of the story, at best shows Paris to be an ambiguous figure--the best looking man of his generation, but often a coward in battle. Helen expresses extraordinary contempt for him in one extended passage. In one or two brief sequences, Paris fights valiantly, but in his major appearance, his winner-take-all-and-Helen duel with Menaleus, after bragging and crowing about his prowess, he completely wimps out in the battle, and, once defeated, is transported by Aphrodite back to Troy to hide in his bedroom.

HELEN OF TROY is not the only effort to mis-read the Illiad into a Paris-and-Helen "runaway" love story. Perhaps in writing a commercial screenplay, that's what any writer would be forced to do. But that doesn't speak well for our popular culture, one that can't sustain the ambiguity and complexity of another culture--of 2700 years ago!

Still, the movie has its strong parts, particularly Stanley Baker as Achilles. Watch for Brigitte Bardot in an early, pre-star role as Helen's handmaiden.

Come on, IMDb'ers! Get your stuff right. Warner Brothers was the studio and they usually forced their producer/directors around this period to use their own proprietary single-strip color process, rather than Technicolor, which by 1956 had already abandoned its own more expensive to use and cumbersome to handle three-strip process. Somehow Robert Wise and his technicians managed to get more variety and warmer tones while using Warnercolor in this film than what was usually achieved stateside on W.B.'s Burbank sound stages and on various U.S. locations. Maybe it was, as Franco Zeffirelli is fond of calling it, "the golden-ah light" of Italy. Anyway this film is quite an eye-filling visual achievement. And Max Steiner's score is one of his better ones, pumping up the spectacle aspect quite effectively.

A couple of trivia notes: The Walls of Troy set accidentally caught fire before the company was finished with it, but Wise and his technicians were on the spot and managed to get some usable footage out of that disaster. (I don't know if they had to reconstruct it or rewrite some scenes that were originally supposed to have taken place on its ramparts.) And TIME magazine in its review complained that Signorina Podesta's vaccination scar (and I think that of Monsieur Sernas as well) is clearly visible in a love scene. Without computers to fix such gaffes back then, and probably not noticing that little "oops!" until examining footage in a U.S. screening room when the company returned home for editing, the studio probably figured they'd just let it pass. But forty-foot wide CinemaScope screens were quite merciless when it came to audiences' perceptions of the obvious.