Helen of Troy

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.

Of all the great stories handed down through the ages, few can equal Homer's Iliad - a towering epic of warrior heroes, squabbling gods, and anger that destroyed nations...

This is the source for Robert Wise's film... All the elements of a magnificent spectacle exist in Homer's work - a lavish and decadent court life, the tension of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the most beautiful woman in Greece, and a drama of love and seduction...

Thousands of weapons are used: spears, bows, arrows, body armor, helmets, shields, maces and ships of the period l200 B.C., plus a tremendous wooden horse...

Paris, on a diplomatic mission to Sparta to arrange peaceful trade, is washed up on the Spartan shore after being shipwrecked during a storm... He is helped by the lovely Helen who claims to be a handmaiden to the queen... She takes her leave, directing him to the court of King Menelaus... Paris is greeted and honored in a 'cesti' combat with Ajax... Secretly, however, Menelaus plots to kill his guest...

Helen warns Paris of the danger to his life and urges him to run away... Herself in danger for revealing the plot, she succumbs to Paris' pleadings to flee with him... The lovers make their way to Troy...

From that point the spectacular elements - the massing of the ships and men, and the battles outside the walls of Troy, take over...

Rossana Podesta - a natural brunette given a blonde wig and the classical Grecian look - plays Helen, the indirect cause of the Trojan War, but for Paris, she is the goddess of love and beauty, "Aphrodite."

Jacques Sernas plays Paris... His seduction of Helen and refusal to return her, started the Trojan War...

Robert Douglas is Agamemnon, the commander in chief of the Greek forces... He calls on the kings and princes to unite in a war of revenge against the Trojans... He was a very ambitious man, dreaming of Troy's treasures...

Stanley Baker is Achilles, the unbeatable warrior, the greatest and most tragic of the Greek heroes...

Harry Andrews is Hector, the eldest son of king Priam, and the husband of Andromache... He is the chief warrior of the Trojan army...

Niall MacGinnis is the furious Menelaus, King of Sparta, who calls on his brother Agamemnon to gather an army and avenge the mark of shame...

Torin Thatcher is Ulysses, king of Ithaca, the man of outstanding wisdom...

Sir Cedric Hardwicke is the powerless but kindly King of Troy...

Janette Scott is Cassandra, daughter of Priam, loved by the goddess Athena... With a great spirit of prophecy she warns her father to burn the wooden horse...

Robert Wise makes a brave attempt to marry the intimate with the spectacular - a difficult task - but "Helen of Troy" is an epic movie, a superior entertainment filmed in CinemaScope and Technicolor..

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.

The first thing I read about this movie was that it was terrible and that the first lady even though very gifted as far as bust is concerned was a nightmare when it comes to acting. However when I saw this film I had to disagree with those critics who tried to ruin a good movie. Even though the sets are nothing to those of "Ben-Hur", "Cleopatra" and other screen giants the sets of Cinecitta are stupendous. The colour is magnificent and the acting is quite good. It is true that the part of the heroine could have portrayed some more fragility, still Ms. Podesta' was quite satisfying. The cinematography is very good and the story never lingers. It is action-packed and is bound to marvel anyone who likes this genre.

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.