Cartagine in fiamme

Made before the Sword & Sandal cycle but released during the upswing of the Hercules/strongman movies. A lot of action with huge battles and court intrigue. Anne Heywood is the featured player and is rescued from the sacrificial alter during a great final scene.

The cast is really international:Anne Heywood (English),José Suarez (Spanish) ,Daniel Gélin and Pierre Brasseur (French) and for all that,Italians(Paolo Stoppa and Terence Hill here credited as Mario Girotti).

The film is supposed to tell Carthage 's last stand .The Romans wanted the city to be destroyed then rebuilt some miles away from the shore.

A merchant,the villain, (Gélin,at his worst) wants to negotiate but a soldier(Suarez ),the hero,wants to fight against the enemy.After this start ,nothing makes sense: the plot gets bogged down in uninteresting love rivalries ,most of the time away from Carthage city .When it finally comes back to the essential (that is to say the Romans' impending victory) it's only to show (and the title is no lie) Carthage in flames .An ending a la "last days of Pompei" without a volcano,where the villains are punished and the heroes rewarded.

Don't be fooled by the official running time of the movie which is 107 minutes.

The actual runtime is around 56 minutes as far as goes the title of this movie.

To be more precise this film starts with what u expect the conflict between carthage and rome but after like first 14 minutes it changes direction and u witness events and love affairs which have very little to do with the actual plot of the film and then suddenly arround 42 minutes before the end of the film we get back on track and we witness the events which led to the destruction of carthage by general scipio and the romans.

What's important for this film is that it based on actual events and the story we hear as to the causes that led the romans destroy carthage are all true and it's a great depiction of events as we even see how the romans burned the city destroying it limb from limb.

So for you who really want to see these events just skip the film between the 14th minute and the 65th minute and watch only the beginning until the 14th minute and then fast forward the dvd up until the 65th minute in to the film and lose nothing of importance.

Why they did that in the film i dunno and it was weird but this is the only film about the third punic war not to miss.

Huge scale historical romance set against the backdrop of the Rome/ Carthage wars in the 2nd century BC. The production is amazing with a scale and a look that few films, even the Hollywood epics ever matched. As jaw dropping spectacle the film is top of the heap. However the film suffers from a storyline that is at best soap opera as a wounded soldier is saved by a priestess who falls in love with him while he has love elsewhere. Things get complicated as the soldier leaves to rescue his lady love with the priestess in tow, causing a great deal of friction for everyone. At the same time the Romans attack Carthage…and then it gets even more complicated. It seemed to have been plotted by a monkey on espresso who just wanted to keep things movie, since there is way too much going on since after awhile I began to get lost.(being tired didn't help either).Its not bad its just ..please stop enough already. Worth a look for those who like spectacle or for those who like historical romance.