Helena de Tróia

Spectacular and Hollywood style renditíon based on Troy war with splendid cast and breathtaking battle scenes.When París : Jacques Sernas escapes with Helen : Rosana Podesta there takes place the Troy war. Helen is the beautiful wife of Menelao , Sparta King, : Neal MacGuinnis, when she falls for París , son of Troy king Priamo : Cedric Hardwicke, both of them escape. This event lead to the Siege of Troy.Director Robert Wise picked two new Italian stars: Sernas and Podesta to play the íntimate lovers in this impressive as well as epic tale based on the known poem written by Homero: Iliada. Dealing with love , battles , Goddess : Aphrodita and Atenea , death and the motive led up to it . While tension among Greeks divide the camp giving hope the Trojan . As Greek warriors under command of Menelaus , Agamenon , Ulysses , and Achilles : Stanley Baker get to hide out in the Trojan horse when they take the Wooden Beast into the Troy city and they are successful.

This monumental and epic retelling contains a moving love story , Drama, tragic events , and overwhelming battles with a cast of thousands. After a hardworking filming the results were only fair and decent. The picture ignores true deeds for lavish and high budgeted effects, including a great number of extras and a lot of war machines.In the movie shows up numerous historical and mythological roles as Priamo: Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Hecuba well played by Nora Swinburne , Agamemmon performed by Robert Douglas , as Menelaus interpreted by Neal MacGuinnis , Ulysses : Torin Thatcher, Hector : Harry Andrews , Achilles: Stanley Baker , Cassandra : Janette Scott , Ajax : Maxwell Reed , Patroclus : Terence Longdon , among others.

This events about Troy war have been adapted on various films : Silent movie titled The Private life of Helen of Troy by Michael Curtiz 1927 with Maria Corda , Lewis Stone ; Italian versión 1962 by Giorgio Ferroni with Steve Reeves , Juliette Mayniel, Lidia Alfonsi, Mimmo Palmara; Italian recounting titled Fury of Achilles by Marino Girolami with Gordon Mitchell , Jacques Bergerac , Gloria Milland , Ennio Girolami and Troy by Wolfgang Petersen, with Brad Pitt, Diana Kruger, Rose Byrne , Orlando Bloom , Brian Cox. And a TV series 2003 by John Kent Harrison with Matthew Mardsen , Sienna Guilery, Rufus Sewell , Joe Montana,Daniel La Pine, James Callis , and Katie Blake as Cassandra.

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.

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.

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.

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.