Les Mongols

For those of you who got a kick out of Mr. Palance's Attila the Hun in SIGN OF THE PAGAN this film gives you a better, new improved version of his unique brand of barbarity. This man's GOT to have a war or he'll just be miserable. He'll lie, cheat, steal, connive- do just anything in order to HAVE THAT WAR. This is type A personality taken to it's most outer extreme. You can really feel the almost unbearable frustration he seems to experience when his old dad Genghis Khan tells him that they're going to try for a peaceful solution with the Poles. Well, anyhow, it all ends badly for Jack (and dad). Anita Ekberg as a truly ice cold partner/lover of Jack's is fascinating to watch as well in a sort a somnambulistic way; she's pure deceit. And I was also rather entranced by the head Polish knight's seeming death wish in his relentless, driven fixed idea of obtaining peace with the Mongols. Discouraged at almost every turn, the son of a gun just would not give up and finally came out on top in the end (and got the girl, too). A good lesson in superhuman determination.

As many other American directors, Andre De Toth finished his career in Europe; this movie seems to be a response to Richard Thorpe's THE TARTARS, produced the same year, and starring Victor Mature and Orson Welles. Rudolph Maté, Hugo Fregonese, Vincent Sherman, Edgar G Ulmer, and many other film makers finished their filmographies in Italy or Spain. This one is a pretty good one, offering splendid settings, good pace, good scenes, a gorgeous Anita Ekberg as a villainess whom you won't forget. I saw it for the first time when I was just thirteen and have never forgotten it. I like this Andre De Toth's movie.

The story of this movie takes place in the middle ages at a time when Genghis Khan's Mongolian army was threatening Europe. It centers around the adventures of a Polish knight who wants to save the town Kraków from being taken by the cruel enemy.

The creators of the movie put much effort into the scenery and even more effort into the costumes. But they did not put any effort at all into the script or into acting. The plot is as simple-minded as if it had been invented by some twelve year old boys, playing cops and robbers. The dialog consists of stupid, hollow phrases. This alone would already make the movie a bad movie.

However its weaknesses go beyond that. The background music is not only unbearable symphonic rubbish. It is also inappropriately matched to the atmosphere of the individual scenes. Even the optical aspects that seem to have been the film maker's only focus are flawed. I do not have sufficient historical knowledge to judge about the historical correctness of costumes, weapons and other equipment. But I am quite sure that ordinary Polish women in the middle ages did not possess a hairstyle, makeup, and manicure like models in the early 1960's, especially if they were hiding from the Mongolian army in the marshland.

This having been said, it is almost unnecessary to mention that even the main story line is far from telling a true story about Genghis Khan's time.

There is no reason to watch this film, as long as you do not want to see how much can go wrong simultaneously with a single movie.

This is a highly entertaining Italian epic -- provided that you watch it for fun and not as a history lesson. The real Genghis Khan, historians tell us, was responsible for the deaths of some 20 million people, roughly a tenth of the known world, but in this version Roldano Lupi, bewhiskered and benign, comes across as a sort of Mongolian Father Christmas. As his evil son, Ogotai, Jack Palance has the time of his life dispensing cruelties and whippings with his usual leering relish, but he also imbues his role with a certain depth of character. Palance, carrying on where his maniac charioteer in Barabbas left off, is easily the best actor on show and more than anyone else holds the film together. By contrast, his leading lady is simply hilarious. "We Mongols..." says Anita Ekberg, looking exactly like Anita Ekberg and soon to go for a nude swim in the local river – shamelessly cashing in on her popular performance in La Dolce Vita where she waded into the Trevi Fountain. Her incongruous appearance is explained away by the fact that the Mongols abducted her from her homeland, but one wonders whether they acquired her from modern-day Sweden. Star Trek fans will be pleased to see Lawrence Montaigne, alias Spock's love rival Stonn, in an early role as an ally of Prince Stefan. (Italian references wrongly credit him as the King of Poland, but he's actually the one who changes clothes with Stefan to fool the Mongols). The remarkable score – not too well transferred in the American prints – is by film music legend Mario Nascimbene who has evidently tried to repeat the barbaric qualities of The Vikings. In his autobiography Nascimbene explains that the harsh percussion for The Mongols was achieved using ordinary household utensils. He even toured the Rome shops asking if they had a casserole dish in F-sharp or a frying pan in D-flat, and he was perhaps lucky to get out before they rang for the white coats. Back at the recording studio, conductor and friend Franco Ferrara was well accustomed to these musical eccentricities and asked if the RAI Sinfonica was always going to have a kitchens department? However, one must admit that the final score is both magnificent and ingenious. Dino Solari's choreography for the Mongol court is surprisingly erotic for its day, but disappointingly the US version has some clumsy cuts to exclude the bit where one of the male dancers gets astride and rolls round the floor with a scantily clad girl dancer. Adult ballet fans can see the uncut version on the French video release from Film Office Peplum. The battle scenes, where the Mongols are outwitted into entering a swamp where they all drown, were obviously filmed in two places. We begin in Yugoslavia where the location scenes were shot, then minutes later cut to the studio tank in Rome. Only the Italian epics can get away with this, of course, and all in all, this is a movie full of rich pickings. As long as you aren't expecting to see Henry V, it's a diverting way to spend a couple of hours.

It makes me laugh . Genghis Khan don't die by the hand of his daughter in law in Poland he died from burbonic plague in China. The Mongol Empire beat the crap out of polish and hungarian and they reach Wien.in 1241 , 14 years after Geghis Khan died. When his son. Ogotai dies the invasion has stopped, , Poland never be an obstacle in front of.anybody. Stepen of Crakow it's an invented personage , he never existed. Mongols never suffer a defeat like americans never had a win or a neuron .As a fiction movie it's an easy to watch movie with gorgeous Anita Ekberg.and Antonella Lualdi , but has nothing to do with reality like western media nowdays.