The greatest of Hercules’ competitors in the great Italian peplum parade, in popularity, profitability, prolificacy, was Maciste. Like Hercules, the Maciste character is a beloved Italian folk legend who originated in the days of darkest antiquity – 1914.
There are in fact two Maciste franchises in existence, and the ‘60s franchise which is our primary concern (as it eventually crosses over with the Herc) would be nothing without its predecessor. And unlike all the other musclemen, Maciste is a purely cinematic creation, hailing originally from the silent classic Cabiria.
The Italian-made Cabiria is the first sword-and-sandals film ever made, which isn’t saying a whole lot. Rather, let’s say it was – for a long time, at least – considered perhaps the first feature length film made! And not just any feature length film; 181 minutes! Furthermore, it’s not every film of which you could argue Griffith’s Intolerance is a rip-off of. (Or however that sentence parses out.)
Cabiria is also the first movie to feature Maciste. To parse out the character’s inspiration, maybe it’s best to let Wikipedia have a shot:
The name of Maciste ultimately comes from a sentence in Strabo's Geography (Book 8, Chapter 3, Section 21), in which he writes: ἐν δὲ τῷ μεταξὺ τό τε τοῦ Μακιστίου Ἡρακλέους ἱερόν ἐστι καὶ ὁ Ἀκίδων ποταμός … However, in the first volume of the Dizionario universale archeologico-artistico-technologico (1858) Macistius is given as one among several epithets of Hercules (Ercole). In the second volume of the same dictionary (1864) this name appears Italianized as Maciste, defined as uno del soprannomi d'Ercole.
What they said. “Macistean” was an Italian adjective for “Herculean,” meaning the English equivalent of the “Maciste” name is “Strongo McStrong Strong.” And therefore in original conception, Maciste is truly no different than Hercules – hell, rough Cabiria drafts called the character “Hercules!”
In watching Cabiria, the masterpiece of early director Giovanni Pastrone, one must block out all thoughts of the peplum aesthetic debate. For all its surface level Roman trappings, this ancient-set silent spectacle rather stands as a road sign in the ongoing evolution of early cinematic language. I shall try to spell this out, and set the stage.
First of all, it’s silent; the only noise is the rather insistent piano track, the sort of thing we normally associate with mustachioed villains tying virgins to train tracks. This means all the dialogue and plot stuff is mostly conveyed through title cards – wordy, wordy title cards, sure to delight any blogger’s heart. And assuming slowness of marginal literacy, these are on the screen for oh so very long. And overly descriptive too, in the translated prose of literary author Gabriele d’Annunzio, rendering the visuals somewhat redundant seeing as we’ve just been told what we’re about to see. It is a slow-paced film, by any modern standards. The acting is mostly of that grand silent tradition, with much arm gesticulation and all-around histrionics, as subtlety wasn’t much favored in the medium with its major technical limitations then.
Though Pastrone’s work sets out to correct many of the limitations with early film. He is one of the first directors, to my knowledge, to move away from the proscenium staging format which betrayed film’s early desire to be a variation on stage plays, in the way most video games today just wanna be movies. It’s ever so slightly closer to naturalism. Add to that a moving camera – and in the ‘10s (the 20th Century ‘10s, that is, not today), any camera movement was a major revolution in avante gardism! Though with Griffith’s aforementioned inspiration taken from Cabiria, it wouldn’t be long (two years) for Intolerance to up Pastrone at his own invention.
And of course there’s the lira-bragging spectacle of it all, which would inspire the early Cecil B. DeMille to do his 1923 Ten Commandments, which would inspire him to do his different 1956 Ten Commandments, which would lead to the peplum crazy, and the rediscovery of Maciste.
But Maciste isn’t even the focus of Cabiria; Cabiria is. How ‘bout that?! It’s all so much melodrama. And Cabiria (Lydia Quaranta) is merely a prop, a little girl ousted from her home by an exploding, Pompeii-esque volcano model, sold into Carthaginian slavery, thus serving as our window into a larger tale of the Second Punic War, of Carthage vs. Rome, of Hannibal vs…uh, was it Scipio? [Yes it was. – ed.] …Wait, since when do I have an editor?!
Early in cinema, earlier still in feature cinema, storytellers were still working out just how much incident to fill their movies with. Cabiria, following the patterns of a standard epic (as opposed to peplum), tries to cover just a bit more story, in true literary form, than movie audiences are ready to go along with. And every event cannot be glanced over, with any sense of narrative editing. Rather, every beat has to play out in full, regardless of overall importance to the tale, or emotional content, or anything. This is a fault of age, mostly, and of ambition. And made for one million 1914 lira, Cabiria is ridiculously ambitious.
Would you look at that thing? Look at the size of the people by it! And all the sets are like that, all constructed at a scale hardly ever seen done sans trickery. In a true “cast of thousands” model, Cabiria even ladles extras into ever corner of the shot, all the time, to populate this realm as something more than merely a mimed-out picture play. It’s an effort to thoroughly represent the ancient world, not merely pastiche it, even if the Carthage setting allows for lots of outdated “exoticism” which has no basis in any historical reality (again, see the ridiculous face monster building above).
Far from trying to ape the forms of the stage play, as so many lesser films of the era, Pastrone rather seems taken up with literature as his goal (a common movie ailment). Specifically, Cabiria has the whiff of historical fiction about in, in the Leo Tolstoy “War and Peace” sense, a sprawling epic with dozens of important named characters. (More correctly, the actual inspiration here is Emilio Salgari’s “Carthage in Flames” and Gustave Flaubert’s “Salammbo.”) Which works well enough in print, over 1,000 pages, but a 3 hour movie cannot present such a canvas and still hope for some emotional connection. Most movie watchers grow connections with specific heroes, little plots which inform the whole. Consider what Star Wars would be like if the whole of the Empire and galaxy was treated with equal degrees of attention, relegating Luke Skywalker to 1/20th of the tale. The wordless and purely symbolic Cabiria offers no real compass for us, despite all her ostensible main character status.
Then thank Moloch, or whichever pagan deity you prefer, for the presence of Bartolomeo Pagano’s Maciste! He and his master Fulvius Axilla (Umberto Mozzato) are the closest to the modern definition of main characters, even if they seem but minor figures in the vast and needlessly complex tale of warfare and political intrigue. Yes, they occupy that hypothetical “1/20th of the movie” Luke Skywalker role, but because their narrative is simple, we latch onto them.
Maciste in particular stands out, even without reference to his later proliferation of sequels. Casts of thousands’ll do that, making the lone distinct guy seem that much more distinct. Ignore the interchangeable masses in their Roman soldier outfits, Maciste’s (or Pagano’s) body type alone distinguishes him. In peplum terms, this is the unexpected genius of the muscleman, even for the reduced degree of shirtlessness on display here. You can see how Pagano became a movie star, not just for being somewhat ripped, but for being unique in appearance, lending audiences grounding in these otherwise overwhelming epics.
Maciste is Axilla’s slave, a North African portrayed by an Italian in full blackface. I dunno if it’s for a lack of actual African actors available, or rather a degree of racism on the filmmakers’ part (probably the latter, for reasons to appear later), but it’s a shame. Maciste is interesting in spite of this ethnic questionability.
For one thing, in Pagano’s performance we have an early example of the Douglas Fairbanks approach, the joys of the silent era stuntman risking his neck foolhardily on genuinely ginormous sets. Maciste and Axilla set off to rescue newly-enslaved Cabiria, who’s about to be sacrificed in a proto-Temple of Doom set piece. Though the movie as a whole has a rather stale desire to make Art, such a scenario (an ultimately tiny portion of the film) has rather the tone of the action adventure. Though it’s perhaps lesser in aim, this is the most successful, the most cinematic attribute of Cabiria.
That’s necessary, because so much of the film’s other 85% or so over-relies upon clumsy narrative devices such as this:
I don’t decry the title card as a technique, but it best serves the visuals, rather than the other way around. For as astounding as the visuals regularly are in Cabiria (the whole of the film is kinetic, in 1914 terms), we’d be lost without these complex reiterations of the cast, their importance, etc. etc. etc. There’s no single character through line, rather forcing the audience to settle upon the one obvious story they can find – Maciste & Co.
Regarding Cabiria in terms of the later, pulpier sword-and-sandals films (which does a great disservice to its greater cinematic legacy), one finds scant, proto examples of the sort of hijinks musclemen would get up to in the ‘60s. Maciste is strong, but not ridiculously so. Indeed, compared to the hyper-exaggerated feats of superhumanism the cinematic Hercules regularly dabbles in, Maciste is – surprise, surprise – realistic, mortal, believable.
Following the initial rescue of Cabiria, the plot bifurcates wildly, and it becomes increasingly difficult to follow our preferred story of Maciste and Axilla. The possibility for a simple, streamlined adventure is there…were it not for the filmmakers’ enthusiasm for suddenly chronicling every facet of this war in great detail. That means scenes whose purpose is barely clear, celebrating the vampy royals, or depicting Hannibal crossing the Alps. In the latter case, it is something to actually see the elephants and everything, done legit. The spectacle of these old films, Cabiria and more so Intolerance (and the later DeMilles, et al), is always mightily impressive, even when it’s difficult to ascribe much concern to the action on screen.
So eventually Maciste is separated from his beloved slave-driving master, and given over to an evil slave driver. He is chained to a millstone, taunted, mocked, ridiculed…This is the stage where, in a standard Hercules endeavor, he’d break those chains in an instant (and with inestimable ease, I might add). Not so this Maciste – or at any rate, the old Maciste, as surely even his silent series would exaggerate his strength. No, Maciste cannot break his chains, and spends years bound to them. That’s while all manner of unrelated plot, for a full 45 minutes, spiels along. It’s all spectacular yet uninvolving, with the complexity of a Gore Vidal novel, and I don’t wanna try recounting it.
For we’re here for Maciste, truly, even though that wasn’t the intent in 1914. And at long last, having survived fort sieges and sea battles and any manner of other spectacle, Axilla returns to Carthage, where Maciste awaits in chains. And now, like 2 hours in, Maciste can perform the great feat of strength that would’ve graced the first 10 minutes of a later such movie. He breaks his chains!
There are, scattered about, a few more examples of Maciste’s nascent super-strength, deployed most sparingly only when Pastrone feels the need to lighten up his dour epic. For instance, Maciste bends prison bars, he hurls a big stone, he picks up another man. Again, such feats would combine together into one of the more underwhelming 5 minutes of any ‘60s peplum, but such tropes gotta start someplace.
One of the (unexpected) long term impacts of Cabiria was the popularity of the Maciste character. This is on account of his action hero status, of his escapist moments of derring-do. It has nothing to do with his artificially swarthy skin tone. Though at the time of filming, that is likely to be the element of greatest importance, and here we examine some of the more…controversial elements of Cabiria.
Its makers were fascists, and racists. Racist, fascist Maciste! For all Cabiria’s deniability, what with its ancient Roman/Carthaginian setting, there is the sense that it’s really a response to the recent Italo-Turkish war – which Italy won. This resulted in Italy specifically conquering parts of North Africa, parts that Maciste is supposed to hail from. So his characteristics, his amazing strength and dark skin, are all just a reflection of how Italy surely considered Africa at the time. And these traits, for as celebrated as the later pepla would make them (when applied to good, white-skinned he-men), weren’t meant as positives.
Consider the distinction drawn between Rome and Carthage. Rome, which I’ve hardly addressed, is populated by the same clean, white, antiseptic columns and togas as in the later films. Carthage, as I did mention, is exotic to a ridiculous extent, much like the Persians in Snyder’s 300. And it’s an exoticism founded upon nothing except the notion of an Other, something to be held in contrast to the moral and pure Romans. For surely Carthage is the baddie in this piece, as Maciste’s goodness comes not of his background, but of his docility to his mighty Roman master.
In the period immediately following WWI, invoking Rome was not an innocent practice in Italy. Rather, there were powerful political connotations, thus placing Cabiria in something of the same category as aesthetically-pleasing yet philosophically-bankrupt efforts such as The Birth of a Nation (a contemporary) and Triumph of the Will (an ideological cousin). Writer Gabriele d’Annunzio in particular is a part of the continuum which led to Mussolini, whose entire reign was dominated by a return to Roman-style art and architecture. And rather than simply inspiring the aesthetic choices of the future dictator, Cabiria is complicit in the actual arguments of Italo-Fascism, what with its tale of civilization vs. the hordes.
Cabiria’s audiences couldn’t care less about its ties to Mussolini, for that wouldn’t mean the same thing in 1914. They were more concerned with the exciting, half-naked “black” man, same as even a modern viewer would be. Quite unplanned by Pastroni, in this character was the promise of a line of moviemaking yet unheard of: a character-centric franchise.
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Upon making their Maciste-mongering follow-up (simply titled Maciste, or Marvelous Maciste), we have not only a ridiculously early franchise, but a ridiculously early sequel. Such things just weren’t a major part of cinema yet, and isn’t it appropriate that sequels only came about at popular audience insistence? That sounds about right. Tying Maciste back to The Birth of a Nation yet again, we even discover that 1915’s Maciste predates Fall of a Nation, traditionally considered the first sequel!
Now, movie serials existed even prior to Maciste, as short subjects were more common in those days (this being when the notion of a feature length flick was itself unique). So we see at least one franchise which arguably predates Maciste – the Fantômas silent serials which started in 1913 – yet this is a step beyond. (Other early franchises, still beaten by Maciste: The Seven Deadly Sins, Boston Blackie, and…that is it for the ‘10s.)
Bartolomeo Pagano returns as Maciste, a role he would inhabit for the entirety of the 27-film silent franchise. The film, far from being a star-reaching epic like Cabiria, is much more in tune with the needs of Maciste. So it drops from 181 minutes, now down to 67. That’s more like it! And any handwringing melodramatics have given way to simple adventuring.
Now…the notion of a cinematic sequel must’ve been a truly bizarre notion in the 1910s, to look at the premise of Maciste. For even while he prospered in ancient Carthage, audiences know Maciste is a fictional character! Seriously?! You can’t do a sequel because you’re aware of the original’s fictionality? I can’t even imagine a world where the notion of a “sequel” is that alien.
But they found a solution! In Maciste, a little girl Josephine (Arline Costello – only film) on the run from the standardly villainous Duke Alexis (Robert Ormand – only film) hides out in a movie theater. Here she sees Cabiria, Part One, and decides Maciste could help her! Now that they’ve addressed Maciste’s falseness, and possibly made the very first meta movie, all logic can sail off to Sicily. The girl writes to Maciste, who apparently exists in the world of movie theaters even as he’s a fictional North African from before Christ.
Oh well, Maciste’s in play. The rest, presumably (as most movies from nearly a century ago are lost), simply focuses upon Maciste’s strongman exploits, assorted serial-style escapes and perils. And thus did the proto peplum come into being.
Maciste proved that the character could carry his own story, without recourse to overt spectacle or Griffith-lite cinematic evolution. This was an enormous discovery, and soon production on Maciste sequels started in earnest. Soon the business model was apparent: Provide the character, provide Pagano, but otherwise do whatever you please. Far from the astounding analness about the impossibility of sequels, these later Macistes ran for over a decade on the notion that continuity didn’t matter whatsoever. Credit the producers for recognizing how to maximize profitability on an efficient assembly line, at the sacrifice of art. The result of this, far from Maciste remaining a mere slave around 200 B.C., is that he became an Italian folk hero of sorts, entirely due to the films!
The rest of the series is as follows:
3. Maciste the Ranger (1916)
4. Maciste The Warrior (1916)
5. Maciste the Athlete (1917)
6. Maciste the Clairvoyant (1917)
7. Maciste the Detective (1917)
8. Maciste the Tourist (1917)
9. Maciste the Sleepwalker (1918)
10. Maciste's Revenge (1919)
11. Maciste's Will (1919)
12. Maciste's Journey (1919)
13. Maciste the First (1919)
14. Maciste vs. Death (1919)
15. Maciste in Love (1919)
16. Maciste on Vacation (1920)
17. Maciste, Rescued from the Waters (1920)
18. Maciste and the Silver King's Daughter (1922)
19. Maciste and the Japanese (1922)
20. Maciste vs. Maciste (1923)
21. Maciste and the Chinese Trunk (1923)
22. Maciste's American Nephew (1924)
23. Maciste the Emperor (1924)
24. Maciste vs. the Sheik (1925)
25. Maciste in Hell (1926)
26. Maciste in the Lions' Den (1926)
27. The Giant From the Dolomite (1927)
I could spend some time pontificating the titles alone, but what’s the point? Rather, reliable-enough online resources say much that would otherwise be mere conjecture, that the films took on a tremendous degree of formula in order to survive, and that this formula even started to resemble the later pepla to a grand degree. To repeat what I’ve laid out for the ‘60s films, but at last in one place, that amounts to:
- A damsel in distress, and a one-time love interest
- One good ruler, and the evil ruler who wishes to usurp his kingdom
- A second female lead, a femme fatale, intent upon vile seduction
- A random, contextless dancing scene
- And of course Maciste himself
Within that framework, anything was possible, to a far greater extent than the later pepla, which mostly limit themselves to Greco-Roman antiquity. Without concern for inter-entry continuity to a remarkably progressive extent, these Maciste movies could also occur in Mongolia, Peru, Egypt, the ancient Olympics, World War One, even the afterlife!
As for Cabiria, it aimed for historical realism, despite its wilder touches. That fidelity waned with time, and the Macistes took on an ever greater love for the fantastical. It is unclear just how devoted it was to this angle, which emerges fully-formed in 1958’s Hercules. But towards the end, there was some movement in this direction. Indeed, it seems one can find nearly all of the peplum elements in this first generation precursor, only in different proportions.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Maciste in the Valley of the Kings (1960)
• No. 2 Maciste vs. the Headhunters (1960)
• No. 3 Maciste in the Land of the Cyclops (1961)
• No. 6 Maciste, the Strongest Man in the World (1961)
• No. 7 Maciste Against Hercules in the Vale of Woe (1961)
• Nos. 8 - 20 (1962 - 1964)
• No. 21 Maciste vs. the Mongols (1963)
• No. 22 Maciste in Genghis Khan's Hell (1964)
• No. 23 Maciste and the Queen of Samar (1964)
• No. 24 Hercules, Samson, Maciste and Ursus (1964)
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