Customer Reviews

Epic Films: Casts, Credits and Commentary on Over 350 Historical Spectacle Movies, Second Edition

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Gary Allen Smith should get some sort of medal for having sat through and taken notes on 355 historical epics, of which 222 appeared in the first edition. I mean, "Ben Hur", okay. But ten times as many "Ursus in the Valley of the Lions," starring Ed Fury as Ursus and Alberto Lupo as Ayak? That took what might aptly be called "coraggio."
Holy Exclamation, they turned out a lot of garbage over the years!

The films are arranged alphabetically and the main cast and crew are listed for each. The reviews themselves, sometimes opinionated and sometimes more descriptive than anything else, occupy about half a page apiece, which is enough for most films. Just the right amount of space is given to photos from each film.

It's well written. The prose is clear and free of heady aesthetic theory. You don't need to have read Jacques Derrida or Foucault or Levi-Strauss to understand what Smith is getting at -- and thank heaven for small favors.

Smith's opinions are pretty candid, and I admire the work for that. He's not a snob. If some piece of 1959 Italian junk starring some muscleman as a Roman God is lousy, he tells us what it lacks to make it better. He doesn't dismiss it out of hand. I would, but he doesn't. Sometimes he puts his finger on something in a movie that's been bothering me too but that I've never been able to put a name to. He did it, for instance, with "Alexander the Great," the one with Frederick March as Philip the Barbarian and Richard Burton as Alexander. "Robert Rossen's 'Alexander the Great' is both literate and lavish; what it isn't is lively. . . . This biography of the youthful Greek warrior is told with restraint, a quality which Richard Burton would have done well to some degree in his characterization of the title role. Instead he rants, raves, and chews the beautiful Spanish scenery." Smith isn't always that nasty. The reviews are balanced for the most part, and in the case of "Alexander" he goes on to point out its virtues too.

It's not the kind of book you'll read from beginning to end. It's the kind you dabble in during quiet moments or during TV commercials, skipping around from page to page, checking on your favorites, chuckling over the manifestly absurd.

Kind of fun, overall. And nice to keep at hand in case one shows up on the tube. Many of them are so obscure that I doubt they ever will. And most of THOSE deserve that obscurity.