Customer Reviews

Hannibal

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Anyone expecting a really good view of the Punic Wars in Italy will certainly not find it here. That being said, there are a number of interesting and amusing scenes that make it half-way worthwhile. Victor Mature sleeps his way through the role of the great Carthegenian general. Mature seems never to have taken his own acting skills that seriously, and that is evident here with his lethargic style.

Probably one of the best parts of the film is the extended scene showing the crossing of the Alps. This was surely one of the great feats of ancient warfare and we get a decent look at how tortuous it must have been here. The Punic soldiers crying out in English somehow lacks something, but this was a 1960 Italian dubbed film! Some of the battle scenes with the elephants are not too bad, but the overall effect is on the poor side. The most vigorous battle shown, Cannae in 217 BC is a joke! There is some attempt to show how the Romans were destroyed here, but somehow it gets lost in the details.

I give the film some credit for staying somewhere near the history, but many details are wide off the mark, and almost purposely so. The romance with Mature and Rita Gam is required of course for this period of movie, but it seems half-hearted at best. Again, Mature's Hannibal seems to almost doze through the scenes! No doubt Hannibal did console himself with a few Roman women for the many years he was in Italy, but what we get here is standard hollywood filler for the time. This film might be fun to watch along with the Italian Propaganada epic, Scipio Africanus. Both have the same lame style, although the older facist film has the production value which this film really lacks. Still, both make for some light viewing in the classic sword and sandal style.

A very contrived rendition of the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome in the 3rd century B.C. The fact that Victor Mature plays the lead role is enough to discourage anyone from buying this shallow film. This film is also outmatched in every respect except color by another production and so not really worth one's time or money unless you're a die-hard Mature fanor accept only the color medium for a film.

The screenplay is disjointed as it doesn't really convey the reasons why Hannibal hated Rome so much or why he led an army of almost 100,000 men to trample over the Italian countryside for 18 years. The battle reenactments are small, sparing, and second-rate. The acting stinks especially by Mature whose presence always appears as if he just came out of a cocktail lounge around 3:00 a.m. Victor Mature was barely competent as a back-up actor not to speak of a lead role in a historical epic. Even more shame on the Italians who contrived this silly film about their own history. The direction is purely conventional for the period and so unimaginative. The screenplay is terrible and focuses on a ridiculous love story instead of the historical events for dramatism. History here is simply the backdrop for the romance. The anachronisms of the film themselves would require modern anachronisms to interpret as this film is horribly out-of-date. Wayne's 'Genghis Kahn' is better than this film. At least you have The Duke instead of 'Manure' to watch in a bad film.

A vastly superior film on Hannibal is Carmine Gallone's 1939 'Scipio Africanus' that looks at the conflict from the character Scipio's point of view in which the climax comes with Hannibal's defeat at Zama. Unlike this film, 'Scipio' primarily emphasizes on the history for the drama as opposed to romance. Although the few romantic scenes in 'Scipio' are truly arch-melodrama as one reviewer has commented, they are fortunately fewer than in this film. The character of Hannibal is treated as a tragic hero and honorable foe who, like his Roman antagonist and unlike Mature's character, doesn't waste much time on trivial romance when the life or death of his nation is at stake. Although not in color, at least 'Scipio' was done on an epic scale with 50 elephants, over a thousand horses, and 30,0000 extras under the direction of a competent Gallone. The battle scene for Zama was more a replication rather than a re-enactment and so exceptionally brutal even by some of today's standards. I guarantee you that few professional stuntmen of today would be doing what ordinary guys did in that reenactment. So lavish are the sets and battles that they remained unmatched in film until no sooner than Kubrick's 'Spartacus' or Mankiewick's 'Cleopatra' 25 years later. Despite the film's occasional overdrama, believe me, you will get a lot more accuracy, lavishness, and a breathtaking battle scene from that film on Hannibal. This one with Mature isn't even worth seeing free as it is just a waste of time.

"Hannibal" is a great movie for nine year-old boys, or at least it was back in 1960 when I sat through it twice at a Saturday matinée. I don't think it had much of a mainstream release, playing mostly to kiddie matinée and drive-in audiences. The film planted in me an interest in this historical period and was my first taste of cinema gore; my one memory being the blood pouring from a soldier's mouth after he was crushed by an elephant during the army's march over the alps.

In style "Hannibal" is like a really bad spaghetti western, only set it 200BC and produced by people generally clueless about just who was their target audience. On one hand the less your sophistication the less energy you will need to burn suspending disbelief. On the other hand the subject matter cries out for a more sophisticated audience interested in history. And finally the awkwardly inserted love story will go unappreciated by both sophisticated and unsophisticated viewers.

Hannibal was a brilliant military tactician from Carthage (now Tunisa) who gave imperial Rome a run for its money as the dominant world power two centuries before the birth of Christ. The film was promoted by Warner Brothers as "a fanciful adaptation of history" (make that an extremely condensed adaptation). Given all the omissions it is difficult to understand why they felt compelled to invent a love story. It might have made some sense if they had paid a box office draw actress to star as the title character's love interest; but Rita Gam was an aging bit player, pleasant in a wholesome Dorothy McGuire way but too detuned to add any sizzle to a production desperately in need of some sparks.

After an especially ponderous title sequence a narrator begins the film by getting the audience up to speed on current events (circa 200 BC). Rome is threatening Carthage and Hannibal has decided to head things off by moving his army from Spain to Northern Italy via the Alps. Then we get 15 minutes of the 40,000-man Carthaginian army making its way single file over the icy slopes. The editor cuts in shots of officers shouting, "keep moving," soldiers slipping off the path to an icy death, and the same group of elephants rounding the same fake soundstage boulder. At several points the men must pull themselves up a steep incline with a rope. There are no shots of the elephants, horses, or wagons climbing this rope and this becomes the first of many suspension of disbelief moments; it is unwise to dwell on why the soldiers are subjecting themselves to this dangerous climb since there must be a nearby Roman road for all the animals and baggage.

Hannibal's army emerges from the icy mountain and camps near the country villa of Roman Senator Fabius (Gabriele Ferzetti - despite the name this is not a girl). Fabius is in Rome futilely suggesting that they employ guerrilla warfare and avoid direct confrontation with Hannibal's army. This was in fact the way that the Romans were finally able to rid themselves of the invader but it took them several years to adopt such tactics.

Fabius' son Quintilius (Terence Hill who I've always confused with Terrance Stamp) and niece Sylvia (Rita Gam) are at the villa and Hannibal captures them. Hannibal and Sylvia have a romance and she is released to tell Rome what a big army he has and that he has only crossed the Alps because he wants peace (could have fooled me). Before you know it Hannibal has hurt his eye and Victor Mature spends the rest to the story wearing an eye patch and the Roman Senate spends its deliberations telling pirate jokes.

The elephants get inserted into several poorly edited battle sequences. They lumber around (on occasion they speed up the film to make it look like they are charging) and crush a lot of Romans off-camera and the sound people make noises that make it seem like the straw being thrown toward the elephants are actually arrows.

Then at about the one third point of the actual story they run out of film, the narrator briefly explains that Hannibal never was able to sack Rome, and the ponderous title sequence runs again but this time it is full of credits.

Mature was a horrible actor nearing the end of his career at this point. Since most of the cast are Italians whose lines were dubbed and there is no indication that anyone received acting for the camera direction, the production achieves a nice lethargic unity.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

Over the years and up until now there have been good films made but you cannot go past the old classics as this one 'Hannibal' I watched it when it first came out and I am glade I can watch it again.

I saw this movie at a drive-in as a 10 year old child and was excited to see it released on DVD. All I remembered was the elephants crossing the Alps in the snow. Seeing it for the first time that is probably all you will remember as well. Yet it is enjoyable enough, even if not the most spectacular of spectacles. The print is uneven-clear and sharp colors at times, at others, washed out and grainy. The acting is definitely B movie as is the dialog. But it still is nice to see that someone thought enough of this movie to bring it out on DVD for another generation to see and say "They don't make 'em like this anymore". Good or bad, they don't make movies like this anymore but it's nice to watch it and remember a time when they did.

Watch it and make you own option. I think this would have been a great movie for the drive-in back in the day.

A peripheral, distorted story in conflict with documented evidenced actions historically. It ignored the real Hannibal who spoke 7-8 languages who had no battlefield equal, who was never defeated in 16 years of going up and down the Italian country side destroying legions after legions of roman armies, a shame to show him as a one dimensional man.. He was much, much more, he was in the physical sense, and evidence gathered a serious threat to the entire known world. The facts and evidence say he did not die at the hands of a Roman but killed himself many years after the second Punic war was over. He died only when he believed Romans were finally going to capture him, this after year of traveling around the known world at the time, training other armies how to defeat with the Romans in battle. The depiction in this movie gives no such account of the person or his true contribution to that time in history. It was short sighted, mean in all but it's depiction of how dangerous and creative a warrior was to the world, Hannibal just was not on the right side of those who wrote history, as a veteran I can verify history is always written by the ultimate winners, not facts that support the truth. The part I found most remarkable about Hannibal was he died like Brutus, he jumped on a sword. Taking into account t all the errors of fact the movie was fairly entertaining, if reality was being deliberately suspended.

I bought a dvd and it doesnt work in any of the dvd players. i would like to maybe get it on vhs.

Victor Mature's Hannibal was the first drive-in movie I ever saw, about 1960. My recollections of the original was that the film was bigger than life. This digitalized version was nowhere near as panoramic.

This makes a good addition to the Victor Mature section of your film library. But I was mostly disappointed in just about all the aspects. First the music in the background did not match the situation. Then the movie starts in the middle of Hannibal's life as he started over the mountains if you do not know the history then you will be lost thru the movie. The dubbed voices reminded me of the voices in "Fractured Fairytales." The were all sort of squeaky and of course as in the tradition of dubbed Italian movies did not match the speech timing. The one exception was Victor he would show the right or left profile and read his likes perfectly. I don't know how he kept a straight face. By the way he was 45 at this time.

After he makes it over the mountains it becomes a love story between Hannibal and Sylvia the niece of the Roman determined to do Hannibal in. Even Hannibal's men think they are in trouble because Hannibal is gaw gaw over a Roman girl. Here uncle thinks she is a traitor but still loves her like a daughter.

A few wars with some so so elephant scenes and a lot of obviously fake blood. Hannibal's ex turns up and Sylvia runs off.

Will Hannibal and Sylvia ever get their lives together?
Who wins the war?
Why did they stop the story so abruptly?

Samson & Delilah ~ Victor Mature