Sodom And Gomorrah (1962) We would have thought a biblical epic directed by that master of pulpy action-melodrama Robert Aldrich would be way more fun than this......
There's a few guilty Aldrich-ian pleasures to enjoy here, but you'll have to pluck them out of the endless 153 minute running time......the fun trashy moments bob along amid all the usual tropes of bible spectacles.
It's an oddly conceived British-Italian-American co-production and it's weighed down by the detriments of a genre that audiences had already tired of......the stilted acting (more posturing than acting), the carved-in-stone dialogue than no human ever spoke, the phony piety.
And this movie suffered the extra burden of a huge supporting cast of Italian actors badly dubbed into awkward, stiff English.
So what's to like?
The good stuff - the villains played by Stanley Baker and the serenely gorgeous Anouk Aimee, both having a grand time as the evil-beyond words brother and sister rulers of S & G.
Babes a-plenty! An eye-popping beauty pageant of 1960's European starlets.....Pier Angeli, Scilla Gabel, Rosanna Podesta and more.
A heavy duty battle.......which has the stodgy stalwart Hebrew leader Lot (the stodgy stalwart Steward Granger) leading a combined force of his own burlap-sacked Chosen People and the crack Sodom and Gomorrah national guard. Together they kick the living crap out of a warring tribe using flaming oil, flaming arrows and finally drowning the bastards with an Old Testament level flood.
Yay God......the Big Guy makes His presence known in the film's last 20 minutes or so, breaking Granger out of S & G jail, blinding the dungeon guards and applying the Wrath Of Himself on the Twin Cites Of Whooopee.
The Sodomites and the....uh Gommorrah-cles or whatever they're called, true to their depraved nature, keep up the thieving and sex while the buildings crumble on top of them......you just can't discourage dedicated sinners with mere falling architecture.
We realize we're running the risk of making this movie sound like demented fun when it really isn't......it's a slow ponderous slog to get through......but we couldn't resist pointing out the highlights....(oops, and we almost forgot the bit where luscious Scilla Gabel meets her doom by hugging a guy whose chest armor features spikes that breathe with him! And don't even get us started on the torture barbecue ferris wheel....)
Robert Aldrich himself declared this as his worst film......and who knows, maybe he should have let Sergio Leone direct it instead of firing him at the start of production....(or so the legend goes).
By the time "Sodom And Gommorah" reaches its interminable conclusion we felt like poor Pier Angeli.....who looked back at the destroyed cities and got God-zapped into a pillar of salt. On the plus side, she made a very convincing condiment. 1 star (*_)
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