Robert Wise’s Italy-filmed epic looks better than ever on Blu, showcasing a fine cast and imaginative special effects. It’s a straight telling of Homer’s The Iliad with just a drop of Cold War attitude — this time the Greeks are the unreasonable aggressors. Neither Rossana Podestà nor Jacques Sernas excited the critics of ’56, but we can appreciate the high-powered cast, which includes Stanley Baker, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Nora Swinburne, Janette Scott and especially Niall MacGinnis, who all but steals the show as the cuckolded King of Sparta. It’s an intelligent pageant — the Achilles-Hector duel is a highlight, and the famed Trojan Horse quite a spectacle. And for the curious, a young Brigitte Bardot is present and accounted for, perky and pouty.

Helen of Troy
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1956 / Color / 2:55 widescreen / 121 min. / Available at MovieZyng / Street Date July 25, 2023 / 21.99
Starring: Rossana Podestà, Jacques Sernas, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Stanley Baker, Niall MacGinnis, Nora Swinburne, Robert Douglas, Torin Thatcher, Harry Andrews, Janette Scott, Ronald Lewis, Brigitte Bardot, Eduardo Ciannelli, Marc Lawrence, Maxwell Reed, Robert Brown, Barbara Cavan, Terence Longdon, Patricia Marmont, Guido Notari, Tonio Selwart, George Zoritch, Esmond Knight.
Cinematography: Harry Stradling
Art Director: Edward Carrere
Assistant Art Director: Ken Adam
Continuity Sketches: Maurice Zuberano
Visual Effects: Louis Lichtenstein, Joseph Nathanson
Dialogue coach: Harriet White Medin
Costumes: Roger Furse
Film Editor: Thomas Reilly
Original Music: Max Steiner
Assistant and 2nd Unit directors: Gus Agosti, Yakima Canutt, Sergio Leone, Frank Mattison, Raoul Walsh
Screenplay by John Twist, Hugh Gray adapted by Gray & N. Richard Nash from The Iliad by Homer
Directed by Robert Wise

Yet another giant-sized epic of ancient times, Helen of Troy didn’t get its fair share of attention in 1956, from the critics or the public. True enough, the big screen retelling of The Iliad reduces Homer’s epic poem to a Classics Illustrated comics level. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — the story is one of the pillars of Western literature, and the filmmakers have given it a good outing in just over two hours’ running time. Yes, the pageant-style performances, many of them post-dubbed, didn’t impress 1955 audiences fixated on Marlon Brando and James Dean. But raw spectacle is the subject. One can’t help but be impressed by the sight of the ‘thousand ships’ launched by a single face, or the inspiringly devious Trojan Horse. This time out, the Greeks are the villains, using a runaway queen as an excuse for a war of plunder.

“Troy is to blame. Ours is a war of defensive aggression.”

The screenwriters John Twist and N. Richard Nash had some decent credits, and their cohort Hugh Gray shared writing credit on the previous epics Quo Vadis and Ulysses. The script is well organized and respectful, if lacking in ‘big’ moments beyond the timeless tale’s obvious story points. It also carries some mild ‘Cold War’ dialogue bits, equating the greedy Greeks with Soviet expansionism. Robert Wise, the ultimate Producer’s Director, attacks the show in an organized, somewhat impersonal way. It’s his first film in anamorphic CinemaScope and only his third in color. The multinational spectacle was filmed in Italy with thousands of extras, multiple camera units and dozens of assistant directors — it was likely Wise’s most complex shoot to date, a challenge taken on to prove that he could function like Eisenhower masterminding D-Day. Knowing Wise, he was one of few Hollywood filmmakers not likely to be taken to the cleaners by the Italians at Cinecittà. Helen of Troy may have had its difficulties, but if its ledgers went into the red, it surely wasn’t because of directorial mismanagement.

With all that traffic to direct, Wise shows even less of a personal style than was usual. He films the expensive sets in an attractive manner, and gives his actors room to add some coloration to their roles. Wise was a great judge of stories and acting talent, but he wasn’t the man to rework so-so material with inspired directorial invention. He assembles Helen of Troy efficiently, often using two cameras to get good match-cuts in busy scenes. The crisply-paced scenes make their point and move on, without the feeling that we’re getting particularly deep into the characters. It is indeed a Pageant Spectacle, that delivers a Big Picture of Big Events.

It’s eleven hundred years BC in the kingdom of Troy. King Priam (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and Queen Hecuba (Nora Swinburne) rightly fear that the Greek states will attack. In hopes of defusing war tensions, Prince Paris of Troy (Jacques Sernas) and his cousin Aeneas (Ronald Lewis) set sail to Sparta on a mission of peace. Paris ignores the warnings of his sister Cassandra (Janette Scott), who claims to have visions of the future. Paris’s ship is struck by a storm, and when he washes up on a Spartan beach, a beautiful woman comes to his aid. She hides the fact that she is Helen (Rossana Podestà), the wife of the Spartan King Menelaus (Niall MacGinnis). Paris boldly enters the Spartan court, alone. The belligerent Menelaus, Achilles (Stanley Baker), Agamemnon (Robert Douglas) and Ulysses (Torin Thatcher) secretly plot to torture him for information for their planned conquest of Troy.

Helen uses her servants to help Paris escape back to Troy, but at the last minute Paris takes her with him. Both know that the proud Menelaus will use her ‘abduction’ as a pretext for all-out war. She’s right — the outrage unites the squabbling Greeks, who prepare for an immediate invasion.

Put the blame on Mame Helen.

All of Troy rejoices at Paris’s safe return — until they learn of Helen’s identity. King Priam begins to believe Cassandra’s predictions of doom. A huge Greek army arrives and the two nations become locked in a combat stand-off. The Greeks fight over leadership as the stalemate continues; the Trojans cannot hide their fury at the calamity created by Paris and Helen. King Priam’s besieged city holds out for ten years. It’s a disaster for both nations.

The epic movie drops Homer’s notion that the Gods of Olympus have a personal stake in the actions of the mortal combatants. What’s left are allusions to a conflict between Aphrodite and Athena, the Goddesses of Love and War, represented only by statues in the Trojan palace. But the photoplay honors the political spirit of the original — Homer’s frank critique of patriotic aggression gets a good workout, especially the idea that war destroys what is best in a country. In this case, a number of history’s greatest warriors are revealed as having major flaws and weaknesses: Achilles, Hector (Harry Andrews), Diomedes (Marc Lawrence), Ajax (Maxwell Reed), Polydorus (Robert Brown). The film hits the main story points, leaving the actors to do their best to make their roles memorable.

Rossana Podestà and Jacques Sernas are as beautiful as pieces of white china, but their ‘timeless’ romance doesn’t generate a great deal of heat. Generic post-dubbed voices don’t help much, either. Robert Wise poses them as he does the other players, like statuary in a museum. Ms. Podestá likely came straight from the Kirk Douglas Ulysses, where she made a fine impression in a much smaller role. She’d stay busy for several decades without becoming a major international name. Her other big crossover production is Sodom & Gomorrah, directed by another American taking the epic plunge in Italy, Robert Aldrich.

Jacques Sernas appeared in a number of sword ‘n’ sandal epics, also maintaining a name presence without rising in stature. He’s in the cast lists of both La dolce vita and 55 Days at Peking but has more to do in fare like Goliath and the Vampires. The lovers at the center of Helen of Troy are locked into Homer’s game plan — their Great Romance is also ground underfoot by the scourge of war.

Curiously, Janette Scott’s Cassandra doesn’t come off as particularly interesting. Just five years before Scott was a marvelous little girl in No Highway in the Sky. Cassandra comes off as a whining nuisance, not history’s premiere fatalist prognosticator.

This film’s Ulysses of Ithaca is not an athletic hero like Kirk Douglas, but a cagey strategic trickster, more the C.I.A. type than a sword guy. It’s Torin Thatcher — a reason in itself to see the movie. When the grinning, sly Thatcher lectures his fellow Greek generals, or hatches the most daring bit of subterfuge in the history of warfare, you’d think he was plotting to recover a precious magic lamp.

With so many characters to work with, often on screen at the same time, we wonder if Wise dropped anything difficult and just went with simple setups. The ‘locked-in’ nature of the directing choices suggests some rigid storyboarding at work. The technically-minded Robert Wise may also have kept his camera a bit distant, and avoided too many pans, to minimize CinemaScope distortion problems.

Wise may have first met production illustrator Maurice Zuberano back on Citizen Kane. Zuberano is credited for ‘continuity sketches,’ and we’re betting that the artist’s storyboards dictated the film’s look — Wise would make Zuberano a key visual consultant on West Side Story,  The Sound of Music,  The Sand Pebbles and  Star!

Wise always hired excellent collaborators, and the visuals for Helen of Troy include dozens of matte shots combining paintings with thousands of soldiers in motion — wide shots of the walls of Troy, the Greek armada on the horizon, and armies advancing from lines of beached ships. Visual effect artist Louis Lichtenfield does good work under the circumstances. The marching scenes are heavily storyboarded second-unit material directed by a moonlighting Raoul Walsh, whose first assistant was none other than Sergio Leone. When a ‘cast of thousands’ is present, remember that Hollywood filmed in Italy to take advantage of very cheap labor — in 1955 the country was just beginning to recover from the war.

The in-close combat mayhem is excellent. We see a few scenes in which the leads fight, but they wear helmets that often blur their identities. Big bruisers like Stanley Baker and Robert Brown come off well, and Harry Andrews convinces as a legendary warrior too. The one-on-one chariot duel between Achilles and Hector is a major highlight. Sir Christopher Frayling suggests that it was the work of Sergio Leone. The duel ends with the film’s one really wrenching emotional jolt, the reaction of Hector’s virtuous wife Andromache (Patricia Marmont). It’s a great scene for an unsung actress.

Unlike Howard Hawks’ very different Land of the Pharaohs, Helen of Troy delivers the basic sword-smashing action demanded by the target audience for ancient history thrillers. The concluding sneak attack and rout inside the walls of Troy fully convinces. The royals can do little under the onslaught.

Stanley Baker’s Achilles is the ‘star’ Greek warrior, and he gets fourth billing after Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Baker’s acting stock-in-trade is is ability to look like a hothead at all times. He’s unforgettable as a bitter naval officer in Charles Frend’s The Cruel Sea. Achilles’ arrogance overrides the rules of ‘decent’ warrior conduct — the disrepect he shows his noble foe Hector deserves a retribution from the Gods.

We’ve got Sokurah the Magician AND Doctor Julian Karswell!

Achilles is given a swank entrance and Torin Thatcher is a devilish standout, but the film’s strongest performance is by good old Niall MacGinnis. The actor is always on task, at the center of the conflict. His Menelaus is the patriarch autocrat who can’t be reasoned with, and the ultimate scorned husband. He instantly intuits funny business between his wife and the foreign prince, and when he finally catches up with them only one outcome is possible. And how often do we get to see Niall MacGinnis show his stuff with a sword and shield?

The classics had harsh words for ‘noble’ interpretations of warfare. The aftermath of The Iliad is examined in Euripides’ The Trojan Women, which laments the enslavement of the women of Troy — and their fierce resentment of Helen.   Michael Cacoyannis made a good version of The Trojan Women starring Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Irene Papas and Geneviève Bujold. Interestingly, Euripides casts Helen as selfish and destructive, and not a victim of love.

If Helen of Troy feels longer than its 2 hours and one minute, it’s likely because we aren’t as invested in our title couple as we ought to be. That’s the price of not ‘improving’ Homer’s original storyline. But the film is a fun exercise for spotting English actors. We know many in the cast from popular thrillers, even Hammer films:  Ronald Lewis,  Robert Brown,  Janette Scott,  Stanley Baker,  Torin Thatcher. With his distinctive voice, Robert Douglas was always an excellent villain in costume pictures.

Helen of Troy carries no credited producer, something that’s difficult to explain. The credits also don’t reveal any Italian companies as co-producers. Neither assistant director Raoul Walsh nor assistant art director Ken Adam mention the film in books dedicated to their careers. We’d easily think that Robert Wise produced, but he’d need a lot of help — and Wise didn’t exactly remember the movie as his finest hour, either.  ^*

Somebody kept the show on the rails. It doesn’t seem to have been plagued by disaster, like Fox’s  Cleopatra, or become an outrageous money trap, like the Spain-shot movies of  Samuel Bronston. The only angle that smacks of film-biz politics is the inclusion of starlet Brigitte Bardot in the opening scenes, helping Paris escape with Helen. Her invented character is given several key bits of screen time. Bardot’s few scenes now generate as much interest as the film’s star actress. 1956 was the year Bardot broke out as an international sensation, with the scandalous …And God Created Woman.  She must have had one heck of an effective agent.

We like Rossana Podestà — she’s very good in the movie. But imagine what might have been had Brigitte Bardot slinked around as a less statue-like Helen, a teenage seductress for the ages.

Latest Viewing Notes.

With the clarity of Blu-ray, our latest viewing of Helen of Troy yielded a pile of petty observations, for detail-obsessed viewers:

• As a background for the main titles, Warners takes the shot of the entrance of Achilles into Menelaus’s court, removes Achilles by rotoscoping the figures opening the doors, and inserts a generic background hall. A still card of the composite is used behind the Overture, as well.
• We’re amused to hear the dry wind noise during the shipwreck — it’s of course the same sound effect from Them! and every other Warners picture, even The Wild Bunch.
• The Spartan beach on which Paris washes up looks very much like the beaches in several Ray Harryhausen films, especially the distinctive trees. But wasn’t Harryhausen & Schneer’s favorite ‘hero’ beach a Spanish location?
• It took a while for us to conclude that it really is actor Eduardo Ciannelli playing Andros, Helen’s fisherman host at the beach. The beard disguises Ciannelli’s looks, and the dubbed voice obliterates him even more.
• At 36 30: Helen’s slave Adelphus, who helps Paris escape from Sparta, looks very familiar. But we don’t see the character listed on the IMDB page for Helen. Any help with the ID?
• During the escape scene at 41 48, we hear the famed Wilhelm Scream, a more subtle use than usual.
• Helen and Paris talk about running away to an island called Pelagos, which apparently exists.

• King Priam’s main high priest is played by Esmond Knight, an actor who lost most of his eyesight while serving on a Royal Navy ship fighting the Bismarck.  ↗  Michael Powell helped him continue with film work. In The Silver Fleet Knight plays complex scenes, pretending to be sighted.
• We like the scene showing fancy Trojan bows being manufactured, a nice graphic image.
• At 01 13 02, we’re betting that the soldier falling backward off a Trojan wall is the same stuntman who takes an identical arched-spine tumble into an alligator pit in Land of the Pharaohs.
• The practical-looking Greek battle towers feature strongly in the assault on the walls of Troy. The single Chinese battle tower seen in 55 Days at Peking and its fireworks look pretty at night, but the Helen scene is more convincing.
• We’re pretty sure that we didn’t see the shot of a soldier with an arrow through his neck in old TV prints. Anybody remember it?  Note 08 06 23: Correspondent John Black remembers seeing the arrow in a 1970 telecast in Seattle.
• The Trojans burn the retreating assault towers, which easily ignite. Why didn’t the defenders light them up as they approached?
• At 01 20 21 we see several chariots entering Troy at high speed, on a wet stone roadway. These appear to be the stock shots seen early on in Columbia’s  Jason and the Argonauts. The shot is in the Helen trailer, too.
• Those big city sets constructed at Cinecittà look solid, substantial. Is it possible that the Italians maintained and re-used them for their own sword ‘n’ sandal pictures, starting with the next year’s Hercules?

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of Helen of Troy is a handsome encoding of this early CinemaScope feature, in the extra-wide 2.55:1 format. Colors look good, even with the slightly reddish-brown values of WarnerColor. When Harry Stradling pans his camera, the C’Scope warp can be severe. Some medium close-ups are fine, but others are definitely soft — perhaps one lens was better than another. We do question one exterior scene between Paris and Helen — Paris mentions that it’s late at night, but the timing on the video looks more like high noon.

Max Steiner’s music certainly enhances the spirit of the piece — the emotional love theme for Paris and Helen compensates for the dimmed romantic chemistry. The show is preceded by a brief Overture; Chapter 2 launches the film itself.

The timing of Helen of Troy coincided with the ABC TV show Warner Brothers Presents, which capped off its episodes with extended B&W promos for new WB releases. The three  Helen segments included as extras are hosted hosted by Gig Young, who claims that the movie is ‘the most ambitious ever produced by Warner Brothers.’ Gig interviews Rossana Podestà as Helen — and she’s still dubbed!

Also present is the Friz Freleng Bugs Bunny cartoon Napoleon Bunny-Part, in remastered HD.

The trailer is an overlong four-minute item that tries too hard to stress the film’s importance. Helen’s ‘fiery sin’ is emphasized, which goes against the tone of the film itself. The dialogue bites sampled tease Helen’s adultery, when not thumping the most obvious dialogue bites: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!”

What’s the ultimate yardstick in evaluating Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy?  This reviewer found it entertaining and is ready to see it again. We saw good things in the 2004 Troy with Brad Pitt, but have never once considered a re-watch.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Helen of Troy
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good – Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Three Behind the Camera items from the Warner Bros. Presents TV series: The Look of Troy,
Inteviewing Helen and Sounds of Homeric Troy
Cartoon Napoleon Bunny-Part.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: August 3, 2023
(6970troy)
^*  Correspondent John Black shared a memory of a phone conversation with Robert Wise from 1996:

“… he and I shared a very pleasant conversation about the home video versions. Wise commented that he himself was ‘essentially’ the film’s producer, alluding to some corporate misgivings when the film was being shot. He commented somewhere that at least one Warner executive came to Rome to check on cost overruns, as the film was very expensive for its era. He felt that the studio was having doubts, and that somebody was looking over his shoulder. He also mentioned that both Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone had told him that they liked Helen very much when it was playing theatrically.”

Final product for this review was provided free by The Warner Archive Collection.
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Text © Copyright 2023 Glenn Erickson

Here’s Jack Hill on Helen of Troy: