Helen of Troy

 Strangely bland and uninteresting, Robert Wise's Helen of Troy (1956) has some good ingredients but they are combined in a way that makes the whole far less than the sum of its parts.  You can count the compelling shots on one hand -- there's a fine image of the Trojan horse amidst smoke, fire, and orange-black chiaroscuro; a couple of pictures of triremes plying the deep are memorable; there's an odd landscape near the beginning of the movie comprised of low cliffs topped with strange-shaped bulbous trees, and, in one love scene, the blonde sleek heads of Paris and Helen rotate mechanically about the pivot of their lips creating an interesting and metallic effect of gold on gold.  The sets are imposing although the matte work is pretty evident -- you can guess where the seam between the fortified city painted on glass and the actual photographic image. combine.  Some chariot sequences, filmed with unwieldy-looking bronze carts, are marred by terrible rear-projection.  The acting is uniformly wooden.  Helen, played by the Italian glamor girl Rosana Podesta, didn't speak any English and so she recites her lines mechanically -- she learned the part phonetically.  The script is middle brow and, therefore, doesn't really appeal to anyone.  The film isn't tawdry, but rather staid and solemn (it comes equipped with an eight minute overture by Max Steiner played to the accompaniment of a painted image of Doric columns and some sort of strange stanchion -- Steiner's music sounds like a mixture of Rachmaninoff and Debussy; it's okay but not memorable.)  The movie's script also falls between stools -- at times, the picture is sophisticated, requiring a working knowledge of Homer's Iliad and parts of the Odyssey; there are several allusions even to the thesis that Helen never went to Troy and that it was her eidolon (or "image") that stirred up all the trouble in the Eastern Mediterranean.  The movie depicts the Homeric-era Greeks as freebooters and pirates, a realistic approach to this material -- Odysseus in particular is little more than a vicious pirate as portrayed in the Odyssey  But this material subverts other aspects of the epic.  We are supposed to admire Paris, the Trojan responsible Helen's abduction, but this also cuts against the grain of the Iliad which is primarily about Greek (Achaian) heroes.  Most of the time, the characters speak in a sort of fortune-cookie diction, uttering quasi-poetic aphorisms -- the dialogue is too "poetic" for the popcorn crowd and too vulgar for those who know the source material.  The substance of the plot, an extra-marital love affair with tumultuous results, is pretty racy for 1955, and so has to be denatured into a series of winks and nods -- the adultery between Paris and Helen of Sparta is portrayed as basically accidental.  No one really has any culpability here.  This approach to the story could be managed if the gods were admitted into the epic.  But the gods, who in Homer control everything and even insert their thoughts into the minds the characters, are completely excluded from the narrative.  Thus, the defense that "some god" made me do this act -- a motif ubiquitous in Homer doesn't appear even by implication in this stolid and unimaginative rendition of the story.  

The movie starts in Troy, visualized as big city something on the model of Babylon in Griffith's Intolerance -- it has huge walls that are sixty feet high, vast temples and palaces, and acres of ornate buildings (painted on the camera-lens glass).  (I've been to Troy -- it's a couple of acres of knee-high ruins and broken crockery on a wind-swept bluff-top; I can't imagine the place ever looking like the images in the movie but this is probably a defect in my understanding.)  Paris is a devotee to the goddess Aphrodite; strangely enough, Pallas Athena is depicted as a scowling, witch-like war goddess -- something that seriously falsifies the Homeric text.  (We see Paris mooning about in city council chambers decorated with triple life-size monochrome statues of Aphrodite and Athena -- real Hellenic statues, of course, were polychrome with painted pink flesh and gemstone eyes.)  The backstory is weird but no doubt based on one of the lesser-known Homeric hymns.  The Greeks destroyed Troy once but it has been rebuilt into something called "New Troy".  Paris leads a delegation of Trojans to Menelaus' Sparta in an effort to establish a treaty with the Greek principalities -- the Greeks have been engaged in piracy on the high seas.  A tempest at sea intervenes and only Paris survives, washing up on shore like Odysseus in the Nausicaa episode in the Odyssey.  He is found by Helen, unhappily married to the belligerent Menelaus, and Helen's slave, Andraste (played by a young, winsome and innocent-looking Brigitte Bardot -- here she is a healthy strapping maiden ten years before her ascent into international stardom as a rather depraved-looking sex symbol).  Paris and Helen fall in love.  The Spartans catch them in a tryst and the couple have to escape by jumping off a sea-cliff and, then, being rescued by Phoenicians while the Greeks haplessly shoot arrows at them.  Helen wants to go to an idyllic island called Pelasgius as a sort of romantic retreat but the dutiful Paris has to go home to Troy -- so Helen agrees to accompany him.  Helen is, as they say, "liked but not well-liked" in Troy and her reputation suffers further when the Greeks appear in the  harbor with a thousand ships -- this is a pretty effective shot.  There's a big initial battle in which the Greeks are repelled although they do briefly breach the city -- this is the movie's big battle scene involving seventy-foot high ladders, lots of fire, and burning siege towers.  Everyone settles in for the ten-year duration of the war.  We are shown little snippets of the Iliad:  Achilles wrath at being denied Brisius, the captive slave, some skirmishes and, finally, Achilles dispatching Hector after the death of Patroclus; Achilles drags Hector's corpse around in some tight circles in front of the horrified Trojans.  By this point, Helen has been accepted as a citizen of the city.  Odysseus contrives the plot to sack the city using the Trojan horse.  (Helen says "beware Greeks bearing gifts" and Cassandra bleats out some sinister oracles.)  The Trojans drag the big wooden horse into the city and, then, have a giant orgy, complete with girls squirting wine into the mouths of their lovers, all this activity taking place right under the belly of the horse.  When the Trojans are all hungover, the ungentlemanly Greeks emerge, slaughter the bemused and mostly naked Trojans and yank open their city gates.  Ten-thousand Greeks storm into the citadel and kill everyone.  At the end of the movie, poor Helen is shipboard with her doughty, dim-witted husband Menelaus, heading back to Sparta.  Paris has been lanced in the back and, after some tender kissing, lies dead in the streets of the ruined city.  In a voice-over, we hear Helen bemoaning her fate but remarking that Paris will always be with her -- at least in her thoughts -- and that they will be re-united after death in Elysium.  

Robert Wise, after a strong start (he edited The Magnificent Ambersons and directed several brilliant films produced by Val Lewton during World War Two) had the singular skill of making everything that he touched dull.  He would have sank West Side Story except for Leonard Bernstein's score and managed to wreck The Sound of Music, also a picture with a fantastic musical soundtrack.)  The  1956 film is shot in big scale Cinemascope but Wise has no idea how to position the camera or use the broad aspect ratio -- the images are almost completely inert.  In the big battle scenes, Wise wants to show the audience the money and so he keeps the camera a long way from the action to capture huge masses of men and chariots swarming across the screen.  These shots are uninteresting, however, because Wise doesn't know how to insert details into the action -- it all looks remote and antiseptic.  Homer's epics are claustrophobic -- most scenes involve two or three participants in a sort of god-lit glowing enclosed space.  Even Homer's big action scenes have the effect of intimacy -- we see a few people in action but the rest of the image is empty or shown in close focus.  (This is a result of Homer's famous enargia, that is, his immediacy which as Erich Auerbach noted casts everything into the foreground.)  Wise' s approach is the opposite -- everything seems a long way from the camera.  Helen is attractive but not sexually imposing -- she's pretty and her clothes fit her well, but she doesn't have any particular charisma; simply put, she's no Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor (or, for that matter, Brigitte Bardot); Paris, played by Jacques Sernas has a oddly shaped head -- it's a sort of truncated triangle, huge at the top but bending inward to his rock-hewn square jaw. He looks pretty ridiculous and the love scenes between the couple have a automated effect; they are robotic and risible.