Of course, a costume film is not necessarily serious. What's more, this one is riddled with historical errors. For example, Titus Livius tells us about a very loyal dog belonging to the Proconsul of Armenia, named Medorus. Where is this dog? Finally, the script is infantile, and I see hardly anything to rival it in terms of implausibility and naivety except for Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.
Vittorio Cottafavi is a young Italian director who has made around fifteen films with unattractive titles, which are completely unknown to film fans. [1] In France we have seen: Una donna libera, Traviata 53, Nel gorgo del peccato, Avanzi di galera, Il boia di Lilla, I piombi di Venezia, [2] Il cavaliere di Maison Rouge, and this Rivolta dei gladiatori, dubbed coproductions, with a miserably commercial appearance, distributed — except for the last one — between Belleville and the Porte Saint-Martin. All these films are interesting, four or five contain beauties that no other European filmmaker can match, and two are masterpieces: Una donna libera and Il boia di Lilla.
La rivolta dei gladiatori is probably not the best introduction to Cottafavi. The set-up, hitherto extremely intimate and anchored in the greater possibilities for surprise, emergence and selection offered by the regular format, tends to be diluted in this first confrontation with the Cinemascope format, resulting in a certain generalized loosening and various longueurs. Nevertheless, there are enough shots — tense, prickly, sharp, and piercing like diamonds — to serve as support and reference for some propositions on the genius of their author. Leaving his compatriots to grope their way through the neorealist mists, he joins Preminger and Mizoguchi in chiseling his delirium into precious, paroxysmal films, oscillating between the two seductive poles of love and death, major obsessions that resolve into a sublimation of gestures. What do I care about the pretext if the events are dissolved by the magnificence of the expression? More than anyone else, Cottafavi focuses on the beauty of faces, crucified beauty, magnified in torments, nostalgia for a world of princes where only princely games are allowed. Masks, poisons, flagellations, palaces, heavy draperies, daggers (or their modern equivalents) know only two possible conclusions: the sudden slackening of the man standing at his death, his eyes lost, bottomless windows, still there and yet already having left this world, and delivering to us in a final wrenching the secret of a painful divinity, or the radiance of two bodies finally reunited, sculpted together in the instant and yet bearing an eternal allure. This is the kind of mise en scène we love, a series of surges and rests, shimmers, cries, gratuitous and irrelevant games that speak to us of the essential.
Cahiers du cinéma, 99, September 1959, p. 62.
La rivolta dei gladiatori (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1958)
Notes
Let us point out to our new young writer that Robert Lachenay [François Truffaut] ‘discovered’ the talent of Vittorio Cottafavi more than five years ago. Just look at his praise for Traviata 53 (Cahiers du cinéma, June 1954) and the long unsigned reviews in Arts-Spectacles of this film and Avanzi di galera at their respective releases. The prelude should not be confused with the andante. – Editors’ note.
Translator’s note: This film is credited to Gian Paolo Callegari, with Cottafavi receiving a ‘realizzata da’ (‘realized by’) credit. Elsewhere he is listed as a ‘supervising director’.