01  SUMMER 2025

In the past, critics scorned a good half of the best American cinema simply because it was commercial. It was a banal misunderstanding, and therefore easy to dispel, as the facts later showed. Today, when it comes to Vittorio Cottafavi’s work, there is no longer one misunderstanding, but at least four.

1. — First, the most classic. Italian critics and filmmakers, who, since the creation of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 1935, and particularly since the end of Fascism, have fought for a free, modern cinema and against conventional Italian commercial cinema, would consider themselves disgraced and defeated if, at the end of a victorious battle that lasted for some of them a lifetime, they admitted that a commercial film — even just one — could be brilliant, or equal the great achievements of neorealism. This kind of thoughtless discrimination was once the preserve of the Nazis, who refused to accept that the best Jew could be superior to the worst Aryan. In Rome, it’s fashionable to say that you’ve never seen a single Cottafavi film, because they’re all so bad. But people often go and see them on the sly, with heads bowed under shoulders and Godard glasses on. This sentimental loyalty to the cause of neorealism is understandable and endearing, but I pity those who go right past the most beautiful things without daring to look at them;

2. — A certain decorative sense at times, but a total absence of content. Perhaps valid for some of Cottafavi’s historical films, this judgment, proclaimed by a few honest and serious French critics, does not square at all with the ambitious melodramas Cottafavi made between ’49 and ’54, in which the theme of solitude and the particular problems of women were handled without embellishment, with an accuracy and precision that one would look for in vain in the best Antonioni. And today we’ll see that this point of view is once again the opposite of the truth;

3. — The ultras of the young criticism decree that, during his melodramatic period, Cottafavi was the best filmmaker in Europe... Today’s historical Cottafavi, on the other hand, is far inferior. Indeed, it took Cottafavi some time to get back to a quality equal to that of his best melodramas, but that’s approximately the same or even less time than he took groping around before making his great melodramas. Every genre requires a learning period. Now this discrimination has become a crude error, explained by the snobbery of the movement: ideally, one should praise to the skies films that others can’t see.

4. — Another paradox: some, looking to make up for the mistake of our predecessors, or their own mistake, of paying attention only to neorealism in Italian cinema, now watch only historical films. Zurlini, Castellani and De Seta are forgotten, and Freda and co. are admired as much as Cottafavi, when in fact Cottafavi is the only one to triumph in the difficult genre of the historical film, where Kubrick, Ray, Mann, Ulmer and Bava have all failed, and where Minnelli has just died.

In order to look up to date, French critics, who had been quietly ignoring Cottafavi for the past eight years, began singing the praises of the first of his films to come their way. Bad luck: it was the only one of his recent historical films not to exceed the threshold of mediocrity, Messalina, which Cottafavi has disowned and attributes to his producer. This unfortunate misunderstanding, caused by people who were thought to be serious but who let themselves be won over by the snobbery of novelty, runs the risk of making Cottafavi seem wrongly esteemed.

Confusion reigns, to the point of provoking a small Battle of Hernani among French and Italian critics. Fortunately, the exceptional quality of Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (1961) resolves all these misunderstandings and answers all the criticisms.

* * *

The action takes place in a fictional time halfway between mythology and the first historical age of Greece. The king of Thebes (Ettore Manni) forces his friend, the demigod Ercole (Reg Park), accompanied by his son, a dwarf and a few others, to go on an expedition to subjugate the country beyond the Mediterranean, which, according to omens, threatens Thebes. Ercole alone succeeds in entering Atlantis, overcomes Antinea despite all her trickery, blows up Atlantis, and finds and saves the king and his own son, who brings Antinea’s daughter (Fay Spain) ^[1] back to Greece.

Unlike Cottafavi’s previous historical films, this one, by virtue of its subject and treatment, is both morally meaningful and highly topical. This is not the film’s essential quality, but it is one that should not be overlooked. It’s a fable about war and violence, depicting man’s various acts and attitudes in the face of the problem. Since the genre hardly lends itself to a message, Cottafavi has opted to deliver his moral under the guise of parody, benefiting from the critical effectiveness of comic-strip schematism.

At the council of the kingdom, for example, all of the statesmen’s attitudes are excessively stylized: the comic-strip style shows the puppet side of every politician. One is ruled by fear, another by his mother, another by his lust for power. A politician ceases to be a man; he becomes an object, a drawing. He’s the only being who can be caricatured without losing any of his personality, because he has neither blood nor flesh. Indeed, the comic-strip mode originated in political journalism.

In fact, the film proper begins with this sequence, the third, because the opening has no bearing on the rest of the film. At most, it serves to introduce the characters. This lack of dramatic necessity shifts the accent onto the absurdity of violence, the major theme of the first sequence: Ercole’s son looks a little too closely at the maid of the inn, and a fantastic brawl ensues between some thirty combatants for almost ten minutes. Meanwhile, the strongest of them all, Ercole, continues to eat, indifferent to the storm raging around him. Once he’s got to the cheese course, Ercole says that’s enough; he nonchalantly pushes back a five-meter-long beam, and all the enemies collapse.

The whole first part shows us a Hercules who goes against tradition: drink, eat, sleep is his motto, and he lets the dwarf do the hard work. The King of Thebes must kidnap him to have him on his side, but Ercole will only use force when he’s forced to, when he or his friends are attacked. His attitude is that of a wise man. So, instead of the mediocre Mark Forest, hero of La Vendetta di Ercole (1960), Cottafavi chose a good actor with an intelligent face, Reg Park. And part of the film’s success lies in the fact that the viewer feels sympathy for the main character.

Less convincing is the portrayal of court intrigues in Atlantis, as we fall back into scenes of explanation, hateful in this kind of work, which always operates at the level of stylistic exercise or parable, allowing ellipses and implausibilities, but never at the level of psychological realism, to which explanation unfortunately brings us back: our belief in the film is then destroyed. Perhaps Cottafavi wanted to mock the sinister loquacity of the Italian blockbuster, but he didn’t caricature it frankly enough to amuse the viewer, as he had succeeded in doing with the parodic painting of Ercole’s character. Fortunately, the episode is brief enough, and ends with a magnificent parodic gag, in which Ercole plays at being a geyser.

In the end, Ercole delivers the slaves from Atlantis and tells them to keep quiet while he blows up the magic stone, the cause of all their troubles. Well! These foolish slaves unanimously decide to spare no time in taking revenge, and attack their tyrants, who slaughter them all. When Ercole returns, he’ll find a field of corpses as frightening as that in Night and Fog or Hiroshima. The oppressed imitate their oppressors; in doing so, they lose their lives, even though their future was assured. This is a common occurrence in history. Indeed, the film ends with a destruction that resembles an atom blast, which for Ercole is the only way to save his own life and that of his companions. Here we have one of the rare historical films that advocate defense, dedicated to the glory of peace and hostile to the violence usually glorified by producers for commercial reasons. And Cottafavi has managed to make this peaceful message palatable to the public, presenting Ercole’s lazy hedonism as a theme for parody, when it is also and above all a reflection of the highest moral conception.

* * *

Today, Cottafavi is an exception in a cinema of aesthetes, because while the Italian artist demonstrates himself to be a man of infinitely more refined taste than the French, he is on the other hand a rather old-fashioned traditionalist intellectual. This makes it difficult for other Italians to understand Cottafavi.

Cottafavi seems to have been able to exercise this intelligence and lucidity to the full, thanks to the material difficulties he faced in expressing himself. He and Vittorio Sala, both graduates of the Centro Sperimentale, are the only ones to have tried to get something out of the thankless genre they were offered. But Sala limited himself to an overly one-sided parody. Cottafavi exploited all the possibilities open to him with astonishing intellectual rigor. There’s nothing romantic about his genius; it owes everything to reason and analysis. As a result, his various films, on similar subjects, go in the most opposite directions. One gets the impression that Cottafavi has nothing to say, and that it’s by making his film — according to the conditions of the film — that he finds what he has to say. One never senses a personal predisposition for this or that style, this or that theme. Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide confirms this feeling. It’s a potpourri of so many tendencies that it becomes a cosmic film, more through the varied directions of its mise en scène than its subject matter. Cottafavi’s determination to remain objective and show all aspects of the world — and of the immaterial as much as the real world — in a single work aligns him with the efforts of the French New Wave (only the subjects differ), and distances him from the more down-to-earth Italian New Wave. Here, each scene breaks with the previous one; what is mocked is exalted in the next shot. We’re constantly oscillating between the good-natured humorist Cottafavi, the classical constructor Cottafavi, the Italian baroque Cottafavi and the experimental Cottafavi. The four encounter each other right from the start. Exaggeratedly wide and precise opening credits — in line with this 70mm film as a whole, which gives the impression of being Cottafavi’s first blockbuster made for more than pennies — are inserted into a very long master shot composed of various vertical, horizontal and oblique camera movements. We see a brawl with a rhythm and gags as dizzying as in North To Alaska (Hathaway, 1960). But here, the greatest spontaneity is combined with the greatest concern for composition. The lens, theoretically splashed with wine, heralds the fantastic lighting effects and zoom into the sun in the second sequence. Next, a return to a fuller style, with classically tasteful sets, then parallel montage and further forays into the experimental realm, when we return to the fantastic. At the same time, of course, there are many changes in tone.

In turn, rhythm is created in a more original way, through the use of tracking shots within static shots, either preceding the actors as they walk, or going out to meet them, with a dazzling beauty not seen since Rio Bravo. It’s just a shame that this plastic beauty is sometimes compromised by a lack of sharpness in the movement at the front of the depth of field.

At the end, there’s a return to the cinema d’essai (overexposure and lens effects to express the fantasy of destruction) and borrowings from the Italians’ dubious taste for colossal, baroque sets; here, beauty is born of accumulation rather than of what makes it up. And Cottafavi manages to transcend this style of decoration, which he otherwise detests, and which is to be found in every variety show in Rome, by adding a little more each time. Shots of eruptions lent by Haroun Tazieff and the rhythm created by the music accentuate the heterogeneity of the finale, giving it its grandeur and originality. After a more uneven middle section, the film’s initial richness and frenzy return here, culminating, with the help of the montage, in an apotheosis.

Cahiers du cinéma, 131, May 1962, pp. 39–42.