Hannibal

Warner Bros

Big Sky Video

R4 DVD

This 1959 epic is along the same lines as other really bad Victor Mature epics like Demetrius and the Gladiators, Samson and Delilah, and The Robe. Mature strikes a pose at any opportunity, has doubtful acting ability (in these films at least) and is really not given any chance to improve his performance given a stilted script and historically inaccurate storyline. Even the cover of the DVD doesn’t give you much hope –

Jump on ! Hang on ! Here comes the avenging Hannibal and his crazed elephant army.

Well yes, the elephants probably will be crazed if you wave flaming torches at them. And they are young Indian elephants, not the larger and more impressive African elephants. Still, apart from many errors like this we do get lots of men running around in very short skirts. We get pompous Romans, an even more pompous musical score, vacuous women, great battle scenes in which the Roman soldiers can’t hit an elephant with an arrow at twenty paces – what more could you want? Apart from acting ability?

In fairness to Mature he was employed mostly for his beefcake looks and was obliged to show his torso at any opportunity. In unfairness to him, his torso was often a better actor given the sort of film he played in. In Hannibal he was directed by well-known B director Edgar G Ulmer. Ulmer could direct a good film and get good results from his actors but was usually limited by miniscule budgets. With a bigger budget for this film he was able to include some quite impressive battle scenes. Ulmer had to contend with a production that was largely financed by Warner Brothers but filmed in Italy using mostly Italian actors. It must have been a nightmare.

Scriptwriter Mortimer Braus should carry some of the blame as he had to write a script where the mouth movements in Italian could be overdubbed into reasonable English, but essentially the bulk of the blame goes to Alessandro Continenza who butchered the original story to produce a “treatment” from which it never recovered.

The film could have been so much more.

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