Movies - Maciste

	Movies - Maciste

Maciste, or Machiste (pronounced ma-CHEES-tay) is one of the oldest recurring characters in cinema. He cuts a heroic figure throughout the history of the cinema of Italy, even if the movies that featured him were usually of poor artistical quality. He is usually depicted as a Hercules-like figure, utilizing his massive strength to achieve heroic feats that ordinary man cannot.

The origin of the name is a bit of a mystery. There was no Maciste in Greek mythology or history. The word machiste, however, means "macho man" or "mâle chauviniste" in French.

Cabiria

Maciste made his debut in the 1914 Italian silent movie classic Cabiria
. Maciste first appeared on the screen in the same year that Tarzan made his début in print. Including this first one, there have been at least 52 movies featuring Maciste, 25 of them starring Batolomeo Pagano, who played Maciste in Cabiria.

The silent film was a story about a slave who was involved in the rescue of a Roman princess from an evil Carthaginian king who plotted to sacrifice her to the cruel god Moloch. The film was based very loosely on Salammbo, a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert, and had a plot and screenplay by Gabriele d'Annunzio.

Maciste's debut pretty much set the tone for his later adventures. Typical plots involve tyrannical rulers who practice vile magical rituals or worship evil gods. Typically, the young lady who is the love interest runs afoul of the evil ruler. Maciste is a super-strong guy who must rescue her. There is often a rightful king out there somewhere who wants to overthrow the evil usurper. There is an obligatory belly dance scene. There is often an evil queen who has carnal designs on the hero.

These films, then, could be set in settings from Mongolia to Peru, from Egypt to the Roman Empire. His life story, or his origin in ancient Carthage, did not prevent him from appearing in any setting from classical antiquity or modern times.

Bartolomeo Pagano's Maciste films

As a character, Maciste had two distinct moments in the spotlight. The first was in the Italian silent movie period, in which the original Maciste from Cabiria, the muscular actor Bartolomeo Pagano, starred in a series of at least fifteen sequels over the period from 1915 through 1926.

The Pagano Maciste films established the character as someone who could appear at any place and at any time. Some of the earlier ones, made during World War I, had the distinct flavour of propaganda, and cast the hero in the role of a soldier. Later films in the series return to fantasy, but the fantasy was not always mythological. Maciste appears as an Olympic athlete, in contemporary settings, or in the afterlife. His character and his plots remained consistent in whatever setting; he was a populist Hercules, using his physical prowess to overcome the evil ruses of effete aristocrats and authority figures.

Revival of the 1960s

The character was revived in the 1960s. In 1959, Steve Reeves' Hercules, an Italian production, created a minor boom in Italian dramas featuring American bodybuilders in vaguely mythological or classical historical subjects. The actual mythology was frequently pied to make up the improbable plots. Maciste was a frequently recurring hero in these films. This sword and sandal fad continued for about seven years, until the new fad for spaghetti Westerns took over the attention of the Italian cinema industry. The title character in the English version of several of these films was not Maciste: when these films were imported into the USA and dubbed in English (usually in a poor way), the hero's name was often changed to Hercules, Samson, Goliath, Atlas, or Colossus, because the name of Maciste was not widely recognised in the USA.

The biggest source of the second series Maciste films from the second cycle in the USA was The Sons of Hercules, a film series which was later made into a syndicated TV show. Best remembered for its stirring title song - hear it once and it will never get out of your head - films originally featuring Maciste were dubbed into a variety of Sons of Hercules pictures, with stock narration at the opening relating each character to Hercules.

One of the first films to appear in the second series was Il Trionfo di Maciste, anglicized as Triumph of the Son of Hercules. Other Maciste films available in English are Terror of Rome v. the Son of Hercules, Beast of Babylon v. the Son of Hercules, and The Son of Hercules v. Venus. Many of these films are available from .

In comic books

In the 1970s, Maciste was introduced to another American audience by being made a recurring character (under the spelling "Machiste") in DC Comics' Warlord sword and sorcery comic. In this version, the character was a gladiator of African appearance.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Maciste ]

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