Hannibal

source: Hannibal

source: Hannibal

There are four things for which this film is worth seeing and remembering: Victor Mature as Hannibal, the crossing of the Alps with live elephants, the meticulously reconstructed battle of Cannae, and a magnificent score by Carlo Rustichelli. The story isn't bad with the loyalty conflicts of Fabius' niece joining hands with Hannibal the number one enemy of Rome and ultimately abandoning him to return to Rome, which doesn't thank her for it, but, as so often in Ulmer's films, the dialogue does not come alive and fails to flow. The actors aren't bad, but the script is not good enough for therm. It's a great story, and it's even greater when you consider that only half of it is told here, the rest of Hannibal's career was perhaps even more dramatic than the first part up to his greatest glory at the victory of Cannae, which is the only part this film has bothered to screen. Victor Mature was always an impressing actor but was unfortunately burdened by scripts that kept him confined to beefy heroes for the display of muscles and knuckles in extensive fisticuffs, so it's only seldom he was allowed to actually be the great actor he was. He almost gets through here, like in John Ford's "My Darling Clementine". Gabriele Ferzetti is excellent as Fabius, he has really studied this character carefully, and Rita Gam also makes the best of it, but she was better in Nicholas Ray's "King of Kings" as the lewd Herodias. This is one of the better Peplum films, they were produced en masse in the fifties up to "The Fall of the Roman Empire", and their number tended to spoil them, give them a bad reputation as only spectacular superficialities, which ultimately made them disappear losing their good box office standing, but a few of them are worth rediscovering for re-evaluation and exoneration. This was one of them, mainly for the sake of Victor Mature.

Many movie fans see this movie as just another Sword & Sandal flic. If you watch it carefully and study your history from the time, you will soon find out how accurate this movie is. This story took place 200 years BCE but many facts are well documented. Hannibal Barca (translated as LIGHTENING), grew up during the first Punic war and was dead set on destroying Rome as he launched the second Punic war at age 26. He first conquered Spain and after amassing an army of 100,000 men and 37 elephants, marched across the Alps in only 2 weeks where he lost half of his force. The Elephants were to be used as a terrifying stick force to trample and disperse the Roman armies. Sabers were attached to their tusks, "a cycle" was attached to the trunk and on their backs was a structure which held 6 archers. Just think of the effect this had on foot soldiers who had never seen such a charging monster. At CANNAE Hannibal destroyed 88,000 Romans in a few hours by dropping back his soldiers in the center and enclosing the Romans in a "circle of death". This Cannae tactic is still studied and used in warfare even today. Also used in the movie is the burying alive of the Senators Daughter which was a common practice at the time for traitors. Also, His brother's head was thrown into the camp as depicted in the movie. Other than the Elephants used were the smaller Indian type and not the huge African one, the rest of the story still holds up under scrutiny. Watch and enjoy. The cry still rings out in Rome whenever there is an impending disaster... "HANNIBAL IS AT THE GATES". Run.

Those of you who read my reviews know that I love the old classics -- mostly because I think that real screen acting was born and made by that generation. They made their characters larger than life and knew how to win our hearts doing it. Ok, going back to HANNIBAL and his elephants, Victor Mature does a remarkable job as as title character, making us love and even root for the historical figure who has always been considered a very unrelenting sort of fellow since childhood. The performance gives us a small peek into a more human side. Highly recommending the film.

it has the virtues and the sins of the genre. and Victor Mature. if you do not like the stories of Sandals and Fights, you have a lot of critics against it. a fact far to be fair because not the historical accuracy or the realism of battle scenes are the purpose but a form of entertainment, giving a nice - but not credible love story- and few moral virtues in the right package. so, it is not real easy to ignore its charm, naive in many scenes, the good intentions, the effort of Gabriele Ferzetti to do a reasonable Roman senator portrait and Rita Gam, not the most inspired Sylvia but looking for the decent way to propose a credible character. so, a nice film. predictable but far to be bad.

The legendary Edgar G. Ulmer has much to answer for -- certainly his willingness to make pictures on a shoestring resulted in some bloody awful pictures -- but he nevertheless has a talent that shines through even in some of his flimsiest pictures. On the other hand, even with fairly strong material (as here) the unevenness is always evident. Among Roman/Biblical epics, though, this, for all its messiness and its generally miserable acting, is not one of the dullest. (For me those are the almost-impossible-to-sit-through "El Cid" and "The Fall of the Roman Empire," pictures with much higher budgets and fancier casts, and made by a far superior director, Anthony Mann. But they are truly tedious.) Why? First of all, the story of Hannibal's campaigns is genuinely interesting from military and historical standpoints, and Ulmer brought them to life in a number of really superb battle scenes, beautifully edited. (Yes, yes, there are obviously cheap things -- the fake blood is terrible and the mix of studio and outdoor scenes is very poorly matched, but the effect of these scenes is generally excellent.) The novelty of seeing elephants climbing over the Alps, too, is refreshing. On the other hand, much of the acting, and, especially, the dubbing and sound mixing, is frankly at an amateur level. Rarely, in fact, have I heard such a poor soundtrack, with characters voice levels not matching camera distance, ludicrous crowd ad libs, etc. The score, too, though rather stirring, frequently seems wildly inappropriate (a common problem in Ulmer films, which is ironic, since Ulmer considered himself something of a musician). So it's interesting to see, to put it bluntly, how working in the lower depths corrupted a basically talented director into accepting standards way below par, even on what was, apparently, a film with a more or less "normal" budget. Kudos, though, to Victor Mature, that oft-misused and underrated actor ("My Darling Clementine" and Anthony Mann's "The Last Frontier" give strong evidence of actual talent). He makes a strong, sober Hannibal, not without a sense of humor. "Hannibal" is, despite fully justifiable criticism, a pretty entertaining picture. We've all sat through much worse.

Hannibal was one of the most brilliant military commanders of all time, so it's such a shame that "Annibale" (also known as "Hannibal") is such a ponderous and awful film. Instead of concentrating on his life and conquests, it centers mostly on a fictional relationship he had with a Roman lady....and a dull one at that. The title character is played by Victor Mature. And, when I think of Victor Mature I do NOT think about a North African military commander! Giving Mature support is a cast of Italians who are dubbed into English. The story is slow and the ending is a mess....nuff said. For history lovers like me, the film is too much fiction to be of any interest and for everyone else it's a slow mess of a film.

Hannibal is a victim of extremely poor production values, horrendous Italian directors, and even worse Italian actors. Mature does his best to salvage the film, but it is as hopeless as the war between Rome and Carthage, which would end with the complete destruction of Carthage after its third and final disastrous war against Rome. The great Italian directors and actors excelled in neorealism. This film is about as far from realism as you can get. The corny love story subplot only worsens the film with an ugly B Italian actress. Almost every great Italian film ever made, with the exception of modern Tornatore films, like the great Cinema Paradiso and a few others since the post-1980s, have been in black and white. This turkey had a hack director, hack actors, and hack production values that tried to use visual violence and gore in place of acting, directing and a script. It is a mess. I wrote a book on Italian Cinema (The Development of Italian Cinema). The book analyzes the great Italian neorealism period immediately following WW2 and lasting for two decades before Fellini and other great Italian directors took over the transition to modern films. Hannibal was not part of the process; it was a hack project from the start. Don't waste your time with this junk.

This Italian production is hardly in the same league as Spartacus or even The 300 Spartans, but despite its laughable dialogue, wooden acting, and clumsy dubbing, it has a certain intensity. I did laugh out loud at some of the swordfighting, in which actors are clearly waving their sticks around without any knowledge of what to with them, other than to hit the other actor's stick. And Victor Mature may have been an early 60s idea of a rugged hero, but the greasy kid stuff does him in (to say nothing of his extremely limited range). As for historical accuracy ... well, never mind that. This has very little to do with actual historical events. The romantic subplot is an invention (at least they got somebody really great to look at for the love interest), and Hannibal's speeches about freedom from hate and revenge are absurd if you know anything about the period. In spite of all these flaws, I found the photography to be mostly excellent, especially in the battle scenes and the crossing of the Alps. There's a curious, cheesy intensity to some of these sequences that makes the film compelling at times. Several notches below The Colossus of Rhodes, but better than Demetrius and the Gladiators.