Year: 1963
Duration: 01:25:30
Directed by: Sabatino Ciuffini, Riccardo Freda
Actors: Jeffrey Hunter, Mylène Demongeot, Ron Randell
Language: Italian, English
Country: Italy, France
Also known as: Oro per i Cesari, De l’or pour César, Das Gold der Cäsaren
Description: Sabatino Ciuffini , Ricardo Freda, and the cinematographer Raffaele Masciocchi do a great job in putting this movie together, making a fairly standard plot into something a little more interesting. It has a cool sense of perspective, with lines placed at oblique angles, the action staged in three or four angles, and he takes full advantage of scenery and shadows. It also has a more organic feel in the exterior shots than I usually associate with peplum.
The score is an interesting clash of styles. It pretty standard “epic-movie music” except during action sequences at the beginning and end of the film. Then it is a choppy trumpet and piano theme that seems more similar to the scores that Morricone was starting to write.
Review: Pretty unusual film that illustrates what happens when a Western plot to clothe classical antiquity in colorful costumes.
By order of the Roman governor slave architect equips an expedition to find a legendary Gaul gold deposit, so necessary to Rome. The expedition is threatened by Celtic tribes. But the film is not only and not so much about gold and wars. There is in it a place of love and jealousy, loyalty and betrayal …
In the picture involving famous artists Massimo Girotti and Mylene Demongeot.
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One of the best peplum, though made expressly for the American audience. What is to say, that Mylène Demongeot is no less stunning than almost perfect scale models/exterrior matte shot’s illusion of the Valley of the Sil. And Mario Bava biography by Tim Lucas again tells us that it was (illusion, not film) one of the numerous Maestro uncredited work for italian industry.
Bava moonligthed in that way, as special effects designer and second-unit cameraman.
What else Lucas says, that Cuffini and Freda were responsible for the “exterrior shots” and Andre de Toth was responsible for the “interrior shots”. As someone seeing the film, let it try to guess which is which.
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Many thanks for yet another prime peplum spectacle!