Programme notes
Steve Reeves | Hercules (1958) Adventure Fantasy Movie | Directed by Pietro Francisci
Summary
A 1958 Italian adventure film directed by Pietro Francisci, starring Steve Reeves — an American bodybuilder rather than a trained actor — as Hercules. It is a loose assembly of Greek myth built around physical spectacle and colour, made cheaply and aimed squarely at a mass audience.
Why it matters
This is the film that launched the peplum, or sword-and-sandal, cycle: for roughly the next decade Italian studios turned out muscleman epics by the dozen, and Steve Reeves became an international star without much dialogue. Its American release is also a landmark in distribution — the rights were bought and then promoted with an unusually heavy, saturation-style advertising campaign, a template that later became standard practice for wide releases.