what is perhaps the most feeling lead female performance to be found in this entire male-dominant genre. Freda’s direction is proud, stoic and exemplary, yet not without hu- mor. In the wake of the fistfight at the House of the Swan, he lets the scene linger on the proprietor sur- veying a business where everything has been wrecked . . . except for a single vase, which he then voluntar- ily smashes over the head of a reviv- ing Mongolian troublemaker, losing everything. His Sadean sense is par- ticularly acute here, especially in the scene of Garak administering a solu- tion of salt and vinegar to Liu Tan’s flogging welts on the edge of a feather, and going so far as to indulge in the black humor of a cut from the plum- meting of a headsman’s axe to a shot of a court entertainment juggling an array of head-sized balls.
Dante Di Paolo remembers that on the last day of filming, Freda de- manded that he and a team of more experienced horsemen ride in their Mongolian makeup through a field rigged with explosives. Di Paolo was confused, as no such scene appeared in the script and later learned that it was an action scene Freda was di- recting for Andre de Toth’s I mongoli/ The Mongols (1961)!
Notable among the Maciste film’s
many strengths is that, if not for some blatantly Western casting (par- ticularly Di Paolo as Bajan), it could pass for a film actually lensed in Asia. This illusion was partly the contribution of Mario Bava, who as- sisted credited cameraman Riccardo Pallottini with a number of unac- knowledged trick shots. He created the maquette of the palace at Panjan; painted the palace and other pagoda- like buildings (such as the convent) onto the hilltops of various country roads, sometimes adding to the veri- similitude with a foregrounded tree branch; added a gigantic stone sculpture of an elephant (actually a tiny thing carved by Freda himself) to the foreground of another exte- rior shot; and employed artful double exposures to multiply the number of extras in epic shots of Asian slaves engaged in toil. He appears to have