Monsters and Heroes


film I giganti della Tessaglia—they are visible in its very first scene. “This story is basically accurate, and I can vouch for it,” Christopher Lee attests. “The only exceptions to the sparse scenery were the scenes shot on location.” These were shot at the usual Tor Caldara beach locations near Anzio, with the opening scenes filmed once again at the picturesque falls of Cascate di Montegelato. Virtually every interior set seen in the film is limited to the compo- nents described by Bava, with the set flats moved and reassembled in different configurations, and the white columns multiplied by mirrors and variously “painted” with colored gel lighting. Everything else—the ex- terior sets, the doors, the boat, even the wardrobe—were leftover pieces from earlier mythological films shot at Cinecittà.


Neri is billed above Ely Draco (who plays Theseus’ girlfriend Jocasta in the first and final scenes) and below Marisa Belli (the Queen of the Hes- perides); these are both prominent, speaking roles, so Neri’s role should be at least as prominent. While some European publications at the time identified her role as “Egle”—a name not heard in the English or Italian version, which is reportedly used in the German version to identify one of the Hesperides women who greet Theseus and Telemachus in the grotto of Procrustes—other, later references credit Rosalba Neri in the role of “Hel- ena.” The English version features a single line of dialogue in which Deianara addresses her first hand- maiden (the one later killed by Lico) as Helena; she is called Elettra in the Italian version. The fact that the ac- tress playing this part looks nothing like Rosalba Neri only confuses the matter further. The only actress who shares the sultry look and voluptuous figure of Rosalba Neri is the nude woman, bound to a rock by chains, encountered in Hades by Hercules and


394


Theseus and revealed to be an illu- sion. I am convinced, on the basis of Rosalba’s explanation, that this actress must be Monica Neri.


Production


Scripted as Ercole nel regno dei morti (“Hercules in the Realm of the Dead”), the film’s working title was changed at some point to Ercole contro i vampiri (“Hercules Against the Vampires”) to exploit the casting of Christopher Lee. However, Dino De Laurentiis pre- empted this plan when his own latest production, La rivincita di Maciste, changed its title to Maciste contro il vampiro shortly before its release. Consequently, Bava’s film was given a new identity, which traded on the title of another recent Italian boxoffice success: Viaggio al centro della terra—that is, Journey to the Center of the Earth, made in 1959 by Bava’s erstwhile associate, Le mer- aviglie di Aladino director Henry Levin. The title and the coincidence suited Bava’s sense of irony, and thus Ercole al centro della terra was born. Bava


DON’T believe in what you think you see: That’s Monica Neri, not her lookalike relative Rosalba Neri, as a Hadean apparition.


later had his revenge on De Laurentiis in France and Germany, where his film was released first and thus could play under its original title. The De Laurentiis production was renamed Maciste contro le Fantôme (“Maciste Against the Phantom”) for its French release.


Whereas Ercole alla conquista di


Atlantide had been a comparatively lavish co-production of SPA and Comptoir Française du Film Produc- tion of Paris, Ercole al centro della terra was produced solely by SPA at Cinecittà with ludicrously minimal means. “For this film, I had to make a little bet with myself,” Bava later con- fessed, “that I could shoot the entire picture using only one segmented wall composed of doors and windows, and four moveable columns.”8


Bava was exaggerating, but only a little. The columns were inherited, in- cidentally, from Riccardo Freda’s 1960


For those viewers with an eye for such things, Ercole al centro della terra is a veritable rummage sale of props identifiable from other films. Medea wears a stylized mask previously worn by a nightclub entertainer in an early scene of Fellini’s La dolce vita, and the Art Nouveau throne of the Queen of the Hesperides can also be seen in Edgar G. Ulmer’s L’Atlantide/Journey Beneath the Desert (1961) as the or- namental throne of Antinea (Haya Harareet), Queen of Atlantis.9


In this


way, Ercole al centro della terra show- cases Bava’s uncanny ability to con- jure a film “out of nothing,” building a metaphysical scenario around a set of unrelated and all-too-earthly props, in much the same way he had previ- ously juggled stock footage to create the illusion of global catastrophe in La morte viene dallo spazio. Despite its thrift shop origins,


Ercole al centro della terra obtained an aura of grandeur by being photo- graphed in the new Totalscope Super/ 100 format. According to Robert E. Carr and R. M. Hayes’ book Wide Screen Movies, Totalscope Super/100 “probably refers to a 100mm prime lens used with the anamorphics. It doesn’t refer to the film gauge. It might, though not likely, refer to the inten- tion to project the anamorphic image onto a concave screen of 100º.”10 When projected on flat American the- ater screens, the image width does indeed overspill the periphery, and


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