| Sheba and the Gladiator | |
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 French film poster | |
| Directed by | |
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| Story by |
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| Produced by | Enzo Merolle [1] |
| Starring | |
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| Edited by | Nino Baragli [1] |
| Music by | Angelo Francesco Lavagnino [1] |
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Running time | 98 minutes [1] |
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Sheba and the Gladiator or Sign of the Gladiator (Italian : Nel Segno di Roma) is a 1959 historical drama film loosely pertaining to the Palmyrene Empire and its re-annexation back into the Roman Empire.
Sheba the Gladiator was shot in 1958. [2] Director Guido Brignone fell ill during the production on the film leading to two other directors to enter the production to help complete it: Michelangelo Antonioni and Riccardo Freda. [3] For Antonioni, he visited Brignone in the hospital and reported on what he filmed and received instructions for the next day. [3] Freda was in charge shooting the battle scenes which he did with cinematographer Mario Bava and Antonioni working with cinematographer Luciano Trasatti shooting the indoor scenes. [3] Other people credited to the film included Sergio Leone as a screenwriter. [3]
Mimmo Palmara commented that Antonioni "couldn't care less" about the film and "didn't direct the actors." [2] Freda had an argument with Palmara and unsuccessfully tried to court Chelo Alonso on set. [2]
Sheba and the Gladiator was distributed in Italy on March 5, 1959. [1] [2] It was released in West Germany as Im Zeichen Roms on 2 October 1959. [4]
American International Pictures acquired the American rights to the film and re-titled it Sign of the Gladiator (Sign of Rome "was a pretty dismal title" according to Samuel Z. Arkoff [5] ) and cut 18 minutes from the original running time. [6] There was no gladiator in the film so they redubbed it to change the general played by Jacques Sernas into a gladiator. [5]
It was released in September 1959 in the United States. [2] American International Pictures added an end title song called "Xenobia" sung by Bill Lee which was released on AIP Records. [7] The film grossed a total of $1.25 million in rentals. [8] "We did quite well with the picture" said Samuel Z Arkoff. [5]
Kine Weekly called it a "money maker" at the British box office in 1960. [9]
American International Pictures LLC is an American film production company owned by Amazon MGM Studios. In its original operating period, AIP was an independent film production and distribution company known for producing and releasing films from 1955 until 1980, a year after its acquisition by Filmways in 1979.
Sword-and-sandal, also known as peplum, is a subgenre of largely Italian-made historical, mythological, or biblical epics mostly set in the Greco-Roman antiquity or the Middle Ages. These films attempted to emulate the big-budget Hollywood historical epics of the time, such as Samson and Delilah (1949), Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and Cleopatra (1963). These films dominated the Italian film industry from 1958 to 1965, eventually being replaced in 1965 by spaghetti Western and Eurospy films.
Mario Bava was an Italian filmmaker who worked variously as a director, cinematographer, special effects artist and screenwriter. His low-budget genre films, known for their distinctive visual flair and stylish technical ingenuity, feature recurring themes and imagery concerning the conflict between illusion and reality, as well as the destructive capacity of human nature. Widely regarded as a pioneer of Italian genre cinema and one of the most influential auteurs of the horror film genre, he is popularly referred to as the "Master of Italian Horror" and the "Master of the Macabre".
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L'Eclisse is a 1962 romantic drama film co-written and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, with Francisco Rabal, Lilla Brignone, and Louis Seigner. Filmed on location in Rome and Verona, the story follows a young woman (Vitti) who pursues an affair with a confident young stockbroker (Delon). Antonioni attributed some of his inspiration for L'Eclisse to when he filmed a solar eclipse in Florence. The film is considered the last part of a trilogy and is preceded by L'Avventura (1960) and La Notte (1961).
I Vampiri is a 1957 Italian horror film directed by Riccardo Freda and completed by the film's cinematographer, Mario Bava. It stars Gianna Maria Canale, Carlo D'Angelo and Dario Michaelis. The film is about a series of murders on young women who are found with their blood drained. The newspapers report on a killer known as the Vampire, which prompts young journalist Pierre Lantin to research the crimes. Lantin investigates the mysterious Du Grand family who lives in a castle occupied by Gisele Du Grand who is in love with Lantin. She lives with her aunt, who hides her face in a veil, as well as the scientist Julian Du Grand, who is trying to find the secret to eternal youth.
Caltiki – The Immortal Monster is a 1959 black-and-white science fiction-horror film with similarities to The Blob that was released in the previous year. The film's storyline concerns a team of archaeologists investigating Mayan ruins, who come across a creature that is a shapeless, amorphous blob. They manage to defeat it using fire, while keeping a sample of the creature. Meanwhile, a comet, which previously passed near the Earth around the time of the collapse of the Mayan civilization, is due to return, raising the possibility of a connection between the creature and the comet.
Chelo Alonso was a Cuban actress who became a star in Italian cinema, and ultimately a 1960s cult film heroine and sex symbol in the U.S. She was well known for playing femmes fatales with fiery tempers and sensual dance scenes.
The Last Days of Pompeii is a 1959 Eastmancolor historical disaster action film starring Steve Reeves, Christine Kaufmann, and Fernando Rey and directed by Mario Bonnard and Sergio Leone. Bonnard, the original director, fell ill on the first day of shooting, so Leone and the scriptwriters finished the film.
Goliath and the Barbarians is a 1959 Italian peplum film loosely based on events of the Lombard invasion of Italy in AD 568. As with many Italian peplums of the time, the English dubbed version renamed some of the characters.
Domenico "Mimmo" Palmara was an Italian actor.
See Naples and Die is a 1952 Italian crime-melodrama film directed by Riccardo Freda.
Sins of Rome is a 1953 historical drama film directed by Riccardo Freda and loosely based on the life story of Spartacus. The rights of film's negatives and copies were bought by the producers of Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film Spartacus, as to prevent eventual new releases of the film that could have damaged the commercial outcome of Kubrick’s film; this resulted in Sins of Rome's withdrawal from market for about thirty years.
Luigi Carpentieri (1920-1987) was an Italian assistant director (1940-1949) and film producer (1947-1968). Together with Ermanno Donati, he founded the production company "Athena Cinematografica", which in 1960 became "Panda Cinematografica". All films produced by the company were genre films.
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