Fifties epic hits the Homer

By GRAHAM REID

Thanks to Homer the poet - and perhaps Humphrey the Bogart - we'll always have Paris.

Homer's epic narrative poems The Iliad and The Odyssey have provided fellow poets, painters and film-makers with a wealth of source material and great characters - sometimes heroic, sometimes flawed - including Ulysses, Achilles, Agamemnon, Helen of Troy, Hector and, of course, Paris.

Legends have always made good movie fodder so, in the wake of the success of Gladiator, attention naturally turned to another story from the ancient of days. And we got Troy - with Brad the Pitt as the swarthy, muscular, brooding Achilles.

It's a curious thing, but ask a woman to name the most attractive physical feature of men and rarely will they say knees. Yet put a man in a kilt (Braveheart) or a sword'n'sandal epic (Gladiator) and women, particularly otherwise sane ones, seem to come over all wobbly.

Of course beauty is in the cliche of the beholder and great knees depend on who is above them: that might explain Braveheart (Mel Gibson) and Sean Connery as a laird. It also explains the rush to the heroic classicism of Troy.

With Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom, Troy was an epic macho flick, but lacked a few fundamentals: the dialogue was ropey, some acting turns were as wooden as the horse, and it is bereft of a sympathetic character.

But as eye-candy it is occasionally terrific, especially the battle scenes.

Where it was successful was in the juggling of massed armies juxtaposed with mano-a-mano stuff which survives the telescoping down to the small screen. The duelling swordplay is excellent, but over the long haul Troy is a long haul.

For my money, however, as good as Troy is Helen of Troy from the mid-50s, a time when they knew what epic meant: it begins with an overture to let you get your popcorn and settle on to the couch, there are lots of stagey scenes and pompous dialogue, it has swelling music by Max Steiner, and is presented in glorious WarnerColour. In other words, it's as camp as a row of Bedouin tents.

It stars the glamorous Rosanna Podesta as Helen (who defines the word "handsome" for women) and even has Bridget Bardot in a minor role, although twice through and I still didn't spot her unless she was that sultry brunette slave girl.

Directed by Robert Wise, who gave us Gone with the Wind, it looks part Carry on Trojans and part Roman epic.

It's a movie where men put their hands on their hips and throw their heads back with laughter in the face of danger, and someone says "may the wings of Mercury speed you". Marvellous stuff. Seriously.

The first sight of Helen, she is gliding across the water towards the camera, breasts aloft.

What elevates this above Troy - other than the homo-eroticism of lightly-oiled slaves, and the sheer camp quality of swarthy men wearing lavender togas - is the lack of computer-generated graphics.

In the 50s when they wanted an army to march they'd just call up whole towns and put them in uniform. There is a real sense of battle about Helen of Troy despite the odd character stumbling into the foreground with an arrow through his neck and going "Aarrghhh", before rolling his eyes and collapsing on to an invisible mattress.

Great script, too: "To think deeply one must think of women and women who are careful miss much in life."

Helen of Troy is a knee-revealing classic at mid-price.

Check it out. It takes itself seriously so you don't have to.