HELEN OF TROY: Blu-ray (Warner Bros., 1956) Warner Archive

Is Helen of Troy (1956) the epic to have launched a thousand imitators? Hardly. The toga party was already in full swing by the time director, Robert Wise signed on for this one. Irrefutably one of Hollywood’s most accomplished technicians, Helen of Troy remains one of Wise’s least affecting forays into movieland immortality. The resultant pic is little more than a gargantuan footnote – both in Wise’s career and the over-reaching arc in Hollywood’s cycle of sword and sandal spectaculars. While Wise’s finesse undeniably lends to certain sequences, like the Greco-invasion from the, by now infamous Trojan horse, the air of a colossus about to be unleashed, the human saga behind its titanic moments of sheer grandeur falls utterly flat on the banal chatter supplied by screenwriters, Hugh Gray, N. Richard Nash and John Twist. Give ‘em nothing to say and there’s nothing to tell, I suppose. Add to this, the sheer chutzpah via artistic license, meant to condense, but moreover ‘reform’ Homer’s immortal works – The Iliad and The Odyssey, and…well, what you have here is more garish gumbo and glossified goo.

It is as though Gray, Nash and Twist have decided there is nothing to be said or done between the grand gestures than either to bookend or fill in the blanks with stodgy platitudes disguised as conversational pig-English. Props paid, I suppose, to this triumvirate’s blind ambition to ‘mature’ sprawling masterworks into the medium of a motion picture barely running 118 minutes with overture and exit music. And again, if only to be judged by its wild and wooly action sequences, then Helen of Troy does yield moments to shatter the Homeric legend in Cinemascope and satisfy matinee popcorn-munchers with mind-numbing spectacle over substance. This, however, is not good enough to sustain Helen of Troy through her dull spots, nor to mature the fatally wooden Rossana Podestà past her posturing sex appeal as the titular target of all this chaos, and certainly, never to canonize this flick in the top-tier contributions from its stellar director. Podestà, for all her sensual cavorting is a hard sell on whom our Paris would claim immortality in exchange for a kiss. The line, in fact, is a riff on Christopher Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus in which Faustus utters the now, much-clichéd dialogue, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss."

Ah, me. How the mighty have fallen…or rather, are about to. It's 1100 B.C. and we are knee-deep in the Trojan War, albeit with much artistic license applied to expedite the narrative and get us to the good parts. We meet Paris of Troy (Jacques Sernas), a paragon from ye olden times who has set sail to Sparta to secure peace between neighboring city-states. Alas, fate intervenes. Paris’ mission is foiled by a hellish storm at sea. He is swept overboard, but spared a watery grave and rescued by Sparta’s queen - Helen (Rossana Podestà) with whom he, of course, falls deeply, madly, truly – and practically, instantly in love. Paris’ arrival at the palace seals his lovesick fate when he is introduced to Sparta’s King/Helen’s hubby - Menelaus (Niall MacGinnis), along with Agamemnon (Robert Douglas), Odysseus (Torin Thatcher), Achilles (Stanley Baker) and a cavalcade of other neighboring monarchs deliberating over war with Troy. Actually, the deal to invade is pretty much carved in marble. It just needs a little coaxing. Denied by Helen, Menelaus is no fool. He clearly sees the sparks of passion between her and Paris. Now, under the guise of friendship, Menelaus plots Paris' murder.

Aware of her husband’s cruelty, Helen forewarns Paris of the plot against him. Together, Helen and Paris flee the city, narrowly avoiding capture by Menelaus’ guard. Under the pretense of helping Menelaus regain his honor, the Greeks unite and the siege of Troy begins. After much bloodshed, the Trojans blame Paris and Helen for their plight, even though it is revealed the Greeks would have struck anyway to lay claim to Troy’s embarrassment of riches. They have no desire to restore Helen to the throne. As Troy crumbles, the Greeks emerge victorious from the Trojan Horse – a supposed gift horse that proves anything but. Helen and Paris retreat from the deluge, but are waylaid by Menelaus and his forces. Paris engages the corrupt Spartan liege in hand-to-hand combat. Alas, at his seeming moment of triumph, Paris is mortally wounded. Helen is ordered to return to Sparta by Menelaus, her awkward reticence giving way to a serene repose, acknowledging that, in death, she will be reunited with Paris in Elysium.

Helen of Troy is a hackneyed cacophony of misfires at best; a genuine shame that, at every possible turn, the Gray/Nash/Twist scenario betrays Robert Wise’s ambitions to hew an epic for the ages. Thanks to Edward Carrere’s production design, Elso Valentini’s set decoration, and, Harry Stradling Sr.’s breathtaking cinematography, Helen of Troy is undeniably a very handsome movie from start to finish, ably abetted by Max Steiner’s rollicking score in 4-track magnetic stereo. Wise has also ‘wisely’ concentrated much effort on lending the battle sequences authenticity with a mind-boggling array of spears, swords, fiery arrows and javelins as historically accurate implements of war. There is no skimping on the brutalities of war either, with more than one extra dissolving into a puddle of pain after being rather realistically impaled. It also helps considerably Helen of Troy, despite being a Warner Bros. production, was actually shot at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. A word about this: in the days when Benito Mussolini’s war-mongering vanity lent itself to a hard-wearing aspiration to surmount Hollywood’s leading glamour factories as the purveyor of mass entertainment, and, boasting 99 acres of real estate to play host to the likes of Italy’s postwar titans - Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci – as well as imports like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Mel Gibson - Cinecittà truly would go on to become the Italian epicenter of film-making, dubbed Hollywood on the Tiber.

One would think that Greek mythology – with all its colorful exemplars - would be compelling enough to make an adrenaline-charged blockbuster. Alas, no.  And curiouser still, Helen of Troy toggles between airless and antiquated, highbrow theatrics of summer stock and thoroughly frivolous vanilla-bred bastardizations of history we have come to readily expect from Tinsel Town’s dream factories, utterly lacking the urbanity of its rich and varied source material. In its place we get a shambled chariot race, a rather nicely staged battle to the death between Achilles and Hector (Harry Andrews), the bloody/fiery sacking of Troy and, in a cameo, a very young/incredibly hot, Brigitte Bardot as Helen’s handmaiden, Andraste – the real face that could have launched a thousand ships! Yet, with all these virtues, Wise’s movie is carry-on codswallop at best. The rumor is Wise was forced to lose almost an hour of drama after a disastrous rough-cut prevue that would have built up the romance to offset the action. True story or apocryphal hearsay? Who can say? But it certainly would explain why the first third Helen of Troy spends an interminable amounts of screen time setting up clumsy intros to characters who do little to advance the plot thereafter and, in some cases, disappear altogether. And anyway, who would want more of the leaden Podestà and sexless Sernas rubbing against each other in diaphanous garb?

Helen of Troy arrives on Blu-ray via the Warner Archive (WAC). The real/reel challenge in bringing it to hi-def has stemmed from its Eastman/Kodak color film stock origins. Eastman’s single strip process was then seen as a cheaper alternative to Technicolor’s cumbersome and costly 3-strip, and, was oft rechristened during the mid-fifties as everything from Color by DeLuxe (for 2oth Century-Fox releases) to Metrocolor (MGM), Pathécolor, and, in this case, Warnercolor. Problem: under whatever name studio heads chose to market it, Eastman stock never came anywhere near to yield the pure tones of its predecessor and, worse yet, proved in the interim to be highly susceptible to severe color fading and something called ‘vinegar syndrome’ – a rapid chemical deterioration of its cellulous acetate base categorized by a release of acetic acid, lending to its distinctly bitter odor during decomposition.  For this new-to-Blu, WAC has gone back to an original camera negative and performed a 4K ‘restoration’ (a word of many meanings in marketing ploys of home video).

Herein, however, the advert seems to fit, as Helen of Troy exhibits an unusually nuanced image with excellent color fidelity (for the most part), and good solid saturation levels. However, the Warner logo immediately following the overture exhibits some undue edge enhancement. Not exactly certain why this wasn't corrected! SFX and matte process shots exhibit a bump in film grain and minor loss of both color fidelity and saturation, an inherent flaw of the technical shortcomings of their time, further amplified by the decision to shoot in Cinemascope (which came with its own litany of issues). Contrast is uniformly excellent and age-related artifacts have been thoroughly eradicated. Helen of Troy has been impressively rendered in 1080p and with a newly remastered 5.1 DTS of the magnetic stereo tracks to boot. So, prepare for some directionalized ‘scope’ stereo to sound spiffy. Extras are all imports from the previous DVD, and include 3 segments of WB’s vintage TV promo show – Warner Bros. Presents…, plus a Bugs Bunny cartoon short - Napoleon Bunny-Part (not quite certain of the tie-in with this flick), and, an original trailer, which will provide some indication of the embarkation point in original elements from whence WAC has worked its magic herein. Bottom line: if you are a fan of Helen of Troy you will want to own the Blu. It’s magnificent beyond expectation.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

2.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

4

EXTRAS

2