Italian Movie Download The Silent Hero
Harold Yengo
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Then I started thinking about my own dad and my relationship with him. Let me tell you about the man I consider to be the silent hero of my family. My dad is simple man, a man of few words, a church going man, and a man with amazing internal peace despite the ugliness and agony he endured. My dad started working at the tender age of 11, grew up, took care of his family, made sure his younger brother got the right education and stayed away from trouble, then took care of his parents in their old age, and never one day gave my siblings and I any shortage of attention. He (and my mom) gave everything to us to make sure we have a better life than they did.
Cast in the part of Maciste was Bartolomeo Pagano, a dock worker from Genoa who had the powerful physique and sense of empathy that fit the character. Although Maciste was a supporting character in Cabiria rather than the lead, his amazing feats of strength, such as breaking chains, and his humorous scenes made him the breakout favorite with audiences.
Although Maciste is today associated with historical spectacles because of the sword-and-sandal movies of the 1960s, most of the silent entries after Cabiria were set in the modern day and combined adventure and comedy. Maciste is the good-hearted giant who performs stunning feats of strength and becomes the hero of various melodramas.
Another change to the character was that he merged with the actor playing him. Pagano took on Maciste as his performer name (and eventually legally changed his name to Maciste), and the character on screen was presented as a movie star who also has immense strength and gets into adventures outside of working at the studio. Maciste introduces the character by showing a screening of Cabiria. A woman in the audience decides to go to the movie studio to see if she can get the help of the real Maciste against the plotting of her evil uncle.
Although the Maciste films remained popular with cinemagoers, the Italian film industry shrank in the 1920s as the UCI (Unione Cinematografica Italiana), an eleven-studio consortium designed to compete with Hollywood studios, floundered. For four years, Bartolomeo Pagano shifted to making Maciste films in Germany, which was the destination for many Italian filmmakers hunting for better opportunities.
What the representations of Maciste and Mussolini on film and photography share is a common referent to Ancient Rome; a connection to the masses and the crowd; and the showcasing of the active, athletic male body as a symbol of virility and national pride. The bodies of both the Duce and the film star functioned as national symbols of regeneration, constituting an avenue of continuity as opposed to rupture, from visual culture to the plastic arts, and, ultimately, in the persona of Maciste, the cinema.
Maciste (.mw-parser-output .IPA-label-smallfont-size:85%.mw-parser-output .references .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .infobox .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .navbox .IPA-label-smallfont-size:100%Italian pronunciation: [maˈtʃiste]) is one of the oldest recurring characters of cinema, created by Gabriele d'Annunzio and Giovanni Pastrone. He is featured throughout the history of the cinema of Italy from the 1910s to the mid-1960s.
He is usually depicted as a Hercules-like figure, utilizing his massive strength to achieve heroic feats that ordinary men cannot. Many of the 1960s Italian movies featuring Maciste were retitled in other countries, substituting more popular names in the titles (such as Hercules, Goliath or Samson).
In the original draft outline of the 1914 movie Cabiria by director Giovanni Pastrone, the muscular hero's name had been Ercole ("Hercules").[2][3] In the revised script, writer Gabriele d'Annunzio gave the character the name Maciste, which he understood (based on the above or similar sources) to be an erudite synonym for Hercules.
While subsequent screenwriters started using the same character for new movie plots, the original etymology of the name was generally forgotten, and a new folk etymology was constructed based on the name's superficial similarity to the Italian word macigno, which means "large stone"; in the first of the 1960s films, Maciste tells another character in the film that his name means "born of the rock", and in a later film, Maciste is actually shown in one scene appearing from within a solid rock wall in a cave, as if by magic.
Maciste made his debut in the 1914 Italian silent movie classic Cabiria. Cabiria is a story about a slave named Maciste (played by Bartolomeo Pagano) who was involved in the rescue of a Roman girl named Cabiria (played by Lidia Quaranta) from an evil Carthaginian priest who plotted to sacrifice her to the cruel god Moloch. The film was based very loosely on Salammbo, a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert, and had a plot and screenplay by Gabriele D'Annunzio.
Maciste's debut set the tone for his later adventures. Including Cabiria itself, there have been at least 52 movies featuring Maciste, 27 of them being pre-1927 silent films starring Bartolomeo Pagano and the other 25 being a series of sound and color films produced in the early 1960s. Typical plots involve tyrannical rulers who practice vile magical rituals or worship evil gods. Typically, the young woman who is the love interest runs afoul of the evil ruler. Maciste, who possesses superhuman strength, must rescue her. There is often a rightful king who wants to overthrow the evil usurper, as well as a belly dance scene. There is often an evil queen who has carnal designs on the hero. These films were set in locales including Mongolia, Peru, Egypt, and the Roman Empire.
As a character, Maciste had two distinct moments in the spotlight. The first was in the Italian silent movie period, in which the original Maciste from Cabiria, the muscular actor Bartolomeo Pagano, starred in a series of at least 26 sequels over the period from 1915 through 1926. Then decades later, (following on the heels of the success of the two 1950s Steve Reeves "Hercules" films) Maciste was revived by Italian filmmakers for a series of 25 sound films (all made between 1960 and 1965).
The Bartolomeo Pagano silent Maciste films established the character as someone who could appear at any place and at any time. Some of the earlier ones, made during World War I, had the distinct flavour of propaganda, and cast the hero in the role of a soldier. Later films in the series return to fantasy, but the fantasy was not always mythological. Maciste appears as an Olympic athlete, in contemporary settings, or in the afterlife. His character and his plots remained consistent in whatever setting; he was always a populist Hercules, using his physical prowess to overcome the evil ruses of effete aristocrats and authority figures.
The character was revived in the 1960s. In 1957, Steve Reeves' Hercules, an Italian production, created a minor boom in Italian dramas featuring American bodybuilders in vaguely mythological or classical historical subjects. Maciste was the hero in 25 of these films. Other films starred such heroes as Ursus, Samson, Hercules and Goliath.
Maciste was never given an origin, and the source of his mighty powers was never revealed, nor was he confined to one specific time period or setting in his adventures. However, in the first of the 1960s Maciste films, he mentions to another character that the name "Maciste" means "born of the rock" (almost as if he was a god who would just appear out of the earth in times of need). One of the 1920s silent Maciste films was actually entitled "The Giant from the Dolomite" (another reference that he was not born as an ordinary mortal man would have been). Hence it is hinted that Maciste is more god than man, which would explain his great strength.
This sword and sandal fad continued for about six years, until the new fad for spaghetti Westerns and spy films took over the attention of the Italian cinema industry. The name Maciste was not in the title of the English versions of most of these films: when the films were imported into the US and dubbed in English, the hero's name was often changed to Hercules, Samson, Goliath, Atlas, Ulysses, or Colossus, because the name Maciste was not widely recognised in the USA.Some Italian sword and sandal films were not theatrically released in the USA; rather they premiered on American television in a syndication package called The Sons of Hercules, usually broadcast on Saturday afternoons. Best remembered for its stirring theme song, films originally featuring Maciste were dubbed into a variety of different "Sons of Hercules" pictures, with stock narration at the opening attempting to tie the film's lead character in to Hercules any way they could. A number of Italian musclemen played Maciste in the 1960s films, but Mark Forest was the actor who played Maciste the most (7 times). The other actors included Gordon Scott, Reg Park, Gordon Mitchell, Reg Lewis, Kirk Morris, Samson Burke, Alan Steel, Richard Lloyd, Renato Rossini and Frank Gordon.
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