PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*
It’s been theorized that ancient
Greece’s legend of the Amazons may have been modeled upon the Greeks’
encounters with the horse-riding women of the nomadic Scythian tribes. From this minor episode of gender
role-reversal, the Greeks then imagined a society that inverted their own
male-chauvinist ethos, the better to glorify the superiority of said ethos.
Cinematic Amazon societies approach
the legend in a variety of ways, but in the 1960s and 1970s, films about Amazons tended
to use them in much the same way as the archaic Greeks had: as deviant
societies unable to survive the coming wave of patriarchal cultures. The 1975 AMAZONS AND SUPERMEN is one of the
more egregious in this respect, taking positive pleasure in the inability of
legions of cute but incompetent women to take any meaningful action against the film’s
musclemen heroes.
Going purely by its script, THOR
AND THE AMAZON WOMEN—which also pits double-deltoid warriors against an entire
Amazon society—seems to take the same marginalizing sociological position, in which the defeat of the film's Amazons (though they're never called that) foregrounds the supremacy of patriarchal culture. Yet, though the Amazons are defeated in the
end, the women at least prove themselves formidable antagonists. Most of Italy's peplum-epics of this period don't show women as anything but helpless maidens or evil, sometimes sorcerous queens.
Before getting into the story as such, I should note that THOR was filmed back-to-back with another peplum with the same star and director, TAUR THE MIGHTY. Both "Thor" and "Taur" were toss-off names applied to a hero who, the story goes, was originally going to be called "Tarzan" until the Edgar Rice Burroughs organization took exception. This goes a long way toward explaining why the protagonist has no resemblance to the Scandinavian thunder-god of mythic and comic-book fame.
Most of Italy’s peplum epics turn
on the idea of an unjust ruler and his followers usurping the rightful rule of
an outcast monarch. Thus, instead of
portraying an Amazon society that’s existed for years, this one has come into
existence within less than a generation, not unlike the one I examined in the
much later MARS NEEDS MOMS. The usurper
here is a nameless ruler billed as "the Black Queen," possibly because she may well be the only one in the history of peplum who happens to be of Black African
descent. Her Amazons kill the old king
of their region and exile the hot blonde princess Tamara (Suzy Andersen) and
her kid brother (who thankfully plays a very small role in the story). In exile Tamara makes friends with local
muscleman Thor (Joe Robertson). Thor doesn’t seem like a man of means, but
he has an equally muscular Black African companion, Ubaratutu (Harry
Baird of TRINITY AND SARTANA), who may be Thor’s slave in that he habitually
calls him “master,” at least in the English translation.
Despite the exile of Tamara and her
bro, no one in their community is planning to take back the Amazon territory. An oracular prophecy warns the Black Queen that Thor is
destined to bring her down. In the tradition of evil queens everywhere, she
sends a squadron of warriors to bring the hero in. Confronted by the squadron, Thor refuses to
fight women. The squad-leader attacks
Thor with a bolas-like weapon studded with poison thorns, and the wounded Thor
falls off a cliff. He falls on top of
Ubaratutu, actually (presumably for a laugh), and the slave hides his master from
the Amazons in a cave. Ubaratutu proceeds
to suck out the poison from Thor’s leg and give him lots of massage. This setup, in addition to bolstering the
arguments of those looking for loads of homoeroticism in peplum-cinema, removes
the titular hero and his sidekick from the main action for almost half the
picture. The dramatic attention shifts
to Princess Tamara, who is taken back to Amazon territory. Since she opposes the Amazon way,
the Amazons do with her what they do with any woman who defies their law: put
her in the gladiatorial arena. Presumably men, who are seen only as slaves, don't have enough social status to be gladiators.
Tamara becomes a gladiator and
seeks to make allies.
Meanwhile the Amazon soldiers happen across Ubaratutu while Thor is still
recovering. The soldiers take the
muscular sidekick to their queen. Though the more usual practice in peplum
is for the queen to vamp the main hero, the fact that the Queen is black probably inspired the writers to allocate that honor to the sidekick of the same race. Such seduction-scenes were a tacit admission
as to how much the musclemen-heroes functioned as eye-candy for female
moviegoers, and THOR makes the motif even more explicit by playing it for
comedy, as the Queen forces Ubaratutu to pose and flex for her. She offers to make him her king, but doesn’t
tell him that she always knocks off her monarchs when she grows tired of them.
Thor finally gets well enough to
show up, but, keeping to his vow not to fight women, he ends up having a
fistfight with Ubaratutu when the latter won’t believe that his queen plans to kill
him. Then the queen comes up with a way to pit her whole society against Thor, by having
the hero engage in a giant tug-o’-war with one hundred Amazons. If Thor loses, he gets pulled into a flaming
pit.
No one will be surprised that
Thor’s biceps carry the day, but his triumph is bookended by Tamara’s
swordfight against a female gladiator. She
wins and then kills the Queen, but seems to perish of her wounds. The temptation is to believe that even though
Tamara was a fierce opponent of deviant Amazonianism, she’s a bit too much of
an “Amazon” on her own right for the film to allow her to live—
Except that in the end scene—which
shows Thor and Ubaratutu congratulating the kid brother on ascending to the
throne and restoring normalcy—Tamara is suddenly alive again. The film’s final
scene is of Tamara performing an Artemis-like action as she shoots down the flags
of the Amazons with flaming arrows. At
the very least, even though the film ends on a “normal” note, the survival of
one warrior-female sends a message that the film’s not entirely on the side of
unadulterated male chauvinism.
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