THE GIANTS OF THESSALY (1960)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

I'm not sure who the "Gigantes" of the title are. Toward the middle of the movie Jason and his Argonauts fight a beast-man who's supposed to be somewhat bigger than they are, though the illusion isn't in the least convincing. Did the Italian filmmakers, including director/co-writer Riccardo Freda, mean to imply that the "giants" were the heroes in Jason's retinue, since they all depart from Thessaly on their quest? I could buy this if the crew included the many legendary names from the ARGONAUTICA of Apollonius. But the only "big name" in the crew is that of Orpheus, who doesn't perform any great musical feats. There's no Hercules, though there is a crewman with the name of Hercules' symbolic brother Eurystheus, but he like the other sailors of the ARGO is just a guy. So I suppose whoever decided on the film's main title was just choosing whatever sounded cool.

Freda's film starts out by radically simplifying the reasons for Jason (Swiss actor Roland Carey) to leave Thessaly to seek the Golden Fleece. (To be sure, the more famous 1963 adaptation by Ray Harryhausen tried to be truer to the epic, with the result that the film didn't manage to finish even an abbreviated version of the story.) In GIANTS, some random volcanic activity, supposedly sent by hostile gods, threatens Thessaly. Jason, the king of the realm, must desert his kingdom, wife and child to seek the Golden Fleece in far-off Colchis in order to end the gods' curse. (It is mentioned that the Fleece originally came from Thessaly, which is roughly true in the archaic myths, but the Fleece's extended absence seems a poor reason for the gods to devastate the whole country.) As Jason departs with his heroic men, he leaves his cousin Adrastus in charge. And in due time, Adrastus shows his true colors, making it clear that he covets both Jason's throne and his wife Creusa. (FWIW in archaic tales Creusa is best known as the name of the wife of Aeneas.)

After the Argo has been at sea for some time, the ship is becalmed and the sailors run out of water. The men campaign to turn back and go home, but Jason refuses to give the command, but also refuses to fight them. The moment he overmasters his retinue by sheer moxie, they get life-saving rain.

The next episode-- and it's a much more episodic film that the Harryhausen effort-- comes closest to the prose epic. The ship docks at an island that's never called Lemnos, but it might as well, since the isle is inhabited only by women. Queen Gaia (Nadine Duca) explains that all their men went off to war and were lost, while all of their sons died of disease. For a few minutes the sailors are beguiled by the available females, though I have to say that Freda handles the sequence so sloppily that there's barely any erotic charge. Then Jason encounters a sheep that talks like a man, one of his own transformed men. A little later he comes across the chained-up sister of Gaia, and she reveals that both sisters are the spawn of Apollo, though Gaia became an evil witch who used her powers to transform men into rocks and animals. But Jason doesn't have to fight Gaia to free his men, for conveniently Gaia simply perishes from having failed to conquer Jason's loyal heart. I guess all the women were under her control too, since they're not destroyed, and one of them stows away on the Argo to be with the sailor she loves. This sequence is obviously modeled after the "Circe" narrative in THE ODYSSEY, right down to Circe being the offspring of Helios the sun-god (a role later allotted to Apollo in Roman myth).

The Argo makes another port, and the heroes generously help the locals get rid of their ravening, Cyclops-like beast-man. Back at sea once more, one of the men discovers the stowaway Atalanta (an unbilled Moira Orfei). This revelation causes some tension against Eurystheus, the man she followed, and he nobly tries to take the blame for her actions. Then the script more or less drops the matter, and Atalanta only appears in one or two more scenes. (In some versions of the epic tale, the famed huntress Atalanta joins the crew of the Argo, so that's where the scriptwriters got the name, even if the island-woman has no relation to the famous figure.)

Finally, the ship lands in Colchis, but the heroes encounter none of the monsters familiar from the epic or from other cinematic renditions. Jason simply climbs a high wall to reach the fleece and manages to steal the prize without any of the Colchians being the wiser. Then back the ship goes to Thessaly.

Interspersed during these episodes, Freda gives the audience a few scenes of the regent Adrastus consolidating his power. He orders Creusa to marry him, threatening to sacrifice her young son if she disobeys. (This trope is another ODYSSEY-borrowing, with Adrastus as an importunate suitor trying to force Penelope, wife of the long-absent Odysseus, into marriage.) But I guess the evil regent only gets around to hatching his evil plot during the final phase of the Argo's return trip, for when Jason and his men arrive in Thessaly, the wedding is just about to commence. The heroes somehow hide themselves in big golden statues that are transported into the wedding-hall, and then the warriors burst out of them to attack Adrastus and his guards. This big finish, which may owe something both to the Trojan Horse and to the story of Ali Baba (with the thieves hidden in large oil-jars), is certainly the most energetic scene in the whole film. Oh, and bringing the Fleece back to its native land does indeed quell the nasty volcano, allowing Jason to resume his just rule alongside his wife and son.

Even if I was making a "best 100" list of magical-fantasy films made on the cheap, I wouldn't include GIANTS on the list, due to the many ways Freda and his fellow scripters blew so much of its dramatic and mythopoeic potential. But the film earns a "fair" mythicity rating just because of the Lemnos sequence. Unlike Circe in the ODYSSEY, Queen Gaia morphs into an ugly old woman when her identity as a witch is disclosed, and that motif certainly reflects the venerable trope of "woman as deceiver of man." As a side-curiosity, one of the myths of the Greek Earth-godddess Gaia is that, when she becomes perturbed at Zeus' imprisonment of her children the Titans, she tries to overthrow the King of the Gods by giving birth to a race of huge beings called "Gigantes"-- which as already mentioned is just another word for "giants."

Also, while the ARGONAUTICA is an early example of a "crossover story." the non-legendary nature of Jason's crew nullifies that aspect of the original story. Since the only action taken by Orpheus, the one "big name" in Jason's crew, is that of moaning over his lost Eurydice, I see no reason to equate this character with the master minstrel who sang his way in and out of Hell.