ELECTRA (1962)

You could make a movie about a young actress learning tough lessons about men, and maybe acting on them in tragic fashion, as she matures from playing Electra to playing Clytemnestra. That's the path Irene Papas traveled in her films for director Michael Cacoyannis. In Electra she's the title character, the daddy's-girl daughter out for revenge on her mom Clytemnestra for the murder of her dad Agamemnon. Fifteen years later, Papas would be Clytemnestra mourning Agamemnon's sacrifice of her eldest daughter in Iphigenia. In Electra Clytemnestra (Aleka Katselli) tries to remind her angry, bloodthirsty daughter of that history, and of Agamemnon's insulting return to Argos with the Trojan princess Cassandra as his concubine, but Electra's having none of it. You were a bitch before all that, she says in effect, and the film has primed us to agree with her. Katselli's Clytemnestra is arrogant and imperious, and Electra seems to hate her guts, or at least distrust her, even before the queen has her lover Aegisthus murder the newly-returned king. We see the young Electra brush the queen's arm off her shoulder when Clytemnestra makes a show of the family greeting the husband she has already condemned. Time doesn't soften Electra's attitude, which is no surprise considering how mom has married her off to some poor (but respectful) farmer and exiled her to the sticks, where she makes something of a show of her impoverishment, going barefoot while the women of the chorus -- this adaptation is faithful to the form of Greek tragedy -- wear shoes. Reunited with her long-lost brother Orestes (Giannis Fertis), she pleads for revenge. Luring Clytemnestra to her village with a tall tale about a baby, she hopes to claim her share of revenge. But no matter what temperature you serve revenge at, it turns to ashes in the mouth when your victim is blood kin.

Does Electra explain Frank Miller? The comic-book auteur took the name for his most famous creation at Marvel Comics, the antiheroine driven by her father's murder to become a ninja assassin, while the ancient Greek setting anticipates Miller's turn to antiquity in 300. And Cacoyannis's film is in black and white, just like Sin City! One can go too far with such speculation, easily, but it just goes to show how the Greek archetypes endure. But if we think we understand the "Electra complex" and thus Electra's place in Greek culture, Cacoyannis surprises us with a sudden emotional reversal that should remind us how alien Ancient Greece is to us, how difficult it is to encompass with our modern categories or sensibilities.

The movie audience, presumably, is rooting all the way for Electra and Orestes to get their revenge. They presumably cheer when Orestes kills Aegisthus, though Cacoyannis, respecting tragic convention, keeps the fight offstage. Presumably we anticipate Clytemnestra getting what's coming to her. That, too, happens offscreen, represented for us by the chorus writhing and screaming in a frantic montage. The evil queen is dead, but now everyone's miserable. Dead, Clytemnestra is now just plain Mom again, and her own kids killed her. Now our sibling heroes are objects of horror, each wandering off into his or her private wasteland, Orestes to be tormented by furies, Electra presumably bound for oblivion. No matter what justification or provocation they had, they crossed a taboo line and know it. If this were a purely modern tragedy the kids might still mourn the mother they knew before she went evil, but before long they'd settle down and take their rightful places in power in Argos. In their own time, the enormity of their deed is not so easily shrugged off, and if we don't get that, that may be part of Cacoyannis's point in making his film.

Visually, Electra makes Cacoyannis look like the missing link between Sergei Eisenstein and Sergio Leone. The early scenes of Clytemnestra in near close-up watching Agamemnon's procession in the distance should remind film buffs of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, while his dramatic use of close-ups throughout, especially in this film's rocky settings, look forward to Leone's spaghetti westerns. Filming in black and white makes Electra look more modernist, or at least more stylized than the later, arguably superior Iphigenia. Both films (and to a lesser extent Cacoyannis's English-language Trojan Women) succeed in confronting us with a Greece we can understand yet can't identify with in any easily complacent way. They are powerful correctives to the cartoon version of Greece presented in so many Italian peplum pictures or American fantasy films, just because Cacoyannis's Greeks don't behave like our contemporaries and aren't so easily assimilated in our consciousness or dismissed from our memory.

THE 300 SPARTANS (1961)

Here's a film I really wanted to like. I was rooting for Rudolph Mate's movie, shot on location in Greece and unenhanced by computer graphics, to be better than the other movie about the Battle of Thermopylae, Zack Snyder's 300. I wanted The 300 Spartans to be the better film because I found 300 a profoundly distasteful film. There's something really unpleasant about Frank Miller's representation of the Persian Empire and his fetishization of Spartans in the original graphic novel. Miller and Snyder try to excuse their images by saying that they represent a "tall tale" subjective Spartan viewpoint of the conflict, but that doesn't hide the fact that the images came from Miller's own mind and portray a pretty-much racist vision of the East as the realm of despotism, decadence and depravity. Obviously the Persians have to be the bad guys in any version of this story, but that doesn't mean that Miller and Snyder had to turn them into monsters and mutants. It's also pretty galling to anyone who knows ancient history to see the Spartans presented as champions of freedom without any mention of all the helots ground under their collective heel. I was once a Frank Miller fan but I don't think he's done anything good since about the second Sin City graphic novel, and a lot of his recent stuff is just sick. Meanwhile, The 300 Spartans is the work of Mate, director of great films like D.O.A., Union Station and The Violent Men, and cinematographer of The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr. So I wanted to be able to say: here's the real Spartan movie for anyone who wants the real story without all the cartoon trappings.

Not only did The 300 Spartans disappoint me on that score, but it ended up giving me a new appreciation of 300's qualities. Snyder, falling under Miller's spell as Robert Rodriguez did, made an expressionistic film as an act of fidelity to Miller's panels. To my taste he often errs on the side of exaggeration, but I can't dispute that he invests nearly every frame with an energy and enthusiasm that is usually absent from Mate's movie. Mate has one great advantage over Snyder, at least as far as I'm concerned, and that's the Greek locations. He makes good use of them at times, as when he decorates a hillside with colorful Persian tents, but his direction doesn't do the landscape justice. His extras too often act just like extras, if "act" is the right word for it, and his world-historical battles include a lot of half-hearted milling about. 300 has spoiled me to an extent because Mate simply hasn't enough extras to fill the scenery the way Snyder and his technicians can. And if you're going to follow the Greek historians and say that the Persians were invading with millions of men, any feeling that the landscape is underpopulated is fatal. Might I have felt differently had I seen The 300 Spartans (hereafter 300S) first? Possibly, but I think the battle scenes would look lackluster anyway.

What about the story? For starters, Mate and his writers appear to agree with Miller and Snyder that Sparta's history with the helots is best left unmentioned. So be it: neither film is about the history of Sparta. If anything, despite embedding "Sparta" in the title, 300S is less about Sparta than 300 is. The later film is a showcase for Miller's conception of the Spartan warrior and the warrior type in general. 300S is more about Greece as a whole than Sparta in particular, and the difference has something to do with contemporary politics. The script is an allegory on the need for different countries to unite against the 20th century version of Eastern despotism, Communism. Arguably, Sparta represents the United States, and many Spartans are played by American actors in contrast to Sir Ralph Richardson as an Athenian ally. Spartans are portrayed as a more pious people than other Greeks, even when it puts them at a disadvantage. In both films, as in history, King Leonidas (Richard Egan in 300S) can only bring his personal bodyguard to Thermopylae because Spartans are obliged to observe a religious festival. While Miller and Snyder scoff at the superstitious imposition, 300S has Leonidas affirm that Spartans respect the gods no matter what. More importantly, though, while some Spartans question allying with less pious Athenians or other Greeks, Leonidas plays the Greek nationalist, stressing the need for unity in defense of freedom. Mate's team has an analogy in mind with lingering American isolationism or distrust of "decadent" Europe. You could even argue that the Athenian Themistocles's maneuver to give control over his own fleet to Leonidas symbolizes the British accepting American leadership in the common defense of Europe or the "Free World."

There's another American parallel that might have been more obvious to moviegoers at the time. 300S appears the year after John Wayne's The Alamo, and the expected success of the Duke's peculiar blockbuster may have inspired the making of our movie. In at least one instance the film seems to imitate The Alamo, when Leonidas launches a night raid against the Persian camp.

So far, so-so. I've only been describing thematic details. What really disappointed me about 300S, apart from the weak looking battle scenes, is the acting and the halfhearted melodramatic additions to the Thermopylae story. Casting Richard Egan as Leonidas takes the American analogy too far, since he comes across more as a cattle baron than a king. There are moments when he does demonstrate Laconic authority, particularly a wordless bit when he surveys the battlefield for the first time. I also appreciate that he never screams like a bass Dalek as Gerard Butler sometimes does. But Egan gives Leonidas no real personality apart from generic stalwart heroism. Despite his limitations, he comes across like Ralph Richardson compared to the romantic leads, Barry Coe and Diane Baker. These two form the sort of couple that comes on to sing ballads in the middle of Marx Bros. movies. Coe, a 1960 Golden Globe winner as Most Promising Newcomer, betrays that promise here with awful line readings and just plain awful lines like, "Hey, this is a great battle!" He's a Spartan who's in disgrace because his father's in the Persian camp. She's his spunky girlfriend who demonstrates some of the legendary athleticism of Spartan women by limply ju-jitsuing him when he gets too frisky.

Diane Baker and Barry Coe as 300S's loser lovers. Below, Ephialtes (Kieron Moore) makes his move before Baker kicks his butt in demure, ladylike fashion.

She does the same to her other suitor, Ephialtes the traitor. Frank Miller envisioned him as a role fit for Lon Chaney Sr., a disgruntled hunchback who betrays Sparta because Leonidas won't let him fight in the phalanx. In 300S, he's a dumb lummox of a shepherd who gets the hots for Diane Baker's character when she has to recuperate in his master's house. He goes straight from getting ju-jitsued by her to the Persian camp as if getting rejected by a girl was enough to make him betray his country. This is where the writers' halfheartedness comes in. They've set up a rivalry for the girl between Ephialtes and Coe's character, but they don't play it out. Give this situation to Cecil B. DeMille and he'd have Ephialtes insist on the girl as part of his reward from the Persians. He'd then have Coe, whose character has been sent home by Leonidas, infiltrate the Persian camp to rescue Baker and fight Ephialtes to the death. That's my hunch, at least. Nothing like this happens in 300S. Ephialtes gets his reward and doesn't even get rebuked by Leonidas as in 300. The boy and girl are sent away before the final battle. What was the point of having this hapless couple in the movie if they're not going to be involved in the climax? That's easy: they're there for what used to be called "heart interest," to have a love story to keep the women in the audience interested through all the boring military stuff. That's the sort of general-audience thinking that makes a hodgepodge of superfluous stuff out of many a classical Hollywood film. By comparison, in 300 Snyder kept the women (at least) interested by expanding Queen Gorgo's role and having her kill somebody with a sword. Score another one for 300.

You've got to have dancing girls in a movie like this one.

There are other loose ends in 300S because of its expanded scope. Mate introduces the historical character of Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus, an ally of Persia and admiral of her own fleet, as a romantic interest for King Xerxes, and the strategic storyline seems to be setting her up for a naval showdown with Themistocles's Athenian fleet at Salamis. The movie leaves you waiting for the other shoe that never drops; there's no payoff whatsoever to Artemisia's presence in the movie. The character is in there just to be another pretty face, but since when does Xerxes of all people (played by the once-mighty David Farrar of Black Narcissus fame) need a romantic interest? This is typical of the film's unfocused approach to its essential subject matter.

Both Thermopylae movies insult the intelligence, though in different ways. Choosing between 300 and The 300 Spartans is a trade-off between psychosis and cliche, with neither really getting to the heart of the history that makes the tale worth telling. But while Mate's film is mainly a perfunctory genre exercise, 300 is at least about something, whether we like it or not. 300S is of historic interest in its own right as a Cold War era reading of the Persian Wars and will be preferred by those even more averse to Miller in CGI than I. Judging the two films in simplest cinematic terms, however, Snyder's is the better movie, if not necessarily a good one. That's not what I expected to say, but I have to call them as I see them.

The trailer for The 300 Spartans was uploaded to YouTube by FirouzanFilms

IPHIGENIA (1977)

Americans, how would you feel if the lion's share of westerns were spaghetti westerns, if your national mythology had been appropriated by another country's movie industry? I imagine the people of Greece must feel that way when they see their ancient mythology presented to the world in the form of Italian muscleman films? The overwhelming majority of films based on Greek mythology are not Greek, but Michael Cacoyannis's stark epic comes straight from the source. It's adapted from the play Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides, one of the great ancient tragedians, but it also had to have struck a contemporary chord for modern Greek audiences.

Kostas Kazakos as Agamemnon

Mythology tells us that King Agamemnon, commander-in-chief of the Greek expeditionary force to rescue his sister-in-law Helen from Troy, was ordered by an oracle to sacrifice his eldest daughter to the goddess Artemis, who would then allow the winds to blow the Greek fleet from its base at Aulis to the enemy coast. This is just another feather in the cap of the House of Atreus, and Agamemnon will get his when he returns from the war (contra Troy, and fie on that awful film while I'm on the subject) and his grudge-holding wife Clytemnestra kills him, only to be whacked in turn by her son Orestes at the instigation of his sister Elektra, in whom Freud took an interest millennia later. Elaborations of the basic myth explain that Agamemnon lured his daughter to Aulis with a promise of marriage to Achilles, then thought better of the whole deal and sent a messenger to tell his wife to turn back for home, only to have that message intercepted by minions of his brother Menelaus, Helen's husband, who wants nothing getting in the way of his revenge mission. None the wiser, Clytemnestra's party ends up in Achilles's camp, only to be baffled by the hero's bafflement at all talk of marriage. When the truth comes out Clytemnestra is furious and Achilles is characteristically more so at being made a dupe. He's now willing to fight against all odds to save Iphigenia from the sacrifice, but seeing that the odds are pretty hopeless, the girl decides to go to her fate rather than let people waste their lives for her sake.

Panos Mihalopoulos as Achilles and Irene Papas as Clytemnestra

That's the story Cacoyannis tells, but he gives it a strongly political emphasis. The film represented the director's return to Greece after years of self-imposed exile during the reign of a military junta, and a deep suspicion of militarism pervades his interpretation of the myth. In his Iphigenia the super-army created by Agamemnon has become a thing unto itself, defiant toward leaders who in the absence of combat look more like politicians than warriors or heroes. They are manipulated by Odysseus, the nearest thing to an outright villain in the picture, who is portrayed as a self-interested demagogue possibly out to usurp Agamemnon's elected position as commander-in-chief. He goads the rank-and-file into demanding the sacrifice originally ordained by the oracle by telling them it's only fair when so many mother's sons are going to lose their lives in the war that the first casualty be one of the commander's children. Agamemnon himself craves his position of command, and his second thoughts about sacrificing his daughter are tempered by the idea that saving her might break up the army or endanger his position on top. He takes out his guilt feelings on his brother Menelaus, blaming him and his "whore" Helen for having to kill his own daughter. But Menelaus reminds him that he, Agamemnon, was the one who wanted control of the army, an end towards which Menelaus made himself subservient, even though it was his honor at stake in the matter of Helen. Initially repelled by the thought of sacrifice himself, Menelaus ends up adding to the pressure on his brother. Even Achilles, the loyalty of whose Myrmidons was legendary, finds himself unable to win his own men over to the defense of Iphigenia. "We came for a war, not a wedding feast," they tell him before driving the invincible warrior out of camp with a hail of rocks. With the gods significantly if not necessarily implicitly absent from the story, it ends up being the army, above all, that demands the death of an innocent who is imperiled only by her proximity to power. The heroic generals of myth, who might well serve as symbols for the junta themselves, end up being sacrifices of a kind to a machine of their creation.

The irony amid the proofs of the powerlessness of heroes in the face of the war machine is Iphigenia's own determination to make a genuine, honest sacrifice, not for the sake of the war but for the sake of her "new friend" Achilles and the others who were willing to protect her from the military mob. Resolved that no one should die for her sake, her only choice left is to die, but to make it clear that she dies by her own choice and on her own terms. But before her courage creates the illusion of a happy ending, we have a cruel finale in which the long-desired winds finally rise before Iphigenia is killed, as Odysseus seemed worriedly to realize they would, inspiring Agamemnon to make one final lunge to save his daughter -- in vain. Now that's tragedy.

Tatiana Papamoschou as Iphigenia

What Cacoyannis lacked in the way of vast Hollywood-style sets he makes up for in manpower and a vast landscape to deploy his actors on. Whatever the Greek film cost, it achieved an epic look without looking overproduced. The stark production design, including the masks the generals wear on public occasions, gives Ancient Greece a more alien quality than Hollywood or Italy ever conveyed, compelling us to look at the old story with fresh eyes.

Landscapes and costume design more than make up for the lack of
conventionally classical sets in Cacoyannis's Iphigenia.

The cast probably won't be familiar to most viewers, except for Irene Papas, but they form a strong ensemble, including an uncanny Tatiana Papamoschou in the title role. Whatever damage generations of sword-and-sandal films may have done to the credibility of Greek mythology, Cacoyannis's Iphigenia is an honorable continuation of the ancient tradition.