Diagonaldi Very well executed

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

clanciai Surprisingly good, many factors adding to an excellent Cinemascope version of the Trojan war, above all the script, which is clear and consistently relevant and sticking to the subject; and although very far from Homer, this variation of the intrigue is impressively intelligent and definitely logical. The first half of the film deals with the Spartan argument, (Homer's epic doesn't start until 75 minutes into the film,) Achilles (Stanley Baker) making an impressing entry, with Brigitte Bardot as Helen's slave girl who is given for the night to Paris by Menelaos but instead helps him escape - she is only 22 but striking - you recognize her figure before you see her face. Niall McGinnis is very convincing as the jealous Menelaos whose jealousy Helen finds it necessary to escape, while most surprising of all is the convincing excellence of Paris especially but also Helen. Jacques Sernas (totally unknown to me) is the perfect Paris, a beautiful young man of great charm, sympathetic intelligence and audacious insolence, and Rossana Podestà (also unknown to me) is a very credible Helena, masking her real identity to get away with Paris from Menelaos.Among the Trojans, Cedric Hardwicke makes a very plausible Priam, he is given the most famous quote of the Trojan war, taking Helen round her chin: "So this is the face that launched a thousand ships," (Christopher Marlowe), and also Nora Swinburne as Hecuba, Ronald Lewis as Aeneas and Janette Scott as Cassandra, a Trojan parallel to Brigitte Bardot. Only Hector is not quite convincing, Harry Andrews being the wrong type, (Eric Bana is the better compensation in the 2004 Wolfgang Peterson version), and all the battle scenes are dramatically violent and bloody enough.The action is swift and never dull, the dialogue is comfortably fluent all the way, the story is well but not exaggeratedly sugared with romanticism, and to all this comes Max Steiner's glorious music, culminating in the orgy of the wooden horse.Of course, you have to make a comparison with the 2004 "Troy" version. None is better than the other. Both have their great credits and very few lacks. The 2004 is technically more excellent, while Robert Wise's contribution (in the shadow of Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" of the same year) is more realistic and human.The Trojan adventure is such a great story that it's impossible to make a mess of it. As far as I know, no one has ever been unsuccessful in dealing with it - the characters are too individually outstanding, all of them, not to naturally add to a great show. But of all the film versions, I think Robert Wise, with his concise and clever editing of the story, with its flamboyantly efficient story-telling (it's less than 2 hours,) and exciting virtuosity constituting an excellent epic for all time, has made the best of it.

jvanderwalt5 Now first of i am not a fan of Greek stories the only ones that i like is this one , Walt Disney's Hercules; and Pompeii.Beginning with this movie i was going into it with the intention of hating it.But boy did this one surprise me.I didn't even catch on that this is the story of the Trojan horse i realized it first when the wooden horse showed up on the screen.That aside the love story that's inter wined is perfect Rosanna podesta and Jack sernas was a perfect cast even though their voices were dubbed seeing that both of them are french.That aside this is remarkable movie.Give it a try and you will fall in love.

tomsview I recently saw "Helen of Troy" for the first since I was ten. That was when I was imprinted with this movie in much the same way as a later generation was imprinted with "Star Wars". Fifty years later, all things considered, the movie still holds up well.The story is culled from Homer's Iliad with embellishments from a number of screenwriters. Maybe Homer would have appreciated their help in tightening the plot and moving things along without so many interruptions from the gods.Jacques Sernas plays Paris, a prince of Troy, who journeys to Sparta on a peace mission. He falls in love with Helen, Queen of Sparta, played by Rossana Podestà, the wife of the Spartan king, Menelaus, brilliantly played by Niall MacGinnis. Paris learns that the Spartans merely await a pretext to start a war; he provides them with one when he takes Helen with him back to Troy.The movie is spectacular. The storming of Troy is epic movie making at its best and the wooden horse lives up to expectations.British actors predominate. Their Shakespearian backgrounds helped them deliver their lines with authority. Unfortunately the filmmakers included a couple of passages of superfluous, off-screen narration, and this, added to at least two references to the face that launched a thousand ships, gives the impression of a predictable, one-dimensional screenplay.English was not the first language of either Jacques Sernas or Rossana Podestà; both had trouble with their lines. Sernas ultimately had his voice dubbed, and Podestà learned her lines by rote. This gives their dialogue a detached quality that is a little odd. Sernas in particular sounds rather disembodied – his voice does not quite fit. However he is convincingly athletic.The actors wear their armour with panache even if on closer inspection some of their arms seem so puny that they look as though they would have trouble unwrapping an after-dinner mint let alone hurling a javelin at the walls of Troy. There are exceptions. Stanley Baker gives an edgy performance as Achilles, and Harry Andrews projects a character of heroic proportions. These two are notable in a movie where helmets, nose guards and beards tend to make the characters indistinguishable from one another.Although Max Steiner's score flows smoothly, he couldn't have spent more than ten minutes researching the music of the period. The score is typical Steiner of the mid-fifties with musical roots no farther back than Richard Strauss.The duel between Achilles and Hector still delivers, although it is relatively bloodless by today's standards. Played out under the walls of Troy and watched by both armies, Achilles hammers Hector with the weighted end of his spear before dragging the body behind his chariot.One famous Hollywood producer believed that it was the last five minutes that made a movie memorable. "Helen of Troy" fulfils that criterion perfectly. With Troy in flames, Helen is back in the hands of her husband, Menelaus, who remarks that she needs to wash the blood of the slain Paris off her hands, "I cannot", she replies, "it's my blood." The movie ends with Helen looking back towards Troy as the ship returns her to Sparta, her love for Paris still strong; a triumph of the spirit if nothing else."Helen of Troy" is still totally absorbing, and provides a unique look at a bygone age.

Steffi_P Paramount and Cecil B. DeMille kick-started the 1949-66 wave of ancient world epics with the biblical tale Samson and Delilah, while MGM and Fox made their mark with gospel spin-off stories Quo Vadis and The Robe respectively. Warner Brothers were a bit slower to jump on the bandwagon, and when they did the fables they chose were refreshingly pagan. In 1954 they produced the delightfully silly Land of the Pharaohs, and followed it up with this, one of the best-known and most enduring myths of ancient Greece.Pictures like this have a reputation for being somewhat corny and insincere. And Helen of Troy is a shameless part of that tradition. It is admittedly a neat and fast-moving retelling of the legend, but its dialogue ranges from laughable to banal. Characters make wooden statements that were obviously someone's idea of ancient wisdom. Slaves talk back to their masters without so much as a telling off. What is particularly inept is the way the writers obviously felt they had to get in famous lines like "The face that launched a thousand ships" and "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts", so we have to listen to them bending the dialogue towards these clichés, to the point where they sound utterly trite – "Hmm, that's a lot of ships out there, at least a few hundred… no I'd say a thousand. And what launched them, eh?" Other than poor writing, another thing that tended to make these epics lacking in intimacy was poor use of the new Cinemascope aspect ratio. This was a big problem in The Robe, which was the earliest release in that format, but Helen of Troy's director Robert Wise handles the wider image with care. While he takes full advantage of the extra space for crowds and spectacles, for the more intimate scenes he brings the performers closer to the camera, and mutes the backgrounds so as not to overwhelm the moment. He also makes great use of tiny bits of light or movement, especially the recurring fire motif, to draw our attention to certain bits of the screen, defying the tendency for individuals to get lost in a big screen. One of the best examples of Wise's control here is the first scene at the Spartan palace where Paris and Ajax have their knuckleduster dual. It's pretty clear that Jack Sernas and Maxwell Reed fight like, well, like a couple of bad actors, but Wise instead focuses us on the fervour of the crowd to give us a more savage impression of the brawl. He then moves in to close-ups of Niall MacGinnis and Rossana Podesta against plainer backgrounds, but still with a little movement in the frame to match their emotions.But all this sensitive direction cannot save us from some appalling acting performances. I can see why Sernas and Podesta were cast in the lead roles. They are both young and beautiful, and their unfamiliar faces give them a freshness and innocence. But they can't act, and the dubbing doesn't help. It's not all bad though. Niall MacGinnis gives a tremendous performance. He boils the character of Menelaus down to nothing more than a jealous husband, and his intense manner dominates the screen. Stanley Baker is also really good, radiating thoughtless aggression with his every move. As for the rest, no-one really stands out or satisfies, even such worthy names as Cedric Hardwicke and Nora Swinburne.The Warner Brothers epics of the 50s were really little more than B-picture with A-budgets. Like the equivalent productions at rival studios, they featured gargantuan sets, hordes of extras and breathtaking spectacles, but they also suffered from weak scripts and dull casts. Still, some of Robert Wise's best efforts up to this point were actual B-pictures that he had treated with credibility and managed to eke some depth and sentiment out of. It is his intelligent handling of the elements in the frame plus the handful of classy performances that raise this one just a little above a mediocrity.As a kind of postscript to this comment, here are a few miscellaneous points of interest. Max Steiner's score has his usual habit of commenting hysterically on every line or movement, but there are some nice little musical touches to the scene of the Greeks marching on Troy that are worth listening for. Later on, have a look at those siege towers. Isn't it convenient that the trapdoors fit exactly between the battlements of the Trojan walls? They must have got someone to go round with a tape measure before they built them. And finally, listen out for an early use of the Wilhelm scream sound effect, decades before it became hip and ironic.