Ancient Fantasies presents
The Giants of of Thessaly (1961)

Director - Ricardo Freda
 

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Plot
Film Notes
Facts and Fancies from the Notebooks of Edison J. Nello
Ancient Connections
Cast and Production Credits

The Plot

Jason journeys with the Argonauts to recover the Golden Fleece and save the land of Colchis from the wrath of Zeus. While Jason is gone, his cousin takes his pleasure on the Kingdom and Jason's wife. Before the hero gets back home, he battles storms, witches, a Cyclops, and his own cranky crew.

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Film Notes

He's Named Jason...but...

The Giants of Thessaly has the honor of being the first film of Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece. However, the film has very little to do with the legend beyond having a character named Jason and a Golden Fleece. Pretty much everything else comes from elsewhere (the Cyclops comes from The Odyssey) or nowhere.

The straying from the mythical facts would be forgiveable if this Sword and Sandal outing was an enteraining effort, but it doesn't seem that Riccardo Freda's head was in the game for this one. The "gREAT" Italian director of Maciste in Hell fumbles the ball from the start and only creates a few of moments of the bizzareness of which he was so capable.

In its "edited for time and sanity" form, it's watchable enough for genre fans, but it just makes one yearn for another viewing of Ray Harryhausen's classic Jason and the Argonauts.

Through the Ancient Lens You'll See...

...Swiss actor Roland Cary, hairy back but moony eyed Orpheus, exotic dancers at a feast, a snot nosed Cyclops, an endless climb up a cliff followed by an endless climb up a statue, a talking ring, a floating bumper car of love, blind man in a beard with a midget...

-- Ed Schneider - Alameda TV

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Facts and Fancies
from the Notebooks of Edison J. Nello

"Jason and the Argonauts is one of the greatest of mythological tales, as a compendium of heroes goes on a quest to save their kingdom and their people.

You may ask why...

It had been foretold that Zeus would destroy the land of Colchis with volcanic fire unless the Golden Fleece was found and returned and Jason and his not so merry band must go on a journey to find the Object meeting obstacles along the way.  

The story is familiar and the results are as expected, but buried within the familiar is the strange and the stranger.

As we have noted in so many of our past mytho-movie explorations, we once again encounter midgets and blind men with long beards, along with spooky storms, dark and witchy eyeliner, talking jewelry and a Swiss actor as the protagonist.
But the particularity of the aforementioned strangeness, is the very "hairied hero". Hairied, not harried, as the once and future king finds himself surrounded by the hirsute.

Jason, has left his beautiful Queen behind to his pointy bearded cousin, with whom there is the usual love/hate dichotomy.

His best friend is the hairy backed poet Orpheus who is ever mouthing soft words in praise of love.

Jason's men are turned into sheep, their wooly  hair begging and baaaing to be brushed and stroked.

Then there is the Cyclops, half bear, half gorilla, half man. 
Yes, three halves, for mathematics dare not rule as the Cyclop's duality duels with its triple occularity, metamorphosizing before our very eyes, switching its metaphorical pairs endlessly back and forth and back again. You have no choice but to gaze on as this monster's mouth roars, drips and drools and mysterious liquids spurt in raging ecstasy from his nostrils. And top it off, there is his single eye, a viscous, uncongealed pool of mad lusting hunger engulfed by a forest of fur.

Finally, of course, there is the Golden Fleece itself for which Jason must scale stony heights both god made and man made to acquire the skin and hair of the ram of rams.

Project upon all of this what you will."

Ancient Connections

Massimo Girotti's (Orpheus) early career found him starring in roles for the best of Italian directors in the late 1940's (Robert Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica). In the 1950s and early 60s, he found himself walking deeper into the Valley of the Potboilers with such fare as Duel of the Titans with Steve Reeves.

In the late 60 and 70s he was back working with great directors (Passolini in Teorema, Bertolucci in Last Tango in Paris, and back again with Visconti in Innocente, L'.

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Cast & Production Credits

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A far more interesting Riccardo Freda effort was The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. Check out an interesting article on this "hymn to necrocphilia."

Channel 31 offers up one of the Sword and Sandaldom's strangest settings ever (17 century Scotland) in Riccardo's Freda's Maciste in Hell!