Pre-Sound Muscle Stud Movies

Imagine this. It's 1894, and you're Thomas Edison. You've just invented a new technology, the kinetiscope, and you've captured motion. What's the first thing you're going to film?

Why, a muscle guy, of course!

And not just any: the strongest man in the world, Eugene Sandow.

Here's a 1894 film of Sandow:



Here's a clip of the winners of the first Bodybuilding Competition ever held in 1904, featuring the most perfectly developed man and woman:



And then you have the first great muscular movie star in history, long before Steve Reeves and Arnold: Bartolomeo Pagano. According to legend, Pagano was a Milanese stevedore that director Pastrone saw when walking by, and on the spot, hired him for his movie.

The movie was 1914's CABIRIA, one of the most influential and important movies in film history. Martin Scorcese has written a lot about it; supposedly, many of the innovations we credit to D.W. Griffith were actually developed by Pastrone a great many years before.

Bartolomeo Pagano, as the muscular black slave Maciste, was nothing short of the star of the show, interestingly enough, the first and last muscleman to be a good actor.

Watch CABIRIA!

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:



Bartolomeo Pagano's awesome biceps, dominatingly huge height, and cut physique let him muscle his way into the Italian film industry, where he did nothing less than 25 spin-offs featuring the superstud slave Maciste.

The most famous of these was 1925's MACISTE IN HELL, which supposedly is the movie that made Federico Fellini want to be a director. Even today, it's one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen, a film made of awesome, as wild and epic as the Shaw Brothers' INFRA-MAN. Maciste punches and pummels his way out from Dante's Inferno. I guess even Satan is no match for pecs of steel. It has these brilliantly bizarre intertitle cards with lines like "The Dragon - Hell's Aeroplane" and "You fool, you blasphemed, and now you are in my power!"

The Archive doesn't allow direct linking, but here, have a look at MACISTE IN HELL.

While in Hell, all the lustful she-demons want a little of Maciste because of his splendid physique!

Internet Archive: Maciste in Hell