Here's my all-time favorite story about the jaw-droppingly handsome, masculine, flawless and symmetrical Steve Reeves:Steve was filming this or that Spaghetti Hercules movie in rural, small town Italy, and he decided to leave the location for a while to go into town to buy some milk and bananas. Steve was in partial Hercules costume. When he entered a store, an Italian woman's eyes popped out, and she started screaming hysterically, "Oh my God, he's the Son of Zeus! You can tell my his arms! Oh my God, he's the Son of Zeus!" Naturally this started to gather a crowd of people in the town, and they mobbed Reeves and refused to let him go until he flexed his brawny, all-meat cannons for them, which set out a round of applause and awe.
I guess the reason I always liked this story was because it just goes to show how Steve was so godlike, brawny and blue-eyed that he didn't seem real at all, he was a mythic and heroic character.
One thing I've always noticed about the great fictional muscular adventure characters of the 20th Century is, I've never seen a real-life actor that was as believeable or buyable as a Tarzan, Conan or Hercules, as a painting of said character. This, incidentally, also goes for the ladies as well: Linda Carter was my she-ro when I was watching her in reruns as a girl, but I was depressed to discover years later how flat of an ass she actually had.
Steve Reeves seems to be the exception. He looked every inch the flawless, Greco-Roman sculpture of the male figure, handsome and strong. He's also the only guy I know that could pull off a well-groomed beard - and I'm well known for being anti-facial hair.
My all-time favorite Steve Reeves movie would not be any of his Hercules pictures, but actually WHITE WARRIOR (1959) where Reeves plays a chiseled, clean-limbed honorable Muslim warrior from the Caucasus that fights the Tsar in the 1850s. It was based on Leo Tolstoy's last novel, HADJI MURAT, and since I'm a big Tolstoy geek, when I read about Reeves's filmography I gravitated to this movie right away. Whereas Tolstoy's novel was about the horror of war and the conflict between religious and secular society very much like his famous WAR AND PEACE, the movie HADJI MURAT was an adventure movie with white horses and 1850s Russian opulence, a spectacle movie with daring escapes. Unlike a lot of Sword n' Sandal movies, this one was actually pretty unpredictable, as opposed to the by-the-numbers Sword n' Sandal films, and is definitely a cut above the rest of this genre. Reeves plays a Caucasus horse-riding nomad with a love of freedom and a hatred for Mother Russia.
The highlight of the movie was when Steve Reeves peeled his shirt off his rockhard, tanned body to impress some captive Russian girl with his prowess at wrestling. The shock of seeing Reeves's articulated, glistening male torso is a little like that of getting slapped in the face.
There is one Steve Reeves movie that I've never seen, and that's the one he did where he fought Gordon "Tarzan" Scott. DUEL OF THE TITANS features the two as Romulus and Remus. Though if I was director, it would involve a whole lot less of the two (ahem) twins fighting, and a heck of a lot more of them competing for me.
2 comments:
Ah memories. Nice trip. I remember watching the Thief of Baghdad on TV as a kid and just being mesmerized by Reeves.
Great blog and I agree with most of what you said. Reeves was as flawless a specimen of male beauty as ever lived, from his physique, to his face, even his hair seemed so perfectly beautiful. There hasn't been an actor that I have seen in all these years that even comes close to having all those qualities. He was definitely godlike. Check him out in "Thief of Bagdad" or "Morgan the Pirate" and ask yourself if any other male actor ever looked this good. He was one of a kind
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