The Filmography of Steve Reeves

One of the greatest misconceptions about Steve Reeves is his association with Hercules, since Steve Reeves only did a career grand total of two Hercules films. It reminds me a little of the assumption that Mae West and W.C. Fields did a ton of movies together, when in fact they only did one, MY LITTLE CHICKADEE.

The movie where Steve Reeves was at the height of his sexuality was his version of the arabesque the THIEF OF BAGHDAD. This was one occasion where the 1924 Douglas Fairbanks original was far better than the Reeves version.

BATTLE OF MARATHON has Steve Reeves in yet another non-Hercules movie. What struck me about THE BATTLE OF MARATHON (a version of the Greek battle against the Persians of the same name) is that it was a Western with men in skirts. The hero is a straightforward, strong rural man with an uncomplicated view of life and a love of the land, whereas the villains are conniving schemers that use their hold to force a girl to marry them. The Persians are a pretty good stand in for marauding Indians, and Steve Reeves even leads a cavalry charge to save the day with extra Spartan help. At one point, the captive girl was even tied to the front of a ship; I have a feeling they did this because in Ancient Greece there weren't any train tracks. GIANT OF MARATHON had two women, just as in most Westerns: the "bad" woman (usually a prostitute of some kind) and a "good" woman (the schoolmarm).

Here's one of my favorite Steve Reeves stories: Steve Reeves was a part of the original Broadway cast of KISMET in 1955. During rehearsals, Reeves performed an extremely complicated bodybuilding move, and defied anyone in the audience to do the move even a single time.

Bonnie Evans, a dancer that weighed 5' and 100 pounds, said that not only could she do the move, she could do it more times than Reeves could.

"More than 25 reps? Never!"

"I'll do fifty." She said.

And she did! Afterwards Steve Reeves had to scoop Bonnie up and rush her in a taxi to the hospital, but the very next day she went back to doing the peppy Ababu dance numbers. Steve Reeves stood in the background and watched her every move: after that experience, he was a big Bonnie Evans fan.

Keith Hamilton Cobb

Despite my interest in that kind of drama, I've never watched daytime soaps, since I actually, generally have had to work for a living. So the first place I ever saw the extraordinarily sensitive, "thinking man" strongman Keith Hamilton Cobb was in the potboiler science fiction drama Andromeda.

Here's what I thought was absolutely genius about that series: every TV show from Dynasty to 90210 has a regular cast and guest-stars that are "beautiful people" in stunning clothes, both male and (usually) female. Yet Andromeda was the first series to actually have a built-in reason for explaining exactly why that was: since it was the future and genetic engineering was widespread, attractive people were relatively commonplace. I wonder what Isaac Asimov's notoriously plain, prim creation Susan Calvin would say to that.

Keith Hamilton Cobb's character was something very common in science fiction: a sidekick that was more interesting and compelling than the main hero. His character, Tyr Anasazi, was a smart and selfish Nietzchian superman, cunning, cynical and loyal only to himself, with a deep love of philosophy, especially Ayn Rand and Nietzche. Tyr also has the distinction of being the only person in the cast whose name and character I actually remember. Andromeda wasn't a great series, after all, and my friends that continued to watch it after the first season tell me that afterwards it got exponentially worse. In all honesty, the only reason I watched it for a very long time was for KHC in a mesh muscle-shirt.

I have absolutely no idea why Keith Hamilton Cobb isn't more famous than he currently is. Physically impressive and imposing, he's not just another muscleboy: he usually plays cultured, intelligent men. He has a startling deep voice that is naturally commanding. Maybe that's the reason that KHC hasn't been seen much: thinking men are very much out of fashoin in the action world.

Movies that would have benefitted from a little bulge

I love movies - love them - and I hope I can be forgiven for blogging about them a little bit

There are some movies that could have stood for a fellow like Victor Mature to be the "and more" for the ladies.

Some movies wouldn't be better off with a few healthy, muscular and virile male leads, however. For instance, the MAGNIFICENT SEVEN had the incredible Steve McQueen to ramp up the flick's testosterone quotient.

(On an unrelated note, I lived for many years in France and Turkey, and I always found it amusing how Europeans (and to a lesser extent, Asians) love and value the Western genre and we Americans tend to take them for granted. With the exception of pseudo-Westerns like No Country for Old Men, Westerns are more or less dead stateside, which is a shame.)

ATLANTIS, THE LOST CONTINENT (1961)

What I find the most interesting about George Pal is how sterling his reputation is, despite the fact that his ratio of hits to misses is of downright Chevy Chasian proportions. Remember how long it took Scorcese and Spielberg to recover, respectively, from the flops of NEW YORK, NEW YORK and 1941, and how totally wrecked Michael Cimino's career was by Heaven's Gate? Pal's Tom Thumb was a poor excuse for family entertainment, his Doc Savage was a lousy campstravaganza in the style of the Adam West Batman TV show (after which, I am certain, Pal died out of shame), and the low watermark had to be Atlantis, generally considered to be George Pal's worst movie.

Atlantis sounds really great on paper: a love story between a Greek fisherman who rescues an Atlantean princess, set around the destruction of a sexy, decadent civilization that looks like a cross between Ancient Greece and the Jabba the Hutt palace scenes in Return of the Jedi.

What I find lacking is the absence of real beefcake and man-candy, especially since this seems to be a requirement for man-sized movies about guys in sandals and little skirts. The male lead was almost as surprisingly uninteresting as Brad Pitt's unfunny and unsexy turn as Achilles in TROY, and it's a tribute to the male actor's dullness in Atlantis that for the life of me I just can't think of his name. It doesn't help the female lead was equally boring and also something less than a knockout: she was like the frumpier, more prudish older sister of a Bond girl.

Atlantis, the Lost Continent is something that almost never happens: the people in front of the camera are unknowns that remained unknown (and lack even the basic cult following of someone like John Phillip Law or Nancy Kovacs), while the person behind is a household name like George Pal. The only other example of this would be the fascinating eighties adventure teen flick Young Sherlock Holmes, which was produced by Spielberg and Henry Winkler and directed by Barry Levinson (prior to his Oscar for Rain Man).

To be fair, Atlantis had more off the wall George Pal innovation, who even in his worst movie had much more imagination than even the better Italian Sword n' Sandal pictures. Take the bizarre Moreau like animal men, and a scene inside an iron-age submarine. What I find surprising is how the Italians did a lot more with less when it came to charismatic and sexy actors that liven up a screen: take the entire career of Steve Reeves, the handsomest and most perfect man who ever lived, or a supersexy exotic showgirl-dancer like Chelo Alonso. I've also seen more than my fair share of Turkish movies, and what Turkish movies lack in anything resembling production value, they make up for with attractive and personable men and women. It's something you don't need a big budget to have, which inexplicably Atlantis lacks. If ever there was a movie that needed a big Greek muscle stud, it would be this one.

On a final note, there was one project of George Pal's that could have saved his reputation, one of movies' great What-Ifs: Time Machine II. The idea of George Pal doing a sequel to his greatest masterpiece should be enough to get any science fiction fan's pulse racing, but also claymation master Ray Harryhausen would have been on board to make all the weird creatures! Why it never happens I'll never understand.

That's my big one: which movies do you think would have benefitted from a little muscle? Fire away in the comments section below.

An interesting comparison picture

I found this absolutely remarkable photoshop job that compares Arnold and Ron Coleman at their primes.

It's easy to think, "hey, maybe they took one of the best Arnold pics and matched it against the worst of Coleman's and make Ron look bad," right? Actually, the Coleman pic was taken from the 2000 Mr. Olympia, which incidentally, he won.

It just goes to show there's been a transformation in the aesthetics of the bodybuilding world, and it rhymes with "steroids!"

To be as clear as possible: the problem isn't just bad pharmacology, because chemicals have always played a role in bodybuilding and sports. Rather, the problem is how they've transformed the exercise patterns of bodybuilders, how they've gone from a supplementary role to the centerpiece of training. Previously, bodybuilders trained year-round. Now, bodybuilders train for several weeks prior to a competition and pump their bods full of chemicals. The winner isn't the person that's trained the hardest, but the guy with the genetics to blow up like a sponge in a few weeks with heavy training.

The problem isn't just steroids, but how bodybuilding has totally deviated from ideals of health and beauty and has started to speak its own language. Mass and training have become ends in and of itself, and the press (notably the mysoginistic, homophobic IRONMAN) have become so insular. Because of the development of bodybuilding as a niche subculture that speaks its own language, there's an extreme lack of introspection. Nobody ever tells these guys, "y'know, your thighs look like a bagful of cats." A generation or two ago, bodybuilders produced movie stars like Steve Reeves and Lou Ferrigno; it'd be impossible to do this today.

The net result of all this is an unwholesome, bloated, somewhat grotesque appearance with big roid guts. For heaven's sake, look at Ron's calves and compare them to Arnold's: they look like a bag stuffed full of cats.

What happened to the idea of bodybuilding promoting a physically healthy, attractive ideal male body? Ron, the winner of the Mr. Olympia and thus the poster boy for the entire culture, has an unattractive body with an emphasis on mass alone, trained and bloated by pharmacology with a build that is something like the human evolutionary equivalent of a peacock's tail, without the peacock's tail's attractiveness.

It's worth noting the only truly good looking bodybuilding men are the naturals: Konstantin Ruzanov, Ulisses Jr., Denis Sergovisky, Mike O'Hearn.