Maciste all’inferno (Maciste in the Underworld)
Guido Brignone, Italy, 1926, 100 min
The screenplay by Riccardo Artuffo provided director Guido Brignone with a scenario rich in fantastic and bizarre humor. Completed in 1925, Maciste all’inferno ran afoul of the censors — reputedly because of charges that its depictions of Hell and Lucifer were blasphemous, which may explain why the Devil is now referred to as Lord Pluto — and the film was released in Sweden three months before it premiered in Italy in March of 1926. Maciste all’inferno was re-released in the early 1940s with a synchronized music and sound-effects track, and the Maciste character surfaced again in the ’50s and ’60s during a revival of the muscleman epic alongside stalwarts such as Hercules, Goliath, Colossus, Samson, Atlas, and “The Strongest Man in the World.”
Maciste all’inferno occupies a very special niche in Italian cinema as the film that inspired Federico Fellini to get into the movies. He spoke of the film as a sort of scena primaria in his personal cinematic subconscious: “I’m sure that I remember it well because the image has remained so deeply impressed that I have tried to re-evoke it in all my films. I saw it standing with my father’s arms around me amidst a crowd of people in wet overcoats because it was raining outside. I remember a large woman with nude belly, her belly button, her eyes darkened with make-up, blazing. With an imperious movement of her arm she created a circle of flames around Maciste, he also half-naked and with a dove in his hand.
– Rebecca Peters, silentfilm.org
