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

 
 

Maciste all'inferno (Maciste in the Underworld) (1926) by GUIDO BRIGNONE

Maciste all'inferno (Maciste in the Underworld) (1926) by GUIDO BRIGNONE

Maciste all'inferno (Maciste in the Underworld) (1926) by GUIDO BRIGNONE

Maciste all'inferno (Maciste in the Underworld) (1926) by GUIDO BRIGNONE