Page 192 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

On the other hand, the films' narratives reject Fascism, often embodied in autocratic villains
holding forth about 'purity' and 'inferior races' - an example would be the blonde Atlantean Super-
Race created in Ercole alla Conquista di Atlantide (Hercules Conquers Atlantis, Vittorio Cottafavi,
Italy, 1961). Dyer observes how Reg Park's toned-to-within-an-inch-of-his-life Hercules embodies
the very aesthetic that he is ostensibly fighting against.28 The peplum offered images of strong,
white, male bodies at a time when they were being supplanted by technology and industrialisation-"'
- at the same time, they conjured up 'a discredited politics of whiteness' which needed to be
displaced/disavowed in some way. 30 The casting of Hargitay and the references to musclemen in
'costume pictures' are the most obvious references to the peplum in Bloody Pit of Horror. Indeed,
Gary Johnson sees it as 'a comment on Italy's love of Hercules and other muscle-bound heroes',
its 'message' (if that is the word) that '(the) obsession with physical perfection can be mentally
destructive'.31
Where the film departs from the peplum, however, is in embodying fascist aesthetics and fascist
politics in the same figure rather than pointedly separating them - it is the Maciste figure who now
talks about 'inferior creatures, spiritually and physically deformed'. The Crimson Executioner is,
significantly, also a figure from the past, unsuccessfully 'hidden' and forgotten, who returns and
regains control over the imagination of the 'disempowered' white male. If industrialisation threatened
the working-class male body, the decline of the peplum threatened the film careers of musclemen like
Hargitay, Reeves, Park and so forth - even Hollywood Tarzan films were on the way out. The bodies
of spaghetti western heroes, like James Bond-inspired superspies, were empowered by technology
(guns and gadgets) rather than an exaggerated representation of masculine physical labour. Muscular
male bodies did not return significantly to cinema screens until Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester
Stallone in the 1980s. If Travis is an explicit intertextual reference to the peplum's decline, he now
also seems like its return of the repressed. In other words, he is Mussolini in tights, back at the film
studio (Cinecittà) built in accordance with his Vision' but which had subsequently become the site
of the cinematic excesses of the 1960s.
Where the film is most knowing of all is in its depiction of male narcissism, although it has become
a generic (and homophobic) cliché to equate fascism with homosexuality, not least in more 'serious'
Italian films like Il Conformista (The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy/France/West Germany,
1969). This is where the Aurum Film Encyclopedia seems to get the film slightly wrong. According
to the unnamed reviewer, the torture scenes function as a 'detour and safety valve', protecting the
hetero-sexual male viewer from the homoerotic pleasures represented by Hargitay's naked torso."
Granted, male and female flesh do seem to be competing for our attention - it is interesting that
Pupillo has claimed that Rita Klein was stuffing her bra and Hargitay his pants to enhance their
spectacular appeal. 33 What I would suggest is that the two substitute for one another, but not in the
displaced circuit of desire that the Aurum Film Encyclopedia offers. Two problems occur to me with
that reading. Firstly, the film defuses (or rather, localises) the homosexual 'spectre' by pathologising
Travis' narcissism - the women simply are not needed for that task. We are never allowed the same
kind of unmediated gaze that the peplum facilitates - when Travis is multiply teflected the camera
remains at a safe distance and his most extravaganr poses are always accompanied by deranged
(fascist) ranring.. Secondly, does anybody seriously think that the film's main selling point was not

178