Sword & Sandal - The Ancient Action Epic's Second Cycle (1949-1966)

Italian filmmakers of the silent era lead the world in colossal films of the silent era, but by the ‘30s they had largely fallen out of fashion. Then, a few short years after Allied troops moved through the Italian peninsula, Hollywood set up camp in Rome and the years of “Hollywood sul Tevere” began. A large part of the production output revolved around stories from the Bible and Greek and Roman myth. Prehistoric, viking, and pirate stories are not on this list, though they easily could be. The end of this cycle begins in 1963 (after about 5 years of aggressive peplum output) and production is down to a minimum by the...