Why men in skirts have big swords

Steve Pratt looks at Hollywood's latest love affair and reveals... why men in skirts have big swords.

Hollywood's leading men are abandoning designer suits and sunglasses for skirts and sandals, swapping fast cars for four-legged horsepower or chariots, and guns for swords. The epic is back.

The success, both at the Oscars and the box office, of Ridley Scott's Gladiator three years ago revived the cinematic genre. In that blockbuster, Russell Crowe bared his legs as the Roman general reduced to fighting for his life in the arena.

Now Brad Pitt, Colin Farrell and Leonardo DiCaprio are set to follow in his sandalled feet in forthcoming epics, heralding the return of the huge sets and casts of thousands of the epic movies produced 40 years ago.

When it was made, Gladiator was a risk - the type of old-fashioned epic not seen for decades. Its success took Hollywood by surprise which, perhaps, explains the time lapse in producers jumping on the Gladiator bandwagon.

The final push was provided by the tragic events of September 11 two years ago. When the world is in chaos, Hollywood turns to the past. Cinemagoers may not be able to stomach films about modern conflicts but will tolerate slaughter and persecution as long as the story is set in history.

"When the world is rupturing, the only place to look is the past. And there are a lot of answers in Alexander The Great. Alexander created a world that is at the core of our civilisation," says Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann, who's helming one of two competing Alexander The Great projects in this return to the no-expense-spared style of cinema.

"It's a whole different world with pretty men, gorgeous women, and swords. It's that fantasy element draw that cinemagoers enjoy, that escape from present day reality," says John Walker, editor of Halliwell's Film and Video Guide.

There hasn't been anything like this since La Tatiche de Ercole created a new cinematic genre in 1958. This was the sword and sandals epic - better known in Europe under the title Hercules - that launched a trend. Hard to believe that a dubbed Italian film starring a former Mr Universe, muscle man Steve Reeves, could achieve that. But audiences fell for the big man in a big way.

Italy went from churning out ten costume epics a year to more than 150 in the first few years of the 1960s. Hollywood joined in with movies such as El Cid and The Fall Of The Roman Empire.

Spectacle was the name of the game. The wide screen was filled with a cast of thousands as men in skirts wielded big swords in epic battles. Dialogue was of secondary importance.

Rising production costs and the success of grittier, more realistic movies put paid to the sword and sandals genre. Sequels and turning TV shows into movies proved more profitable. The financial failure of some of this summer's potential blockbusters, including the second Lara Croft adventure and The Hulk, means that film-makers will be looking to the history books for even more ideas.

The market place is already pretty crowded. Brad Pitt is currently filming Troy in Malta, Morocco and the UK. He plays Greek hero Achilles with Eric Bana (who played David Banner in The Hulk), Orlando Bloom and Peter O'Toole among the cast.

This will be sold as an action epic rather than an adaptation of Homer's classic The Iliad as Homer is hardly a name that sets box-office tills ringing.

Screenwriter David Benioff recognises the risks of upsetting scholars. "This is the mother of all epics, the cornerstone of western literature," he says. "If I screw it up, classicists around the world will issue a fatwa and assassinate me with bronze daggers."

Producers will probably do the same if the film sinks at the box office, although the amount of press interest being shown in Pitt's legs would ensure the film will have curiosity value at least.

The major battle is between two Alexander The Great movies, both costing in excess of $100m. First off the block is the simply-titled Alexander. Oliver Stone's epic begins shooting shortly, with a November 2004 release date already pencilled in.

Stone has cast Irish actor Colin Farrell as the Macedonian king who'd conquered almost all of the known world before his death at the age of 26. Angelina Jolie, the big screen Lara Croft, will play his mother, despite only a few years age difference.

Luhrmann, whose project is as yet untitled, doesn't seem worried that Stone is the first to shout action. He's actually delayed the start and doesn't expect to premiere his version until the end of 2005. So far, his cast has Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, with Nicole Kidman playing his mother Olympia.

Even the Brits are donning swords and sandals to tell the story of King Cyrus of Persia, who lived 500 years before the birth of Christ. The £50m budget is modest by Hollywood epic standards but producer-director Alex Jovy is thinking big with his story of love, sex, war and tragedy that demands 10,000 extras for its big battle scene.

Announcing the project at the Cannes Film Festival, he said: "We're making a film along the lines of Gladiator and Lawrence Of Arabia. It will appeal to a worldwide audience of young and old, and I'm very confident it will be a hit."

He reckons the budget will enable him to attract a star cast - Hugh Jackman and Sean Connery have been mentioned - and production values to match anything Hollywood has to offer.

Developments in computer-generated special effects means that modern-day epics can cheat. A good proportion of a cast of thousands can be conjured up by the computer, without having to pay vast numbers of extras or bulk up the crowd with cardboard cut-out figures.

The makers of Gladiator didn't have to build the entire Colosseum, where big fights were staged. A small section was constructed and the rest of the gigantic arena added by computer.

The work was taken even further in the second of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, The Two Towers, which showed just how much can be achieved in the way of large-scale effects through CGI work.

What is certain is that epics belong in the cinema not on the box in the corner of the living room. Remaking the 1960s epic Spartacus as a TV movie doesn't seem the most sensible idea. Men in skirts and big casts need to be seen in all their glory on the big screen not reduced to the size of pin pricks on the small screen.