The openly wooden Stewart Granger stars as the square-jawed Lot who leads his people to Sodom to do battle with the villainous prince, Astaroth (a slumming Stanley Baker, who deserves a lot better than this). Despite all this intrigue and adventure, the production is still far too long, bloated and sluggish rather a film which pulls you in and carries you along with it. The Biblical tale of the destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah provides the overarching storyline, but along with that we get battles, duels, rivalry, romance, and plenty more besides.
The problem with this film is its screenplay, which is all over the place. SODOM & GOMORRAH should ideally deserve epic status, given the effort and expenditure so clearly having gone into its production, but somehow it works out as less entertaining than even a cheesy Maciste movie. Still it's entertaining in many respects.Īn Italian sword and sandal flick with a tenuous Biblical connection and an American director in Robert Aldrich. DeMille school of arcane Victorian writing. But the script is definitely out of the Cecil B. There's a very nicely staged battle sequence with the Hebrews defending the land granted them by Anouk. He's also got an eye for Lot's daughters. He's Anouk's brother and he's got the idea he ought to be running things. Villain of the piece is Stanley Baker who always improves every film he was ever in. Pretty soon he gets all tangled up in Sodomite politics and gets a bit entangled himself with Pier Angeli who is a slave girl to Queen Anouk Aimee. Lot as portrayed by Stewart Granger doesn't take just his family there, he leads a whole tribe of Hebrew people there after he parts from Uncle Abraham.
Nor is homosexuality singled out as THE sin that got the Deity all upset that he wanted to destroy the place. Of course Sodom and Gomorrah doesn't stick to the biblical version of the tale, but then neither did those DeMille epics, Samson and Delilah and The Ten Commandments. Something like the one they allegedly lived down Sodom way. Not that Sodom and Gomorrah is any great film, but it was certainly better than some of those spaghetti westerns he did in the Sixties to pay for his hedonistic life style. With the filming of Sodom and Gomorrah, Stewart Granger began a phase of his career on the European continent.
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