Article: What, No Orgy?(Review)

BY one of fate's sardonic ironies, the very week that brought the demise of Steve Reeves, the body-builder actor whose Hercules initiated the popularity of sword-and-sandal (or blood-and-sand) epics, also produced the opening of Ridley Scott's Gladiator, the first such film in many a lustrum, the public's blood lust having switched to more up- to-date genres. Although Anthony Mann's Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) covered some of the same ground-so much so that it has, unfairly, been removed from video stores-Gladiator is bigger, costlier, and beastlier.

It begins A.D. 180, at the end of Marcus Aurelius's rule, with the emperor fighting the barbarians in what, ...

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