Arena-icon

One of the great things about pro­ducer Roger Corman was that he was will­ing to let women tackle the kind of cin­e­matic fare that was usu­ally left to men.  Part of it was com­mer­cial cal­cu­la­tion: he knew that women were under­rep­re­sented in genre fare and that both women and men would get a charge from see­ing women per­form tra­di­tional mas­cu­line roles in enter­tain­ment.  Like any good commercial-minded mogul, he had it both ways by adding sex and nudity to these con­coc­tion to please the men in the audi­ence — but he was also will­ing to let film­mak­ers build their sto­ries around strong female char­ac­ters whose take-charge style reflected the fem­i­nist atti­tudes of the 1970’s.

The Arena is a note­wor­thy exam­ple of Corman’s drive-in fem­i­nism in action.  Essentially, the script by John & Joyce Corrington of The Omega Man fame takes the sword & san­dal genre that the Italians did so well and adds the “fight for free­dom” angle from Spartacus but tweaks it in a pro-female direc­tion.  The main hero­ines are Bodicia (Margaret Markov), a proud priest­ess, and Mamawi (Pam Grier), a peace­ful Nubian.  Both are sold into slav­ery after Roman sol­diers wipe out their tribes — and they quickly find them­selves at the mercy of child­ish emperor Timarchus (Daniele Vargas), who uses them for his amuse­ment with the help of cruel slave-driver Cornelia (Sara Bay, a.k.a. Italian schlock star­let Rosalba Neri).

At first, Bodicia and Malawi are used as con­cu­bines to pro­vide enter­tain­ment dur­ing orgies, ser­vants dur­ing the glad­i­a­tor fights and to pro­vide pre-fight “com­pan­ion­ship” for the glad­i­a­tors.  However, once stan­dard mano-a-mano com­bat ceases to be enough for spectacle-hungry vil­lagers, Timarchus uses the woman to be his glad­i­a­tors.  At first it is a diver­sion and the women avoid hurt­ing each other — but soon the crowd wants more and Timarchus is will­ing to kill the women if they won’t com­ply with the crowd’s whims.  However, the emperor has under­rated their desire for free­dom — and they will soon to prove to all com­ers what they’ll do to earn it.

Simply put, The Arena is clas­sic 1970’s drive-in fem­i­nist fun.  On the basic exploita­tion front, it deliv­ers all the fleshly and bru­tal charms one would expect from this premise: the palace scenes offer the expected debauch­ery, the arena scenes have plen­ti­ful blood­shed and the female stars aren’t bash­ful about nudity.  The real sur­prise here is how seri­ous The Arena fre­quently is.  The script has a gen­uine core of drama to it, with a real feel­ing for its glad­i­a­tor char­ac­ters male and female, and direc­tor Steve Carver plays this up to add some unex­pected heft to the film’s cheap thrills.

The seri­ous angle of the film is aided by the art­ful qual­ity of Carver’s direc­tion.  He goes for an expres­sive visual style that mixes hand­held cam­er­a­work with some unex­pect­edly lovely com­bi­na­tion dolly/zoom shots.  His ace in the hole here is the cam­er­a­work by Aristide Massaccesi, bet­ter known to sex­ploita­tion fans as Joe D’Amato.  Say what you will about his schlocky self-directed erot­ica but Massaccesi was a fine cam­era­man and his work here gives the film an artsy, gen­uinely Italian “peplum” flair.  It’s worth not­ing that the film was shot at Cinecitta in Italy so it has an unex­pect­edly high level of pro­duc­tion value that aids the visual ele­gance.  Finally, the edit­ing — done mostly by an unnamed Italian edi­tor but cred­ited to Joe Dante — gives the film the punchy pace a New World Pictures clas­sic needs and a suit­ably grand score from Francesco DeMasi fits the film’s brood­ing tone nicely.

Finally, the act­ing cements the film’s pro-female tone.  Markov and Grier had teamed up before on the blaxploitation-themed Defiant Ones knock­off Black Mama, White Mama and the pair­ing works again here.  Markov has the noble pres­ence to fit her Amazonian looks.  Grier ini­tially adds a lighter touch to off­set Markov’s somber qual­ity but as the film’s tone dark­ens Grier han­dles a few intense dra­matic scenes with con­fi­dence.  It’s also worth not­ing that both excel in the action depart­ment — and when they’re slash­ing up Roman sol­diers side by side dur­ing the finale, it’s a thing of exploitation-flick beauty.

On the act­ing tip, it’s worth not­ing some fun per­for­mances in the sup­port­ing cast.  Lucretia Love steals a few scenes as a wine-loving female glad­i­a­tor while the vil­lain­ous ranks of the palace offer amus­ingly car­toon­ish turns from Vargas as the emperor and also Silvio Laurenzi as Priscium, an out­ra­geously campy slave-buyer.  The lat­ter two ham it up in a way that wouldn’t been seen again in this sort of film until Caligula. However, the best sup­port­ing per­for­mance comes from Neri as the slave-trainer: she’s a grand, cruel-yet-sexy vil­lain­ess who makes a per­fect omega to the Markov and Grier’s alpha.

All in all, The Arena deserves its sta­tus as one of the New World Pictures clas­sics and also shows the early skills that Carver would bring to fruition in later films like Big Bad Mama and Lone Wolf McQuade.  If you dig Corman’s par­tic­u­lar fla­vor of drive-in fem­i­nism then this film offers a ver­i­ta­ble buf­fet of that sort of thrill.