Maciste

   Film character. Played by the barrel-chested Bartolomeo Pagano, a Genoese dockworker with no previous acting experience, Maciste is the powerful but faithful African slave who helps rescue the young Roman girl from the jaws of Moloch in Giovanni Pastrone's epic blockbuster Cabinet (1914). The perceived popular appeal of the character led to a long line of films in which Maciste appeared in a variety of guises and in different times and settings, playing roles as different as an Alpine trooper, an emperor, or a policeman, and yet always fundamentally the same "good giant" who had delighted audiences in the earlier film. After some 15 films for the Itala Film company in Italy, Pagano was enticed to make a further four Maciste films in Germany before returning to Italy to make several more for Stefano Pittaluga, including the surreal and at times hilarious Maciste all'Inferno (Maciste in Hell, 1926).

   While the character's popular appeal undoubtedly derived from his uncomplicated moral values and his role as a natural defender of the weak against the bullying of the strong, many of the Itala films also demonstrated a more complex self-awareness of the medium on the part of the filmmakers. In the very first Maciste film (Marvelous Maciste, 1915), for example, a young girl mistreated by an evil uncle who is attempting to appropriate her inheritance sees Cabiria in a movie theater and decides to seek Maciste's help. She goes to the Itala studios in Turin where Maciste is in the middle of making a new film but he immediately accedes to her plea for help and embarks on setting things right.

   Fading from the screens with Pagano's retirement and the coming of sound, the character was revived in the late 1950s in many of the sword-and-sandal epics, or so-called peplums, produced at Cinecitta. By this time, however, Maciste had lost his individuality and had become indistinguishable from the many Herculeses, Atlases, and other assorted neomythological strongmen, all played by a host of American bodybuilders.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira