User reviews

This minor epic displays action , adventures , humor , luxurious scenarios and results to be quite amusing . ¨Hundred Horsemen¨ deals with a peaceful Christian village is altered in arrival a group of Arabs led by Sheik Abengalbon (Wolfgang Preiss) and his son Halaf (Manuel Gallardo) . The Mayor gives them a great attention and welcome but countrymen carry out a revolt . Fernando (Mark Damon) , the son of Don Gonzalo Herrera y Menéndez (Arnaldo Foa) , rallies peasants and townspeople to overthrow Moorish occupiers in medieval Spain . His enemies only had to fight the legend and he had to live up to it. When 12 Moorish are killed , the Arabs seek vengeance and execute 24 Christians by hanging , including the Mayor . The Mayor's (Antonella Lualdi) daughter , Fernando and his father escape to mountains where create a popular army against Arabs . Meanwhile , some kiddies rob weapons to Moors and various monks led by Frate Carmelo (Gastone Moschin) help the rebels . In fact Carmelo uses the book ¨commentaries of Julius Caesar¨ to proceed the war strategy against Moorish .

Cento Cavalieri (original title) or I Cento Cavalieri packs historical events about invasion Moors over Spain , gorgeous landscapes , glimmer scenarios, and battles well staged with hundreds of people . 100 Horsemen is a fun film plenty of action , humor , tongue in check , fights , entertainment and amusement . The movie has not characterization accuracy neither expectation historic . This is a chronicle about Spanish Medieval time similar to ¨The Cid¨ by Anthony Mann but with lack luster and budget . Being a Spain/Italy production there appears several secondary actors , many of them Peplum and Spaghetti's usual such as Aldo Sambrell , Fernando Bilbao , Jose Canalejas , Rafael Vaquero , Mariano Vidal Molina , Rafael Albaicin , Rafael Hernandez , Alfonso De La Vega and Mirko Ellis , among others . The film was shot in authentic fortresses and strongholds as the castle of Mota , Medina Del Campo . Atmospheric as well as evocative musical score by Antonio Perez Olea . Colorful cinematography by Francisco Marin , being filmed on location in Medina Del Campo , Valladolid , Pedraza, Segovia, Castilla y León , and La Pedriza , Madrid ; interiors shot in CEA studios , Ciudad Lineal , Madrid , Spain . The flick will appeal to minor epic films buffs. Rating : Better than average and entertaining .

This motion picture titled ¨LOs 100 Caballeros¨ is an enjoyable historical flick , being professionally directed by Vittorio Cottafavi (1914-1998) ; he was a complete artist , painter and Peplum expert , as he directed : ¨Conquest of Atlántida¨, ¨Legions of Cleopatra¨,¨Mesallina¨ and ¨rebellion of gladiators¨. He began his professional career in the film industry as a clapper boy. After progressing to write motion picture screenplays and working as assistant director under Alessandro Blasetti and Vittorio De Sica, he became a director in his own right in 1943. Many of his films have been lavishly-produced, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, "sword-and sandal" or ¨Muscleman¨ epics, dealing with mythological subjects involving the Roman Empire or Ancient Egypt . From the mid-60's, Cottafavi concentrated exclusively on directing TV series and mini-series, under contract to RAI , many of them dealing with historic events or known personages such as Oliver Cromwell , Don Giovanni , Napoleone a Sant'Elena , Vita Di Dante and Cristóbal Colon .

One doesn't see many movies set in Moorish Spain so this has a certain "novelty" value working in its behalf. Its story, however, is the standard-issue one about the oppressed townspeople rising up to overthrow an occupying force. Thus we have the usual scenes of the townspeople being drilled in the martial arts to prepare them for the climactic battle, and these scenes are wrapped around a predictable plot about the young man who's initially reluctant to assume the mantle of leadership which is his birthright.

Colorful costumes, bright photography, and a few good vistas help detract from the overall familiarity, and Mark Damon makes an appealing though not especially charismatic hero.

Sometimes movies linger in the mind because of just one scene, however, and this movie has such a moment, on two separate occasions. The Moors controlling the Spanish town which forms the movie's setting have a unique punishment to instill fear in their subjects. Early in the movie we see a bandit, stripped to the waist, enduring this punishment. He's hanged by his wrists from a tripod built over the well which lies in the middle of the town square. (The well is cylindrical and seems to contain no water.) Then he's dropped down into this well, down down down, until the rope binding his wrists brings him to a sudden, socket-wrenching halt. The bandit's scream of pain echoes inside the well and can clearly be heard by all the people in the square. He's then pulled up to the top of the well before being dropped down again. This procedure is carried out a third time, with blood now flowing down his arms from his bound wrists. Another drop isn't necessary because, by this time, the bandit is dead.

Later in the movie Mark Damon endures a similar punishment with the camera giving us several close-up shots of him hanging by his wrists. (And no, unlike Jeffrey Hunter's crucifixion scene in "King of Kings," Damon's armpits have definitely not been shaved.) Perhaps no other movie has shown this form of torture and it must be an excruciating one. Audiences everywhere surely wince every time the victim is jerked to a muscle-tearing, bone-breaking halt.

For a list of other one-of-a-kind tortures in the movies, how about Alan Ladd's keelhauling in "Botany Bay" and Roger Moore's squeezing-by-shrinking-rawhide in "Gold of the Seven Saints?"

As far I remember just in El Cid the Castilian knight against the Moorish portrays a famous battle for Valencia at around 1.100 A. D. at Iberian peninsula, in this "I Cento Cavaliere" renamed in Brazil as "Son of El Cid" such movie states that Iberian still was split in two side the Christians at Burgos and the Moorish ruled the south, in the middle between two sides has a large fertile territory where the Christians peasants have an abundant wheat harvest to supply all neighborhoods, the wheat was sold in a city lead by a elected Mayor, when appears the Muslins under the leadership of the Sheik Abengalbon (Wolfgang Preiss) and his wise son Sheik Aben Calbon (Mario Feliciani) in an off the record visit.

Actually the Muslins want overthrow the Mayor Alfonso Ordonez (Hans Nielsen) and ruling at your way, slaving the free peasants by force, the son of the trader Don Fernando (Mark Damon) aware his pugnacious father Don Gonzalo Herrera (Arnoldo Foà) over the sad happenings, at once he gathered many villagers, peasants and even a one hundred highwaymen lead by a smart dwarf to training them for a fight against the invaders, also getting helping by the Christian monks.

A low profile picture where has a romantic couple Don Fernando and Sancha Ordonez (Antonella Lualdi), Don Fernando challenging the noble Sheik Aben Calbon for a duel, also an average final battle between the Mourish and Iberian, strong humor oriented to relief a little, allowed by sunday matinee, let it see easily, shooting on location at Spain, in several spots of great old fortress and a fabulous rocky desert landscape.

Thanks for reading.

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First Watch: 2023 /How many: 1 /Source: Youtube /Rating: 6.

A specialist of the sword and sandal genre -"La Rivolta Dei Gladatiori" "Messalina Venere Imperatrice" "Le Legioni Di Cleopatra" :some say the latter is better than Mankiewicz's ;they must be blind- Vittorio Cottafavi ,who was a very educated man,never really made a movie which really showed it.

Take "I Cento Cavalieri" which is supposed to take place in the Middle Ages circa 1000 AD and which looks like a spaghetti western ,even the music !If it weren't for the Saracen warriors ,all dressed in blue ,we could think we're near the Mexican border .There's another problem: half of the movie is tongue in cheek stuff -" if the thieves took it ,it's not yours anymore and we are stealing it from thieves"- and the other half is "serious" involving the "torture of the well" and hangings galore.

For once,the director had a true actress,Antonella Lualdi ,who has worked in France with great directors (Autant-Lara ,Chabrol) instead of his usual starlets.But her part is so clichéd she can't do anything of it.

The director's ambitions show ,now and then:

"We hide the maimed,the legless cripples ,for fear they may frighten our young soldiers!"

Later on ,there's a long discussion about war and the ways to put an end to it: all this because of a ridiculous armor!

A Muslim on the steeple of the village church ,calling his faithful to prayer!

And the catholic priests cheering their soldiers ,as if they were watching a football game!

All this plus the beginning and the ending ,an artist painting a fresco, makes the movie watchable,but not particularly memorable.

I first heard of this film when I chanced upon a five-star review of it on an Italian TV listings magazine so I was very grateful to the organizers of the "Italian Kings of the Bs" retrospective at the 61st Venice Film Festival in September 2004 for including it; as it happened, despite tough competition from a couple of its contemporaries, when I finally watched the film on the big screen (with leading man Mark Damon in attendance), I loved it so much that I had no trouble naming it the best film (out of a total of 37) I had seen during that unforgettable fortnight.

Frustratingly, I subsequently found very little reading material on director Cottafavi and the film itself (which is unanimously considered his masterpiece) even in this day and age of the Internet and, in fact, the most substantial piece was an essay written by the late Tom Milne on Cottafavi and two of his contemporaries, Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava, and included in the New York Film Festival's co-founder Richard Roud's indispensable two-volume book, "Cinema: A Critical Dictionary - The Major Film-Makers", which I purchased during my first trip to London in 1999; an even shorter piece is to be found in David Thomson's controversial tome, "A Biographical Dictionary Of The Cinema", in which he references a Cahiers Du Cinema critic naming Cottafavi one of the world's four greatest directors along with Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey and Otto Preminger!! Luckily, the afore-mentioned 2004 screening of THE HUNDRED HORSEMEN, ensured that the film be released on R2 DVD in Italy later on and, despite the lack of supplements and online reviews, I eagerly awaited the disc to get discounted so that I would finally add it to my collection. Thankfully, the video quality is great (even if the sound is overly discreet) and the film itself is every bit the masterpiece I remembered it to be.

After this lengthy introduction, I'll get to the film proper even if, frankly, its most notable aspects have so much to do with aesthetics and narrative form that writing about them is a rather thankless exercise - which perhaps explains the lack of critical writing I mentioned earlier - but I will try my best anyway: the still remarkably pertinent plot deals with the 11th Century Moorish invasion (led by a deliciously villainous Wolfgang Preiss) of a Spanish community during a supposed period of truce and the former's subsequent retaliation under the joint leadership of an ex-warrior turned monk (Gastone Moschin) and an amiably loutish landowner (Arnoldo Foa'). The requisite youthful hero here is Foa''s son and, as already mentioned, is played by Mark Damon (who considers the film his favorite among the many he shot in Italy); besides, he shares the romantic interest with the lovely Antonella Lualdi (whose father, the head of the Spanish community, is hanged by the Moors in retaliation along with most of the menfolk in the village).

The amusing trailer (the sole extra on the Italian DVD) has Foa' describing the film to its prospective audience as an "epicaresque" i.e. a picareqsque epic; as it happened, despite the film turning out to be stylistically ahead of its time - and, in hindsight, the zenith of that most disreputable of genres, the peplum - it was a commercial flop on release ensuring that Cottafavi spend the remainder of his career as a distinguished TV director, helming such adaptations as Graham Greene's THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1970; which was shown on Italian TV last month).

Anyway, to get back to the film itself and its picaresque elements: there is the dwarfish painter seen at the beginning who addresses the audience and acts as a narrator; there is Lualdi's comical intended who turns cowardly, bumbling collaborationist but is subsequently reinstated into the Spanish community and made their head - the word "Fine" (Italian for "The End") are written on his fingers as he cheekily waves at the audience in the very last shot of the film; there is a convoluted philosophical speech given (in a broadly theatrical fashion) by a long-fingered Spanish nobleman who dreams of conducting future wars between one super-soldier on each side but when he shows us his 'candidate', he is ridiculously decked out in a cumbersome, clunky armor which makes all movement impossible and, in fact, falls flat on his back when he tries to do so; and, best of all, Foa's Quixotic soldier who tries to recapture his former dignity by leading the rebels but is quickly cut down to his real size by a dwarfish bandit leader who joins their ranks in a hilarious confrontation.

THE HUNDRED HORSEMEN, like so many international epics of its time (this being an Italo-Spanish-German co-production), had an alternate title, SON OF EL CID and, even if the similarities with the celebrated Anthony Mann/Charlton Heston epic are merely of a historical and geographical nature (apart from the duel by sword between Damon and Preiss' son), I decided to reacquaint myself with that film after a long hiatus. Having said that, Cottafavi's film can stand on its own two feet thanks to the dazzlingly fluid direction which, despite the relatively low budget, gives the film a visually arresting look, particularly when pitting the red-cloaked rebels against the blue-clad Moors with the enslaved white-robed monks in the middle. Furthermore, composer Antonio Perez Olea provides a low-key but equally effective music score which goes against the grain of the grandiose ones typical of the genre. After a very funny first half, Cottafavi reserves his most outstanding trick for the climactic battle as he gradually drains all the color from the image and shooting most of it in black-and-white (anticipating Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL VOL. 1 by 40 years!) thus rendering his depiction of the bleakness and tragedy of war all the more powerful.