Atlas

Atlas (1961)

Feared by Every Man, Desired by Every Woman!

Evil king Praximedes convinces superhero Atlas to fight for him, but Atlas eventually sees the king's true nature and turns against him.

Date of release
1961-05-01
TMDB
3.4 / 10 (12)
Runtime
1h 19m
Genres
Adventure, Action, Fantasy
Director
Roger Corman

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Greece

Atlas is a 1961 peplum film directed by Roger Corman and starring Michael Forest and Frank Wolff. It was filmed in Greece. Corman called it "my last attempt to do a big picture on a low budget." Writer Charles B. Griffith said "Atlas was a mess. It was a doomed project."

Production

Griffith talks about the origins of the project:

I was involved in an Israeli war picture about helicopters, which never got finished, when Roger decided to make Atlas. This was after Little Shop, and I wanted to make it as Atlas, the Guided Muscle, but Roger wanted to make a Hercules, Italian-type thing. Roger had a deal to shoot it in Puerto Rico, so it was going to be a jungle picture about Atlas and Zeus.

According to Corman, he was going to England to make a film about Gary Powers' U2 crash called I Flew a Spy Plane Over Russia based on a script by Robert Towne, but says Towne got writer's block after twenty pages. "I decided to leave London because I looked like an idiot," says Corman.

He decided since he was in Europe he might as well make a movie. With the massive international popularity of Hercules, Corman thought he would make his own entry in the sword and sandal genre with a film shot in Greece instead of Italy.

Corman's original plan was for an epic film in wide screen and colour to be released initially on a roadshow circuit by his Filmgroup organisation instead of Filmgroup's usual black and white double features.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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