Duel of Champions (1961)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

When this film begins, I found myself feeling a bit sad. Here is an alcoholic and puffy Alan Ladd towards the very end of his career playing in an ultra-low budget Italian sword and sandal epic. Alan Ladd?! In this sort of film?! For fans of this once charismatic actor, seeing him in the Roman garb fighting limply, it is hard to watch.It seems that Ladd is the commander of a legion in the early days of Rome--long before the Roman republic and even longer before the legendary days of the Caesars. This Rome is a city-state and it is not THE player on the Italian peninsula, but one of several city-states. This film focuses on the war between Rome and nearby Alba. During the war, Ladd is taken prisoner and assumed a coward by the folks back in Rome. When he ultimately escapes and returns, he's reviled--so soon he leaves for a quiet life in the country. However, when Rome needs his services once again, Ladd is content to sit this one out--after all, what has Rome done for him? In addition to having Ladd looking old and puffy, he also isn't all that much of a hero in this one. Unlike the stereotypical Roman soldier, he's more than willing to turn tail and run. And who's to blame him--as in this film his brilliant strategy ultimately pays off! The film has a lot of problems. Some of it is due to the terrible quality of the print from Diamond Entertainment (a relatively unknown company for a rather forgotten film). It's both blurry AND grainy--like it was copied off a badly degraded videotape. Now you can't blame the film makers for this, but you can blame them for choosing a far from charismatic leading man (an American star in order to give this Italian film some class), having a mostly dull script and for just looking amazingly cheap throughout the film. In particular, you never really see Rome--just a wall that looks like it was made out of painted plywood. Overall, it's a film not a whole lot better than the Maciste (aka, Hercules or Atlas or Samson) films of the same era.Dull and cheap and only recommended to those who insist on seeing all of Alan Ladd's films--even the bad ones.

The worst part about Orazi e Curiazi is that this might have been the best offer Alan Ladd was getting at this time and he took it for the money.As he proved in The Black Knight which had much better production values, Alan Ladd had no business doing these ancient costume epics. He hasn't the flair for swashbucklers, what was Sue Carol thinking when she signed him for this role. Around this time people like Victor Mature and Cornel Wilde were doing some European type sword epics. but they were both good in the genre.Ladd is one of three brothers selected by the King of Rome, Robert Keith to fight three brothers from Alba to see who's going to be the big Kahuna on the Italian peninsula. This was in the real ancient days before Rome became an Empire. Guess who winds up the winner.What's even worse is that Ladd does not exactly triumph by means that would be consistent with these Italian sword and sandal epics. He's not terribly heroic here.This film also turned out to be the farewell film for Robert Keith who was with Ladd eleven year earlier in Branded, a western and a much better film. Of course at that time Ladd was Paramount's number one action hero.I can't say that this is for Alan Ladd fans only because I think his fans would be pained by the experience.

Having read about but not seen I bought this movie on DVD and as the previous reviewer said the transfer is terrible, that is a real shame as this is one of the more enjoyable sword and sandal epics. The great movie writer Steven Shuerer said that Alan Ladd appeared rather foolish in this movie, I disagree, Ladd put's in a nice performance here as one of three Roman brothers who must fight a rival three to try and put an end to years of fighting with the Albans, I think how the film works is that most of the cast are speaking in English, not badly dubbed from Italian as most of these films are, agreed Ladd looks rather tired and the effects of his long term alcoholism are evident, but I don't think he got a good deal from reviewers who concentrated more on his size and his personal problems. I do wish the makers of these films would take more time to try and restore the movie to a better print on DVD, some of these Italian epics are highly regarded by their fans, myself included so in this day and age of digital restoration these things should be brought in by them.

This international co-production tells of a "famous" duel between two sets of three brothers (one from each side of the Romans and the Barbarians) which was to decide the fate of the ongoing war between them. While the production values sounded promising on paper – co-director Terence Young, American actors Alan Ladd and Robert Keith (whose last film this turned out to be), French star Jacques Sernas, ex-Fellini alumnus Franco Fabrizi, four noteworthy screenwriters, etc – the film comes off as a rather talky and undernourished affair which cannot hope to do justice to its mythical subject.A visibly tired Alan Ladd, then, is evidently miscast and seems to be playing his role as if he has just stepped in from the American West rather than being at the head of a Roman legion! The hokey, would-be tragic "Romeo and Juliet" subplot involving Ladd's sister and Barbarian Fabrizi doesn't help matters either; on the plus side, however, is a sequence early on where Ladd is teared at by a pack of hungry wolves and the forest hunt by the three barbarian brothers for Ladd (after having killed his two siblings) which rebounds on themselves – with our hero, naturally, emerging victorious at the end to walk off into the sunset with his beloved.