The Colossus of Rhodes (film)

The Colossus of Rhodes
US film poster
Directed by	Sergio Leone
Screenplay by	Ennio De Concini Sergio Leone Cesare Seccia Luciano Martino Ageo Savioli Luciano Chitarrini Carlo Gualtieri
Produced by	Giuseppe Maggi Mario Maggi[1]
Starring	Rory Calhoun Lea Massari Georges Marchal Conrado San Martín Ángel Aranda
Cinematography	Antonio L. Ballesteros
Edited by	Eraldo Da Roma
Music by	Angelo Francesco Lavagnino
Production companies	Cine-Produzioni Associate Procusa Film Comptoir Français de Productions Cinématographiques Cinema Television International
Distributed by	Filmar (Italy) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (International)
Release dates	16 June 1961 (1961-06-16) (Italy) 14 December 1961 (1961-12-14) (United States)
Running time	142 minutes (Italy) 128 minutes (International)
Countries	Italy Spain France
Language	Italian

The Colossus of Rhodes (Italian: Il Colosso di Rodi) is a 1961 Italian sword and sandal film co-written and directed by Sergio Leone. Starring Rory Calhoun, it is a fictional account of the island of Rhodes during its classical period in the late third century BCE before coming under Roman control, using the Colossus of Rhodes as a backdrop for the story of a war hero who becomes involved in two different plots to overthrow a tyrannical king: one by Rhodian patriots and the other by Phoenician agents.

The film was Leone's first work as a credited director,^[2] in a genre where he already had worked before (as the replacement director for The Last Days of Pompeii and as a secondary director for both Ben-Hur and Quo Vadis). It is perhaps the least known of the seven films he officially directed, and is the only one without an Ennio Morricone score.

The film is set during the time following Alexander the Great’s death (323 BC) but before the rise of the Roman empire (27 BC), known as the Hellenistic era. Most sword-and-sandal epics of the 1950s and 1960s were set in either classical Greece or even earlier (Hercules, Ulysses, The Giant of Marathon) or the later Roman period (Ben Hur, The Magnificent Gladiator, Quo Vadis). The only other films made during the peplum era to use a Hellenistic setting are Hannibal (1959), Revak the Rebel and Siege of Syracuse (both 1960).