Sandokan the Great (1963)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

While Steve Reeves certainly made a lot of musclemen movies for European filmmakers in the 50s and 60s, he would occasionally branch out into other genres, from spaghetti westerns to movies like this one. However, in this particular case, Reeves was used poorly in his new environment. He doesn't have his usual magnetic charm to keep the audience looking at him, one reason that he is not as up front and centre as he was in other movies, the other reason being that he hides his muscles for most of the movie. But even if Reeves had been better used, the movie would still have suffered from extreme dullness. Though filmed on location in Asia with a considerable budget, the pretty backdrop does not hide that the story is both slow-moving and has plenty of plot devices used in many other movies before and since. There's also a very limited amount of action, and except for the okay climatic battle, none of the action is particularly compelling. If you have a hankering for Reeves, pick one of his musclemen movies instead; they may be cheaper and cruder, but they are more lively than this movie.

First of all: The Sandokan movies from 1963 and 1964 are trash- cinema of the 60s, which nowadays appears once again cultic. You notice the low budget, but you will be abducted to beautiful original locations in India and Sri Lanka. Also the look of the costumes is very worth seeing.To the content (WARNING: SPOILERS from now on!):Sandokan, the pirate but also native prince, whose family was deposed and killed by the British, leads his people (a bunch of faithful, pirates, and adventurers) in the fight against the British colonial masters, who are as evil as the Nazis are in some US productions. It is very refreshingly one-sided and wonderfully politically incorrect, that the British here are only bad guys. The first part is, as far as the action is concerned, a little lame, up to the last 15 minutes, but then it's really right. The Malayan natives, supported by Sandokan's men, storm the mighty British fort. The portrayal of the violence in this battle is already quite violent. The British soldiers are really massacred here, which I have not yet seen in this mass of kills. Particularly noteworthy is the scene in which Sandokan fires with a conquered machine gun in a bunch of soldiers in the yard of the fort also backwards and mercilessly mowed them down, which is all shown by the camera. Here is no shading of the camera, you see them going down and in other scenes their dead bodies lying around overall in the background around the whole fort. The Stuntfights are partly quite amateur, but this does not stop the spectacle of this mass struggle.However, the second part is still a little more violent when Sandokan breaks out with his men from a prison camp with a mine and a quarry. There he used also a conquered British machine gun, which he mounted on a truck and then firing around on a ride through the mine, killing British soldiers in rows with it. This goes even further when he slaughters nearly the entire British garrison alone in the yard of the camp with the MG, so that the court is covered with the bodies in red British uniforms. The fight is quite one-sided but this machine gun raid is really suspicious. There are three of these battles in the second part, one on a ship, in the prison camp and in the final battle. In all three battles the British soldiers are completely slaughtered by the pirates and the natives, something which would been no longer shown in this intensity and political incorrect size of the massacres. Infortunately we have only one battle in part 1. A few more battles would be better but the Fort battle here is probably the best.Overall my conclusion is: Good entertaining films, in which the natives are the really one-sided good ones, which I find very refreshing.

I just finished watching a Steve Reeves double feature of this film and the sequel, 'Pirates of the Seven Seas', and was quite entertained the whole time. Reeves' character, Sandokan, is a departure from his well known sword-and-sandal flicks. In these films, while he's a formidable presence who can handle himself, he's not portrayed as a muscle-bound Hercules or Goliath. He's a refined but tough son of royalty, leading a group of rebels fighting British colonial rule of their Malaysian island. With literate scripts, scenic locales and numerous hair-raising adventures, 'Sandokan the Great', as well as the equally colorful and well-constructed sequel, are both highly enjoyable. A couple of interesting items include the fact that the same actor (Leo Anchoriz), played the main bad guy in both films. In both films, he was the head of the British military administration, yet he was cast as completely different people! It's also somewhat disconcerting to hear (in the version of the movie I have) a much different voice dubbed in for Reeves than was used in most of his peplum flicks. For Steve Reeves fans, these are essential additions to your collection. Good luck finding them.

This film even seemed stiffer than other Italian adventure-films of that time, and Steve Reeves, believe me!, doesn't help a bit. The storyline is tedious and unattractive. There is a lot of archive footage for the jungle-fauna built in (that even looks livelier than the film itself). Only fun scene: Reeves' fight against a tiger.But in the last ten minutes the situation explodes, and there is this gigantic battle at the fort, well staged and fun. Reeves gets to fire a machine gun (a little like Django) and matches the strength of an army. If only Lenzi had divided the action and strewn it all over the film's time, it would have been more watchable (if you don't skip the beginning, that is). My rating: 5/10.