They used to make movies about Maciste, a strong man who came to the aid of oppressed people in their struggles against tyranny. He could turn up anywhere from Babylon to Egypt to South America to, as in this film, Russia, and at any time period from the Stone Age to about the 17th century A.D. Seemingly, a Maciste movie could take place in any society that had not yet experienced the emergence of a strong bourgeoisie.

Maciste clearly fulfills the nostalgia for a pre-modern economy and for a world in which problems are to be resolved with force. The peplum (the preferred term for the type of musclebound exotica also known as "sword and sandal") flourished as a film genre during the fifties, when force on the world stage was under the spell of deterrence. By 1964, the year Atlas against the Czar was released, the genre had just about run its course. (In Italy, by the way, they called it Maciste alla corte dello Zar. In America, the distributors figured nobody would go see a movie with a guy's name they couldn't pronounce, so Maciste movies were released as Hercules, Samson, Goliath, Son of Hercules, Atlas, etc., movies—displacements that accentuated the films' feckless unconditionality.) A new regime of verisimilitude was overtaking the Italian commercial cinema: in the twilight of peplums, looming on the horizon were the next big Italian movie genres: the western and the secret-agent film—both of which acknowledged levels of psychological and political complexity that the peplum excluded.

The peplum's imminent death, and the recognition that its answers, or its way of posing questions, lack both relevance and validity, are legible in every aspect of Atlas against the Czar, from its threadbare script to its poster-like sets. At the beginning of the film, the hard-drinking czar, Nikolai Nikolayevich (Massimo Serato), is introduced watching a floor show in his palace. The faux-oriental music sets the tone for the news that the czar is sending an archeological expedition to the Urals to find relics of an ancient civilization. What the czar really wants is the buried treasure he's heard about, which he believes will allow him to conquer the world. The archeologists find Maciste (Kirk Morris) in suspended animation in a sarcophagus in a cave and revive him by rubbing oil on his chest. ("Thank your lucky stars for allowing you to witness this important scientific event," the head archeologist exhorts a soldier.) Unfortunately, Maciste doesn't know who he is or where he's from. He does, at least, speak Russian.

This revival-of-Maciste angle is one of the unusual elements in the plot. In other Maciste movies, either Maciste is already an adopted member of the tribe he's helping out, or he simply appears out of nowhere to lend a hand. Here, it's stated that Maciste has been subjected to magical forces and left in a state from which other characters need to free him. This implication suggests that at the end of the peplum cycle, Maciste's mere appearance on screen is no longer deemed enough to establish him as an ideally functioning hero, ready to dominate whatever sociohistorical spectacle the film throws up. The filmmakers now feel the need to indicate that Maciste is bound, however precariously, by chains of contingency that stretch outside the particular dreamworld of the film.

With this development comes a solidifying of Maciste as an object—initially an inanimate one. Later in Atlas against the Czar, Maciste is immobilized again by means of a drug that causes a deathlike sleep (the heroine manages to obtain an antidote from a wise man living in a cave). A strange inertia keeps pulling Maciste back to this state, more mineral than animal. He constantly tends to become just a thing, like the boulders he loves to throw. I read this tendency as the film's awareness that, with the waning of the peplum's commercial success, Maciste is in danger of becoming an antique, a quaint curiosity, a thing whose force has been spent, whose vital relationship with society has been snapped off.

Another slightly offbeat aspect of the film (apart from the idea of setting it in Russia) is the emphasis on indoctrinating Maciste. Both the czar and the rebels consider it necessary to change Maciste's consciousness. The czar sends him to study with an obedience-inculcating schoolmaster, who advises: "You should never question what the czar tells you to do." Members of a peasant-based rebel movement set Maciste straight about the oppressive regime of the czar and his counselors, and Maciste concludes, "I'm utterly appalled by their tyranny." Maciste's viewpoint on the conflict matters, apparently, because his extraordinary strength makes him a decisively scale-tipping weapon, a human H-bomb. But the deep reason why Maciste as a subject is so important is that he embodies the faith of the audience in the film. Like Maciste, the viewer has been placed in suspended animation and comes to the world of the film from some other place and time, of which all memory has been lost. All the characters in the film, indeed its entire fragile existence, depend wholly on the consent of the viewer. In seeking to secure the ideological commitment of Maciste, the czar and the rebels are seeking, pathetically, to persuade the audience that their goals and struggles matter.

The end of the film registers the fading of this frail faith. After the rebels defeat the czar, Maciste is asked to remain in Russia. He delivers his time-honored demurral: "Your affection for me I find precious in itself, making me want to stay here. But other lands are in serious danger and need help, so I must go there at once. I have only this purpose in life." The equivalent of this speech occurs in many Maciste movies. Here it has an especially token quality (like all the other generic notations in the film) because of the film's wanton slipshodness and almost self-acknowledged unpersuasiveness. The director of Atlas against the Czar, Amerigo Anton (pseudonym for Tanio Boccia), is far from being a stylist on the level of Riccardo Freda or Vittorio Cottafavi (two masters of the peplum); as an unpretentious director of undemanding action cinema, he falls somewhere short of Alberto de Martino and Sergio Grieco. What Anton has going for him is his worthlessness. He seems to have made a conscious decision not to give a fuck about this film. Confronting the outrageous, he seems utterly bored by it. Anton's inability—or refusal—to believe in the film correlates perfectly with the film's end-of-the-line quality. What he does is, admittedly, not the least that could be done with the material (one would need a Warhol for that), but he gets as close to the least as possible while still paying the necessary formal obeisance to the notion of film as "entertainment."

Which means that Atlas against the Czar is almost better than an entertainment, but in failing to be better, it's still better by how much it also falls short of being entertaining. Undoubtedly a certain distance is required (such as that provided by time, genre analysis, or a "camp" attitude) for this discrepancy to be converted into a virtue, for the failure of entertainment to become a source of enjoyment. But it is not at all clear that this distance—which each latter-day ironist sentimentally imagines to be his/her original discovery and essential contribution—was not built into the film when it was made: put there by a bored director or latent in the genre itself and in the genre's relationship to its audience. As a disillusioned parable about this relationship, Atlas against the Czar is exemplary.

Atlas against the Czar is available from Something Weird Video under the title Atlas vs. the Czar.