Italian director Sergio Leone was one of the screenwriters on the latter film. Several of these guilty pleasures will be showcased during UCLA’s two-weekend festival that kicks off tonight with a double bill of “The Loves of Hercules” with Mickey Hargitay and Jayne Mansfield and “Duel of the Titans” with Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott. So there was this demand for more and more bodybuilders.”

‘Hercules’ was a huge success in Italy before it was in the United States, and that’s why all of these Italian filmmakers rushed to duplicate it. “On a practical level, a lot of it was just producers copying the original success. So some have argued that the casting of these American musclemen in these Italian films is sort of a futuristic element. “In the Italian popular imagination of the 1950s, America was sort of a futuristic place and there was this whole physical cultural going on in America and especially in Southern California.

“Some people have theorized that these films are in a way Italy looking back at its past and looking forward to the future,” said David Pendleton, programmer at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which is sponsoring the “Swords & Sandals” festival that begins tonight. In “The Witch’s Curse,” for example, no one blinks an eye when a loincloth-clad muscleman from ancient Rome arrives in a small town in 17th century Scotland to help a woman accused of being a witch. The titles were as kitschy as the films themselves: “Hercules in the Haunted World,” “Hercules Against the Mongols,” “The Giant of Metropolis” and “The Mighty Ursus,” among others. LONG before Russell Crowe slipped on a toga for “Gladiator” or Brad Pitt unsheathed his sword for the upcoming “Troy,” there were the Italian “sword and sandals” epics of the 1950s and ‘60s - those poorly dubbed, often cheesy, delightfully quirky fantasy-adventures nominally set in the ancient world, featuring beefcake musclemen and buxom, shapely sex kittens that usually aired Saturday afternoons on U.S.

Sword and sandals fantasy