[ IMDB | Stream (Amazon) | Stream (Dailymotion) | Wikipedia ]
Duration: 1:30:00, aspect ratio: 2.35 : 1
See all Sword and sandal references.
This is from the Warriors 50 Movie Set disc 2, side A, track 2.
- Ed Fury – Ursus of the shepherds
- Luciana Gilli – Princess Diana, daughter of the king
- Claudia Mori – Mila, niece of the king, she earns an entry in The Female Villains Wiki
- Nando Tamberlani – King Lotar
- Adriano Micantoni – General Hamilkar or Amilcare/Hamilon (ha MEE len)
- Giuseppe Addobbati – Magistrate; also in two Son of Hercules films: The Beast of Babylon Against the Son of Hercules (1963) and The Terror of Rome Against the Son of Hercules (1964)
- Pietro Ceccarelli – Lero
There are three Ursus films in this series with Ed Fury (though many more with the Ursus character):
- The Mighty Ursus (1 February 1961) [ IMDB | Wikipedia ]
- Ursus in the Valley of the Lions (21 December 1961) [ IMDB | Wikipedia ]
- Ursus in the Land of Fire (1963)
My disc and all of the streaming sites are from the same print and are considerably cropped and faded in places:
Some sites have uncropped and/or crisper images from these films taken from non-English language copies and promotional photos. Here’s a comparison of my copy and an uncropped one from PEPLUM TV:
PEPLUM TV is an invaluable resource and often has these flicks streaming (not this time though). Their article from Feb 2020, By the Gods!, has some good background on Ursus in these three an several other films.
A bunch of neat foreign (in relation to us US watchers) posters for sale:
The story:
Ursus of the shepherds saves Diana after she falls off of her horse and into a river
General Hamilon threatens him for crossing the border and demands he return to the land of shepherds.
When Diana awakens, Ursus is gone and the general tells her Ursus attacked her
while she was riding and knocked her out. One of his solders swam to her rescue and thwarted Ursus’s intentions to kidnap and trade her back to them for control of the river. When they return to the palace, the Hamilon convinces the king to have Ursus killed for his aggression and then attack his village, taking control of both the river and the shepherds’ lands. Mila backs up his story.
10:00
Ursus returns to his village and hears Diana call for help as her chariot is chased by ruffians on horseback. It’s a setup! The ruffians are merely “ruffians” and are actually soldiers from the palace that lead him into the land of fire towards the sacred mountain of fire. The soldiers encounter an elderly priest of the mountain who warns against their sacrilege of the holy land. They scoff at his warning and summarily kill him.
Urses catches up and is quickly boxed in by several other groups of soldiers who were waiting for him. Trapped there, he must survive a:
Feat of strength: Fight off five men (sent to match his “strength of five men”)
Their sparring is interrupted when the sacred mountain erupts and rains rocks and fire upon them. Ursus is trapped. The soldiers cheer his apparent death and ride off to raid the village uncontested. They burn it to the ground and take the ones they do not kill as “slaves for the grist mill.”
20:00
Diana confesses to her handmaiden that she feels guilty tricking Ursus. Alas, what’s done is done. Another fire priest demands that the soldiers responsible for the killing be punished. The king agrees and allows them to take the general and Lero for whatever actions are appropriate. They are sentenced by the council of priests to have their lives spared but be exiled from the kingdom. Soldiers arrive to rescue the accused and kill all but the high priest, who escapes into the meandering mountain tunnels. The freed general return to the palace, sneaks into the king’s bed chambers, and kills him. A coup!
Ursus frees himself from the rockslide and enters a cave in the sacred mountain where priests are holding service to the god Iat (eye-AT, sp?).
Throughout all of the machinations and court intrigue, Mila is always at the general’s side and pushing him to take power and so she tells him to kill Diana so that she herself can ascend to the throne with him. Diana escapes (for real this time) on horseback and is again pursued (again, for real) by the soldiers.
30:00
Ursus returns to his now-destroyed village and finds one survivor who then tells him what happened and who happened it. Nearby, Diana arrives at the river and swims across to escape, and then arrives at the village where she asks for Ursus’s forgiveness. Hamilon thinks she is dead.
We return to the palace where slaves are lashed to giant mill wheel and turn them, Sisyphus-like.
To address the general’s/king’s distress over the people’s love of Diana, Mila plans a tournament to distract the distract and allay their suspicions. Because it offers one wish from the king to the victor, the tournament of course lures in Ursus/Robin Hood. Diana pleads that he not go.
40:00
Ursus, Diana, and the elderly survivor from the village make their way, with semi-stealth into the audience and wait for Ursus’s moment for combat. Lero fights and defeats (by cheating, the crowd was not happy) the best combatants from other lands and just as he is about to be declared winner, Ursus (“impudent braggart!” declares General/King Hamilon) challenges him. But first, he must survive a:
Feat of strength: Before battling, Ursus is subjected to the “test of the chariots” where he is pulled between two chariots, four horses each. (See also Hercules the Invincible (1964) for a feat of strength with our hero tied between two elephants.)
The General/King spies Diana in the audience after Ursus glances in her direction and so ties her between the chariots. Ursus holds fast and becomes the Hero of the Audience, but Mila notices Diana’s royal arm band and Mila has her and the old man arrested, unbeknownst to the General/King.
50:00
Ursus, standing mid-colosseum, challenges Hamilon who exclaims: “Your impudence has no limits … I should have you killed like a dog!” Hamilon then has him fight Lero, allowing Lero five weapons against Ursus’s “strength of five men” (callback, from the scene at the holy mountain). To add to the challenge, Ursus first must also fight five men as Lero circles the fray on horseback and whips at them. That was a nice, evil touch.
Ursus defeats them handily by throwing them one by one into a pit with spikes at the bottom. There’s always spikes. When he fights Lero, Lero throws him into the pit by cheating by falsely yielding, but Ursus grabs the edge and returns to defeat Lero by ignoring a second attempt to deceive and throws him to a spikey death.
The people now love him more and for his one wish he asks that the assassin of the previous King be punished. He is, of course, arrested.
1:00:00
Ursus and the old man get chained to the grist mill and whipped while they labor. Hamilon watches and laughs. Elsewhere Diana is chained in the dungeon and Mila whips her. Lots of whipping in this film. The General/King finally learns that Diana is alive and stops Mila from torturing her any further.
The King then wants to abandon the scheming Mila and take Diana as his wife since the people love her. She does not take this well and ineffectively attacks him but is quickly dispatched. The King then boasts to Ursus that Diana is alive and will be his wife, enraging Ursus who then breaks free of the mill. Unfortunately, he is overrun prepared for a new punishment.
Feat of strength: He must hold up a giant block of stone or be crushed and impaled on spikes. (See also Hercules vs. the Giant Warriors (1964) where he must hold up a giant weighted lever to stop spikes from impaling the Female Interest, and Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules (1961) with the impaling threatening two of Hercules’ compatriots.)
1:10:00
Hamilon tells Diana that framing and torturing Ursus was all Mila’s plan, but she rebuffs him and runs to see Ursus. Seeing her, Ursus throws off the stone and it breaks through the prison bars. (Note that when he broke free from the grist mill, Diana was not present and he was overcome. It’s actually seeing her that gives him the strength to fully liberate.) He then frees Diana from Hamilon.
The last remaining fire priest takes the two into his cave in the mountain of fire. Soldiers follow and try to break down the stone door to the cave. The people find out that the soldiers are trying to kill Diana and rebel.
The soldiers break in and reach Ursus, Diana, and the priest.
1:20:00
The god Iat is angry.
The angry citizens overrun the soldiers (Note that again Diana gives others the strength to fight against injustice. Also cf. the citizen rebellion in Hercules vs. the Giant Warriors (1964)). The General/King kills the priest and Iat becomes not only angry but vengeful and the mountain starts erupting again. Ursus and Diana escape but most of the soldiers are trapped and those who flee are kill by citizens as the exit. Revenge! Ursus completes the arc of justice and throws king into the fire.
Ursus and Diana celebrate and are feted by the citizens.
