GORDON MITCHELL, BODYBUILDER

In Part 1 of an Infinity/Dark Side crossover, MJ Simpson digs out an archive interview with Gordon Mitchell, American star of dozens of Italian ‘sword and sandal’ movies…

Ever since the silent days, Italian film-makers have drawn on classical mythology. From the late 1950s on, this became a unique genre – the ‘peplum’ film, sometimes called ‘sword and sandal’. Physically impressive body-builders were recruited from California, shipped across the Atlantic and cast as muscular heroes. The central character might be called Hercules or Samson or Maciste – often it varied from country to country as distributors provided their own dubbed dialogue.

The spark for the peplum genre was Pietro Francisci’s 1958 feature Le Fatiche di Ercole starring Steve Reeves. When producer Joseph Levine released that film in the United States in 1959 as Hercules, audiences flocked to see it. Never slow to react, other Italian filmmakers hurried across the Atlantic in search of their own slice of American beefcake. And the place they headed for was Muscle Beach in Venice, California.

All the great American peplum stars have now left us, but back in 2000 I was fortunate enough to sit down for an extensive interview with Gordon Mitchell, who made more than 150 films, mostly in Italy. In this Infinity feature we’ll cover his early life and his time as a peplum star. For Mitchell’s memories of his later horror and science fiction films, see this month’s issue of The Dark Side.

“Muscle Beach was the greatest place of all time,” stated Mitchell categorically. “Muscle Beach actually started in the ’30s. It was where the stunt guys and others used to come down to the beach and bring their own weights, and little by little it got bigger and bigger and bigger. This is where all the muscle guys came down and hung out. We had a big place that we built for working out. Then we had all the gymnasts and everything with their own platforms. We had crowds there that even Disney wished they had. There was so much friendship there and we had such a great time. No-one hated each other; everybody liked each other in the world of health.”

In the 1940s Mitchell had been a physical training instructor for the US Air Force. As such he was deemed ineligible for the bodybuilding competitions that were becoming popular: “I taught survival swimming to the officers and young cadets: how to survive at sea if they get shot down. I wanted to get into competitions, but they said, ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m a physical training instructor.’ They said, ‘Well you’re a professional. You can’t enter’! A few years later, after I got