Sword-and-Sandal

Sword-and-Sandal, also known by its French-coined name peplum, is a genre of largely Italian-made historical, mythological or biblical epic films set mostly in Greco-Roman antiquity, though some entries reach into the medieval period. Its dominant period ran from 1958 to 1965, when Italian studios made these pictures to capitalize on the success of large Hollywood epics such as Ben-Hur and Cleopatra, before the genre gave way commercially to the spaghetti western and the Eurospy film. Sword-and-Sandal stories typically follow a superhumanly strong hero such as Hercules, Maciste, Samson or Ursus, played by a bodybuilder or athlete, against a backdrop of tyrants, uprisings and a woman in danger, staged with crowd scenes of a city's destruction and modest budgets stretched by colorful production design. Steve Reeves became the genre's most recognized leading man across several of these hero franchises.