Il re dei barbari

Made the same year as another sword and sandal movie dealing with the same subject ,"Attila Flagello Di Dio" (starring Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren),it is an icily impersonal movie from Douglas Sirk.It's watchable ,but it could have been done by anyone at all.Sirk's métier was melodrama (he was the master of the genre in the fifties) and western ("Taza,son of Cochise" ) and epics are not obviously his forte.

Although Jack Palance was potentially as ideal as Anthony Quinn to portray the king of the Huns,the screenwriters made him a too polite ,too sentimental ,not bestial enough character (just compare with Anthony Quinn's performance,in a movie which was not better though).

Sirk did not seem to put of lot of effort into his work:"Christian" best describes it:the thunderbolt,the Roman talking about the Virgin and her son to the pagan daughter ,the pope 's intervention (there's a similar scene in the Italian movie),the final victory which was given by "their" God...