Thirteenth-century China was "a time of myth and mysteries, conquest and courage," at least according to the opening title sequence of 1962's Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World. The film's plot concerns Samson (not the biblical Samson, but simply a large and supernaturally strong man who has chosen to go by that name) rendering assistance to a group of Buddhist monks who are trying to restore the rightful emperor to power by taking on the Mongol horde and their leader, Garak, who threatens to subvert the process of bloodline sovereignty.
Samson, played by the American actor Gordon Scott, is not from China, but finds himself there in the course of his duties of wandering the earth and righting wrongs.
The fact that he wanders a fully clothed earth dressed only in a pair of boots and tight orange high-cut shorts seems to attract little notice, although it may explain the conversion, at one point in the movie, of the evil and buxom Kiutai, who takes up Samson's side and is brutally whipped by Garak for her perfidy.
Along the way, Samson wrestles a tiger, uproots a tree, beats up a group of men with the support column from a tavern balcony, and, in the seventh miracle of the title (the last miracle at any rate--they do not total seven), manages to topple the Mongol palace despite being killed, shackled, and walled into a catacomb in the palace basement (in that order).
Despite the unorthodox locale, Asian extras, and sets left over from the production company's previous film, Marco Polo, Samson is an excellent example of the sword-and-sandals gladiator pictures churned out during the 1960s.
It is the kind of movie Gordon Scott calls "a laugh," the kind he says you could make standing on your head. Scott made dozens of them, and for most people Samson and the Seven Miracles is largely forgettable. Scott will be better remembered as the 11th actor to play Tarzan, a role he filled in the mid to late 1950s, but for one fan, and eventually for Scott himself, Samson was a life-changing event.
Roger Thomas grew up in Baltimore but spent the summers in farm country--West Virginia, Pennsylvania, or Ohio. Thomas saw Scott play Samson at the Buckstown drive-in theater while his family was staying in Rogersville, Pa., in the '60s, and he never forgot it.
At the end of the movie, Samson looks directly into the camera. The hero, victorious, is asked, "Must you really leave us?"
"My task here is finished," he responds.
"Destiny brought me here. Now I must go wherever there is a fight between right and wrong."
At least that's how it happens on the autographed videocassette in Thomas' collection.
He remembers the line slightly differently: "Where will you go?" "Wherever I am needed."
Thomas is 62, with slicked-back hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and a pitch-perfect Johnny Cash baritone twang.
He has a near photographic memory, particularly when it comes to movies. While it is possible that he has mistaken the line, it is more likely that the movie he saw as a boy, dubbed from the Italian, was a slightly different cut. Samson and the Seven Miracles has also appeared under the names Goliath and the Golden City and Maciste at the Court of the Great Khan, the second a nod to the original Italian version, in which Samson is, in fact, the stock Italian movie hero Maciste, a similarly large man of unknown origin, given to earth-wandering and wrong-righting.
Whatever the exact words, the intent is the same--boilerplate hero stuff--but the effect it had on Roger Thomas was undeniable. He became a fan of Gordon Scott. Decades later, after his hero came to live in the back bedroom of his South Baltimore rowhouse, Thomas asked him what the last line of the movie meant, and Scott told him, "I was talking to you.
Didn't you know that?"
In its roots and in its meaning, the diluted term "fan" carries with it the sense of, if not exactly religious reverence, something close to it. From the Barry Manilow Fan Club to the Japanese otaku, the enthusiast looks to the heavenly star for something outside of everyday life.
It is hero worship. It's girls screaming at the Beatles, or sleeping with the Rolling Stones. It's the autograph line outside the concert, the flash bulbs at the premiere.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the rich are different than you and I. Had he lived to see the current age of celebrity, he might have added that the rich are closer to us than the famous.
The famous live in exotic places, behind high walls, and we pay men with cameras to spy on them. They are better than us, different from us, bigger than us. They don't work regular hours, they don't eat regular food, and they emphatically do not live in our back bedrooms.
Gordon Scott lived the life of the famous. He was admired by men, and women desired him. He traveled the world and he flew first class.
In a Baltimore County nursing home recently, Thomas tried to explain his admiration for Scott, who squirmed in his chair, unable to keep from interrupting. The trappings of Scott's fame were hidden away in the dresser of the room he shared with a stranger. It is doubtful that his nurses, or even his roommate, knew of his career on film.
Thomas: "All my life, he's been the inspiration for me. I used to spend my vacation time looking for him. I never did give up.
"
Thomas: "I'm proud to be that sick. He changed me, and I didn't turn out too bad. I used to work, make my money, go to the movies.
All my life it's been Gordon Scott this and Gordon Scott that."
Scott: "Can you imagine trying to live up to that shit?"
Thomas: "They don't make them any better than that in my book.
Nothing. They don't have anything better today."
Scott: "That's a great compliment, and no joke, Roger.
"
Thomas: "It's from the heart, old friend."
Later, after Thomas has left, Scott says this: "Roger is a marvelous guy. He's more than a fan--he's more like a friend or a brother or a son.
He's a real nice guy."
According to the Internet Movie Database, Scott has starred in 25 movies, but when he looks over the list, he says, "They aren't all here."
Scott has played the heroes of mythology, from Samson (tag line: "The Mightiest of Them All!
") to a founder of Rome (in 1961's Romulus and Remus). He has taken a few turns as Goliath (in Goliath and the Vampires and Goliath and the Rebel Slave). Scott has been Hercules, Zorro, Julius Caesar, and Buffalo Bill.
He has been a gladiator (Gladiators of Rome) and a cowboy (opposite Joseph Cotten in Gli Uomini dal passo pesante, released in America as The Tramplers). He played a spy (Danger! Death Ray!
) and a sheik (or a close relative, in Kerim, Son of the Sheik).
But to a generation of men who were boys (and women who were girls, or perhaps slightly older than girls) in the late 1950s, Gordon Scott is Tarzan, the larger-than-life ape-man whom he played in six films from 1955 to 1960, and whose picture appeared on posters and comic books around the world.
Gordon Scott isn't as big as he used to be, but then, almost no one is.
In a recent series of interviews during a temporary stay at a Baltimore County nursing home, he dressed casually (though less casually than Samson), in sweats and a black-on-black Yankees cap, and sat in a wheelchair. As he spoke about his life, he pulled references from a wardrobe behind him--a book about the men who starred as Tarzan, an October, 1964 copy of Young Mr. America magazine featuring "Gordon Scott: Hollywood's King of the Muscle Men.
" At the height of his fame, he weighed 240, and stood 6-foot-2, but Gordon Scott was big even before he was Gordon Scott, when he was still just Gordon Werschkul, a German-American kid growing up in Portland, Ore., where he was born in 1927. He started bodybuilding when he was about 15--as soon as he realized it made him a hit with the ladies.
"Vanity," he says, "is the crutch of us all."
When he was drafted in 1944, his size got him held back in basic training for five months while the Army special-ordered a uniform to fit him. All the other guys he trained with went into the old Rainbow division and off to fight and die on some Pacific island.
"They're under the sand, now," he says. The uniform came in time for Scott to spend the tail end of the war training other soldiers in California and Texas. After he got out, he worked a variety of jobs, until someone noticed the big man working out at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas and asked if he wanted to manage the health club.
He did, and "that was two and a half of the greatest years of my life," he says, a remarkable statement, given what was to come in 1953 as he worked out poolside at the hotel.
"I was out there working on the [diving] board," he recalls. "They had a three-meter board at that time, and I was out there working out on it.
After I got out of the pool, this guy introduced himself, said he was an agent and wanted to talk to me. They were casting someone to be the new Tarzan, and he wanted me to come down and meet Sol Lesser, the producer. I said, `Sure,' you know, just for a lark.
I didn't take it seriously at the time. We met Lesser on a Wednesday, we tested Friday and Saturday, and I was signed Monday."
The producers had already tested some 200 actors and athletes from around the world to fill the role of Tarzan.
Gordon Werschkul, who had never considered acting, became Gordon Scott, the new hero of one of the most popular and long-lived action film series ever. ("Werschkul" was a little too close to Weissmuller, as in Johnny, still the best-known Tarzan actor.) Scott's first movie was filmed in the wilderness of a back lot at RKO Studios--the same one used for Gone With the Wind.
"They had a little jungle fixed up out there," he says, "and we went out."
Tarzan's Hidden Jungle, released in 1955, was not a very good movie. Nor were 1957's Tarzan and the Lost Safari, '58's Tarzan and the Trappers (which began life as a TV series before being re-edited into a feature film), or Tarzan's Fight for Life, released the same year, but people liked Scott.
His size helped him there, too--he did his own stunts, just because he could, and the filmmakers could get right in there for a closeup. The fight for life got a little too real when the script called for Tarzan to wrestle a huge python.
"It can get nasty if they grab onto you," Scott says.
"You know, serpents have those teeth that slant back. It's hard to pull them off you. That was a big one, I think it was 19 feet, weighed about 200 pounds.
But it was funny--they kept it in a warm box to make it kind of lethargic, so it wouldn't wake up, but they kept taking the shots over and over again, so it kept waking up a little bit more. By the time we got the shot, it was a really angry snake. But we got some good shots.
"
All four movies were produced by Sol Lesser. ("A cheap prick," as Scott remembers, "if you'll pardon the expression. I never liked him.
"). But the franchise, with Scott attached, switched hands in 1959, and Tarzan got a makeover.
"Sy Weintraub, he was the new producer," Scott says.
"I wasn't the only one who thought [the movies were], you know, too homey, with the kid and Jane. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about the guy as a wild son of a bitch. [Weintraub] wanted to show that a little bit more.
"
The next Tarzan movie was filmed on location in Africa, and the villain was played by a pre-James Bond Sean Connery. Another difference was Tarzan's expanded vocabulary, beyond the "me Tarzan, you Jane" of previous films--a relief for Scott. That film, Tarzan's Greatest Adventure, and 1960's Tarzan the Magnificent are considered two of the best in the series.
They were also Scott's last. He had offers in Europe for 10 films, and fears about getting typecast as Tarzan, so off he went. There were offers for more Tarzans, but he wasn't interested.
He highballed them--said he would sign for $150,000, an unheard of price at the time, and would do only one picture a year. "I knew they wouldn't accept it," he says.
"If you're successful at [playing Tarzan], it ruins you for any other thing," he says.
"Weissmuller was the same way. He was very successful at it, and he couldn't get arrested. It's like Superman--Chris Reeve was great at that, and he worked at other things, but not a great deal, because he was tagged as that.
"
Europe was fun, anyway. His friend Steve Reeves was there, an old buddy from a gym in Oakland, Calif., where a group that included Reeves, Scott, and Jack La Lanne had worked out together in the '40s.
Reeves had helped kick off a mythological frenzy in Italian cinema with his turn as Hercules in the 1958 movie of that name and the following year's Hercules Unchained. Hercules was joined by (and largely interchangeable with) Samson, Maciste, and another Italian strongman called Ursus, and the strongmen ruled the screen. It was the perfect place for a strongman/actor like Scott.
Reeves brought him in for The Duel of the Titans, released in Italy as Romolo e Remo, in which the two played the twin founders of Rome. He made movies in Italy and elsewhere in Europe for most of the rest decade, deploying his 19-inch biceps in the pursuit of truth and justice. "A lot of body films, you know, sword and sandal," he says.
After running out of myths to adapt for the screen, Italian filmmakers set Hercules and company on anyone who could put up a fight, from vampires and pirates to moon men and the lost city of Atlantis, churning out low-budget sword and sandal pictures at a fantastic rate--between 1958 and 1965, the four big-name heroes appeared in more than 55 films.
The movies Scott and Reeves were in always involved the heroes invoking ancient gods, so Scott would needle Reeves, calling the big man up on the phone and when Reeves answered, Scott would boom, "By the gods!" Reeves hated that.
American companies specializing in dubbed and re-cut versions of Italian films also cashed in. American International Pictures, whose logo graces the credits of Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World, made its mark on the teen-trash-horror-exploitation genre in the '50s with films like Reform School Girl and Attack of the Giant Leeches, but also distributed hundreds of dubbed foreign films to the domestic drive-in market. Anything was fair game--American International brought to U.
S. shores not only the off-brand Italian strongman Colossus in Colossus and the Amazon Queen but also Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita.
The brief golden age of the strongman films ended around 1965, when poor box office receipts for the film Hercules, Samson, Maciste, and Ursus: The Invincibles showed that it was possible to have too much of a good thing.
One of the writers credited on Scott's Romolo e Remo, Sergio Leone, would soon gain international fame for his work in the next big Italian-film fad--the "spaghetti western."
After the success of Leone's Dollars trilogy, beginning in 1964, the Italian film industry set its sights on the Old West. The line between the strongman pictures and the spaghetti westerns was only made bright by the heroes and costumes (some pitting, for example, Zorro against Maciste blurred even that).
The plots and their comic-book morality transferred genres well, and so did Scott, with his rugged good looks and a physique that was impressive, yet not too large to be strapped into a cowboy outfit. Scott made a handful of westerns, including the film he considers one of his best: The Tramplers, with Joseph Cotten and Jim (look-alike son of Robert) Mitchum.
Being an actor, he says, "is one thing I'd never thought about doing, but once you're in it, it spoils you for anything else if you're successful at it.
The money's so easy, you meet beautiful people. My god, that's the ideal situation--kind of a fantasy world. It's the best way to travel, too.
First class, and you get to see a lot of interesting places."
And then, around 1966, Scott stopped making movies and returned to the United States. The reasons for his return are one of the few things he declined to discuss for this article.
He had a personal matter to deal with, he says, and when it was over he had lost the desire to act.
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