Helen of Troy (1956)
Directed by Robert Wise
Prince Paris of Troy, shipwrecked on a mission to the king of Sparta, meets and falls for Queen Helen before he knows who she is. Rudely received by the royal Greeks, he must flee...but fate and their mutual passions lead him to take Helen along. This gives the Greeks just the excuse they need for much-desired war.
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What critics compared Helen of Troy to
I'm a Greek myth geek, so I was surprised when I realized no big Hollywood attempt had been made at dramatizing Homer's epic poem, The Iliad (I'm not sure if the 1956 movie Helen of Troy counts).
Like Robert Wise's 1955 "Helen of Troy" (a much inferior movie), Petersen's version leaves out the gods completely and tries to envision what this event might have been like if it had actually transpired and was later mythologized by Homer.
Lots of things can go wrong in a sword-and-sandal picture, and many of them did in Robert Wise’s 1953 Helen of Troy, probably the most notable previous cinematic stab at the tale.
Previous efforts--from Alexander Korda's "lost" 1927 silent film "The Private Life of Helen of Troy" to Robert Wise's unwieldy 1955 "Helen of Troy" to the recent television "Helen of Troy" miniseries--have all been equally ham-fisted, each falling prey to the misguided belief that a populist action-adventure yarn could be distilled from classical mythology.