Wrestling with love.

 Sword and sandals movies, also known as the peplum genre, were big in Italian cinema in the early Sixties.  It's a very simple formula:  cast a well muscled and macho actor as a legendary figure form history or mythology, throw in a bevy of beautiful women, add a scheming villain and some monsters to fight, and watch the magic happen.  Despite the mythical setting, the budget can be kept quite low, because the real draw is the hero performing feats of strength, and key plot elements can be recycled from movie to movie, so it's easy to crank out a number of pepla in short order.  There's no way that Bollywood would let a trend like this pass them by, especially when hunky wrestler/actor Dara Singh is right there.  Which is why we have Samson (1964).

The movie jumps straight into the action.  Samson (Dara Singh) is a very strong man who lives in the forest, but he has made his way to Hasnapur, a city of sort of Amazons in order to rescue a goat, which was taken from the forest by one of the women.  Men are forbidden in the city, with a couple of notable exceptions, but that doesn't stop Samson; he knocks down the city gates, defeats a giant (played by Singh's old wrestling rival King Kong) and meets with Rashid (B. M. Vyas), the city's vizier and high priest of the god Mukkadas.  Rashid hands over the goat and Samson leaves.

This angers Sheba (Mumtaaz), queen of the city, so she rides out into the forest to take the goat back.  She loses control of her chariot, but Samson is there to rescue her, and when faced with this large, handsome and kind man she feels an immediate attraction, which will not do at all.  After sending some decidedly mixed signals, she yells at Samson and leaves.

Sheba is angry because love is forbidden in the city, by order of Mukkadas.  That's why the city is almost entirely inhabited by women, and if any woman should fall in love the city will burn down.  Which doesn't stop Laila (Ameeta), Sheba's chief handmaiden.  Laila has been secretly meeting with the young, handsome and roguish Salook (Feroz Khan), and that means love songs in secluded palace gardens.  (Mukkadas doesn't seem to have considered the possibility of women falling in love with women.)

Of course it's all a scam.  Rashid is secretly an evil sorcerer and master of a sect of orange-robed cultists, and he fakes the miracles of Mukkadas using three powerful spirits, Aag (who produced fire), Paani (water) and Hawa (wind.)  Rashid plans to take open control of the city, but first he wants to find and kill the missing Prince Salook, Sheba's older brother, who was smuggled out of the palace as a small child.  He has his cultists searching the area for a man who bears the city's decidedly medieval coat of arms on his back, which is either a really large and elaborate birthmark or somebody tattooed a baby.

Meanwhile Sheba is confused by her strange feelings for Samson.  Laila carefully explains that these feelings are love, and that love is actually quite nice, but Sheba knows that love is forbidden so she resolves to end the problem by killing Samson, and sets out in the rain, bow in hand, to do just that.

Before she can fire her bow, Sheba is attacked by stock footage of a tiger, and Samson rescues her with the power of wrestling.  Sheba faints repeatedly, and suddenly it's raining, so Samson takes her to his own cabin and places her in his bed.  There's a moment when he's clearly considering kissing her, but Samson isn't a creep and so he goes outside and chops wood in the cold rain instead.  Sheba was secretly awake during the almost kiss, and Samson proving himself a decent dude is enough to win her over completely, or at least enough for her to stop trying to murder him.

The, trouble.  Someone overhears Laila and Salook singing love songs.  he escapes, she;s captured, and while the law says that women are not to be punished there's an exception when they refuse to give up their canoodling partner, so despite Sheba's protestations Rashid sentences Laila to be fed to what the subtitles refer to as "The Scary Beast."  Salook shows up to take her place as Scary Beast kibble, then Samson shows up to help defeat the beast.  Salook is saved, the ladies are delighted, the city celebrates, and Rashid must come up with a new plan.

He tries using a genie as an assassin, but Samson just wrestles it to death.  The next step is poison, specifically a potion made from the venom of twenty one different snakes, a brew so toxic that just touching it will be enough to kill a man.  He invites Samson and Salook to a banquet in their honor, and has Sheba offer them "sacred Mukkadas water" to drink.  Samson insists on trying it first, and he changes color for a moment, but he's so strong that the poison doesn't kill him, it only makes him angry.  He blames Sheba, and stalks off back to the forest with Salook in tow.

Fortunately, the rift between Samson and Sheba doesn't last long, because Dara Singh and Mumtaz are genuinely adorable together, with a sparkling chemistry that you don't generally get in a peplum movie.  Once the good guys are united and Rashid has seized complete control of the city, it's time to settle matters Samson style, which means walls will fall and pillars will topple.

 

I do not know if this movie is supposed to be set in ancient Judea, ancient India, or some imaginary kingdom; Hasnapur is a real place in India, but I can't find any refernece to scary beasts and Amazons.  Despite the setting and the snazzy haircut, though, Samson is recognizably Samson.  He's strong, and his strength comes from his faith in the one God he follows.  On the other hand, he's a whole lot nicer than the Biblical Samson and makes a much better boyfriend.

For the most part Samson is very similar to a traditional peplum film.  The songs are an obvious difference, but I think the plot is also a bit more direct; it helps that the "haughty Amazon queen" is the primary love interest rather than the secondary antagonist, which both simplifies the cast and removes any need for Samson to lose his memory and spend a soporific idyll in her clutches.

On the other hand, like a lot of peplum, the movie is padded.  In this case, it's padded with wrestling.  So much wrestling.  Samson wrestles King Kong for no apparent reason.  Samson wrestles a tiger.  Samson wrestles a genie.  Four of the evil cultists turn out to be wrestlers, leading to even more wrestling.   

In the end Samson is a fun movie, in the same way that the Hercules movies I used to watch on cable TV as a kid were fun, with the palpable chemistry between Singh and Mumtaz as an added bonus.  I'm going to have to track down Singh's Hercules as well.