Young Trojan boy Paris visits Sparta, and is smitten by the very lovely Helen -- apparently a slave-girl, but in reality the Queen of Sparta.

All sorts of confusion reign, and in the end Paris gets fed up with it all, jumps off a cliff with Helen in his arms, gets picked up by a handy passing vessel, and goes back home.

The Spartans are a tad upset by Helen's fast departure, so they despatch one thousand ships to fetch her home. And, while they're doing that, they may just as well sack and burn the city too. Which they do.

The director of this 1956 Hollywood epic was Robert Wise, a fairly pedestrian director whose career at least managed to contain two very good movies -- The Day The Earth Stood Still and The Sound of Music.

He also made the ponderous Star!, and I'm afraid that Helen of Troy rivals that as being his personal Golden Turkey.

Wise seems determined to prove that a Hollywood epic can be as bad as any Italian historical costume-drama. Well, he fails. It's worse. It is inadvertently funny in parts, but not enough to redeem it. The acting is wooden, the sets and costumes ludicrous, and even the presence of the divine Brigitte Bardot in a small role fails to redeem it.

Rosanna Podesta as Helen is quite pretty, but not really the stuff of legend. She in fact reminds me quite a bit of the fabulous Jean Hagen, who starred as Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain. Jacques Sernas as Paris shows that he could play a wooden-Indian pretty convincingly. The only thing going for him is his physique, which is on show almost the entire time in a very high-camp manner. Now, if Rosanna Podesta had been allowed to dress in similar style, the film might have had some artistic merit after all.

Not quite so bad as to be wonderful; not good enough to be viewable -- a real epic failure, in fact.

For a movie just short of 50 years old, this anamorphic transfer presents it very decently. It's not an outstanding example of just what brilliance can be achieved through meticulous restoration and transfer. But colours are acceptable throughout and there appears very little image degradation of any kind. Audio too is well-presented, with the original stereo track replaced by a not-too-gimmicky and quite clean 5.1 Surround track.

Extras are marginally ok. There is an anamorphic preview trailer in decent condition, and three short vintage 'making of' featurettes of around six minutes each.

The first is Behind The Scenes-The Look of Troy, and includes an interesting look at the earliest cinema-sound process, Vitaphone, in which actors mimed to a separately recorded large gramophone record. Second is Behind The Scenes-Interviewing Helen, where Rosanna Podesta reveals that she actually isn't Helen of Troy but is in fact an actress. Finally, we have Behind The Scenes-Sounds Of Homeric Troy, a doco about how the special sound-effects for the movie were generated.

Film buffs will be interested to know that the soundtrack music was composed by one of the finest of the Hollywood composers, Max Steiner, whose other credits included Gone With the Wind and Casablanca. Any Steiner score is worth listening to, but this one isn't up with his best.