The legendary Edgar G. Ulmer has much to answer for -- certainly his willingness to make pictures on a shoestring resulted in some bloody awful pictures -- but he nevertheless has a talent that shines through even in some of his flimsiest pictures. On the other hand, even with fairly strong material (as here) the unevenness is always evident. Among Roman/Biblical epics, though, this, for all its messiness and its generally miserable acting, is not one of the dullest. (For me those are the almost-impossible-to-sit-through "El Cid" and "The Fall of the Roman Empire," pictures with much higher budgets and fancier casts, and made by a far superior director, Anthony Mann. But they are truly tedious.) Why? First of all, the story of Hannibal's campaigns is genuinely interesting from military and historical standpoints, and Ulmer brought them to life in a number of really superb battle scenes, beautifully edited. (Yes, yes, there are obviously cheap things -- the fake blood is terrible and the mix of studio and outdoor scenes is very poorly matched, but the effect of these scenes is generally excellent.) The novelty of seeing elephants climbing over the Alps, too, is refreshing. On the other hand, much of the acting, and, especially, the dubbing and sound mixing, is frankly at an amateur level. Rarely, in fact, have I heard such a poor soundtrack, with characters voice levels not matching camera distance, ludicrous crowd ad libs, etc. The score, too, though rather stirring, frequently seems wildly inappropriate (a common problem in Ulmer films, which is ironic, since Ulmer considered himself something of a musician). So it's interesting to see, to put it bluntly, how working in the lower depths corrupted a basically talented director into accepting standards way below par, even on what was, apparently, a film with a more or less "normal" budget. Kudos, though, to Victor Mature, that oft-misused and underrated actor ("My Darling Clementine" and Anthony Mann's "The Last Frontier" give strong evidence of actual talent). He makes a strong, sober Hannibal, not without a sense of humor. "Hannibal" is, despite fully justifiable criticism, a pretty entertaining picture. We've all sat through much worse.
