Marte, dio della guerra (1962)

Italian Locandina Poster

Marte, dio della guerra (aka The Son of Hercules vs. Venus), directed in color by Marcello Baldi, is one of Jocelyn's early 1960's sword-and-sandal Italian films.  A group of African warriors are attacking a great walled city, and the defenders call out for help from one of their gods, Jupiter.  As an answer to their pleas, a lightning bolt delivers the god of war, Mars (Roger Browne) into the fight where he almost single-handedly fights off the attack and saves the city.  Mars immediately takes a shine to Daphne (Jocelyn, as Jackie Lane).  Unfortunately, the ruler's daughter, Ecuba (Linda Sini), wants Daphne out of the picture.  She suggests to her father that they should provide a sacrifice to the gods in return for the great victory, by sending the most beautiful and pure virgin in the city to be a sort of nun in a temple to the goddess Venus.  Unsurprisingly, that is Daphne.

So smitten with Daphne, Mars asks his father on Olympus to let him return to earth as a man so that he can be with Daphne.  His father reluctantly agrees and allows him to return, along with a few gold lightning-bolts that will allow Mars to return to Olympus, unless he uses them all up.  The rest of the film follows Mars and his efforts at freeing Daphne, as well as intrigue in the city and some battles.  Ridiculously, the film ends with a planned sacrifice to some kind of man-eating plant monster, Daphne getting shot with an arrow during a fight at the sacrifice scene, and her being revived from the dead to ride off into the heavens on a chariot with Mars.

Simply put, this film is a 98-minute labor in silliness.  Roger Brown looks OK physically in the part of Mars, but let's just say that his acting skills are limited, and the material is not good.  Jocelyn performs OK, I suppose, but it's not like she had much to work with here, and her hairstyle is probably one of the least attractive that she ever had on film.  The straight bangs just looked odd.  I watched an Italian-language version of the film because of the superior picture quality, but through the years there has also been a poor-quality English-dubbed VHS version from Sinister Cinema.  So, in the version that I watched, Daphne's voice is not that of Jocelyn, but for all I know, she may not have even done her own studio dubbing for the English release.  I have no plans to watch the English dubbed version at this point.

Unless you're just a Jocelyn Lane completist, don't bother with this one.  It is probably the worst film in which she appeared in a leading role, though the blame doesn't fall on her shoulders.  She had very little to work with here.

IMDB shows a release date in Italy of March 24, 1962, so my presumption is that the film was shot in late 1961, after Jocelyn had completed her work on Operation Snatch.  I have seen no indication of a theatrical release in the U.S.  By 1964, the film was being shown on television in the U.S. (as evidenced by television newspaper listings for the film in March and August of that year).

Here are some Italian fotobustas:

A French poster:

  
A studio still:

A soundtrack CD: