Riccardo Freda

The Italian film director Riccardo Freda, who has died aged 90, was famous for shooting spectacular costume pictures in anything from three to six weeks.

Whether the setting was Babylon, St Petersburg, ancient Rome, or the Florence of the Medicis, he created authentic-looking, visually stunning backgrounds in Rome studios or locations in nearby castles and palaces. Cecil B De Mille, the New York Times once observed, would not have slept in peace if he could have seen what Freda achieved on a fraction of his budgets.

Freda liked his costume pictures to look realistic, but hated the realism of postwar Italian cinema; he despised the trend of taking cameras out into the streets and shooting what passed for real life. He admired Roberto Rossellini's Open City and Paisà which he considered "the only real films of neo-realism", but despised the rest, Luchino Visconti included. In 1945-46, when Open City was shown in Italian cinemas, Freda's second important film as director, Black Eagle, based on Pushkin's Dubrovsky, was a box office hit.

A year later he made his two-part version of Les Miserables, shooting the sensational cavalry charge with six cameras in two hours. Freda considered Victor Hugo the "greatest of all scriptwriters", but when he had to depend on scriptwriters who were closer at hand, he worked with the best available, including Sergio Amidei, Cesare Zavattini, Mario Monicelli and Stefano Vanzina (Steno). He had a knack for launching talent, such as Vittorio Gassman (who played Casanova in Freda's Cavaliere Misterioso, 1948), while designers like Beni Montresor and Filippo San Just began their careers with him.

Freda was born in Alexandria, where, as a boy, he started assiduous film-going, a habit which continued when the family returned from Egypt to Milan. At 24, he moved to Rome and got his first movie job, as a sculptor at the Centro Sperimentale, the newly-opened school and film studios. He went on to work as script-writer, set designer, editor and actor, eventually forming his own production company, Elica, for which, in 1942, he made his first film Don Cesare di Bazan, based on a 19th-century romantic French drama.

The film did not win critical acclaim, but it was praised by future publisher Leo Longanesi, who appreciated Freda's visual flair in reproducing the mood of Spanish painting. They became great friends, shared filmgoing enthusiasms and, after the armistice of September 1943, an adventurous flight south across German lines. Dressed in American uniforms, when asked their names by hospitable peasants in the Abruzzi mountains, they introduced themselves as Captain Warner and Colonel Mayer.

Following the success of Black Eagle, Fredo established his reputation as a master of costume picture with a series of films inspired by historical characters such as Spartacus (1952), Teodora (1953) and Beatrice Cenci (1956). The role of the Byzantine Empress Theodora was played by Gianni Maria Canale, one of the most striking actresses of the time, who starred in many of Freda's later films and became his wife.

It was in the 1950s that the American Steve Reeves, a former Mr Universe, appeared in the first Italian Hercules. But before he became an international muscleman star Freda cast him in a Cossack story, Agi Murad, The White Warrior (1958), shot on location in Yugoslavia in three weeks and photographed by future cult director Mario Bava, who was also cinematographer (under the name of John Foam) for Caltiki, The Immortal Monster (1959), which Freda directed (using t he pseudonym Robert Hampton). It was a name he often used after hearing someone comment outside a cinema showing a Freda film: "It must be an Italian film!"

In the 1960s Freda resuscitated the mythological hero whom Gabriele D'Annunzio had named Maciste in Giovanni Pastrone's silent classic Cabiria. Freda took Maciste to exotic venues, naturally near Rome, to film, among other movies, Maciste At The Court Of The Grand Khan (1961), which was dubbed for English audiences as Samson And The Seven Miracles Of The World, with Gordon Scott as the hero. It was followed by Maciste all' Inferno (Maciste In Hell, 1961), starring Kirk Morris, who descends to hell in order to bring back a Scottish lass unjustly burned as a witch. It made Freda a cult director.

His last film, made in 1983 under the Hampton pseudonym, was a modest thriller, Murder Obsession. It was not released nationally but was appreciated by film buffs, who helped Freda feel vindicated for the years when intellectuals scorned his work.

John Francis Lane

Riccardo Freda, film director, born February 24 1909, died December 20 1999

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