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| Images courtesy of Terror Vision, 20th Century Fox, Dante Film LLC and Starz |
A few years back for the Movie Sleuth around 2016, I did an
article for our ongoing 31 Days of Hell series dubbed Visions of Hell: Eight Imaginings of the Underworld encompassing various filmmakers’ brief if not unusual
forays into the abyss previously charted by Italian poet and philosopher Dante
Alighieri’s 14th century epic poem The Divine Comedy. A structured travelogue with the author
himself being guided through the nine circles of Hell out through the bowels
and back into paradise, the biblical saga sought to pinpoint and abstain from
sin while being perhaps the most singularly important literary texts not only
of the Middle Ages but of Italy itself.
While the article in question focused on films that were influenced by The
Divine Comedy, it never dug into any actual direct or indirect screen
adaptations of the medieval text.
Recently, however, boutique releasing label Terror Vision in partnership with Vinegar Syndrome’s sister company OCN Releasing unveiled a limited edition 4K restoration of Italian filmmakers’ Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguorois’ 1911 feature length silent film adaptation aptly named Dante’s Inferno with not one but four different versions of the film including slightly different tinting on each. Just like that, the spark was reignited and finally one could pinpoint where those snippets of Satan munching on the still animated body of the ultimate traitor glimpsed at the beginning of the Nine Inch Nails: Closure video originated. However, like the Hellfire and Brimstone conflagration dramatized on film as early as the medium’s inception itself, the wildfire spread and my curiosity didn’t stop there.
Soon yours truly then waded through Henry Otto’s 1924 silent film which reportedly incorporated footage of the 1911 production into it while utilizing the Dickensian structure of an Ebeneezer Scrooge type father figure who picks up the Alighieri text and envisions himself going to Hell with the suffering. Then in 1935 another version emerged with Harry Lachman’s Fox Film Corporation (the last film before the 20th Century Fox moniker took over) production which saw Spencer Tracy as a circus performer turned miserly entrepreneur who goes on to build a literal sideshow exhibit of Alighieri’s poem which goes horribly awry.
Recently, however, boutique releasing label Terror Vision in partnership with Vinegar Syndrome’s sister company OCN Releasing unveiled a limited edition 4K restoration of Italian filmmakers’ Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguorois’ 1911 feature length silent film adaptation aptly named Dante’s Inferno with not one but four different versions of the film including slightly different tinting on each. Just like that, the spark was reignited and finally one could pinpoint where those snippets of Satan munching on the still animated body of the ultimate traitor glimpsed at the beginning of the Nine Inch Nails: Closure video originated. However, like the Hellfire and Brimstone conflagration dramatized on film as early as the medium’s inception itself, the wildfire spread and my curiosity didn’t stop there.
Soon yours truly then waded through Henry Otto’s 1924 silent film which reportedly incorporated footage of the 1911 production into it while utilizing the Dickensian structure of an Ebeneezer Scrooge type father figure who picks up the Alighieri text and envisions himself going to Hell with the suffering. Then in 1935 another version emerged with Harry Lachman’s Fox Film Corporation (the last film before the 20th Century Fox moniker took over) production which saw Spencer Tracy as a circus performer turned miserly entrepreneur who goes on to build a literal sideshow exhibit of Alighieri’s poem which goes horribly awry.
Fast forward to nearly over a century later,
puppeteer Sandow Birk in 2007 unveiled a contemporary iteration with Dermot
Mulroney voicing Dante as drunken street rat wading through the modern American
sociopolitical landscape as the new great underworld. Lastly in 2010, there was an animated film
based on the video game envisioning Dante as a warrior from the Third Crusade
who wades through the many Circles of Hell battling demons and minions to save
his beloved Beatrice from Satan.
Though many indirect iterations have come and gone with Lars Von Trier’s The House That Jack Built being perhaps the most beautiful realization of Dante’s sojourn as other directors including Peter Greenaway, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Tom Tykwer, Jean-Luc Godard and even John Erick Dowdle took a stab, this particular subset of Dante’s Inferno films which span the length of the birth of cinema itself to the rollout of digital media at present all try to reckon with the imagery and subtext within Alighieri’s epic poem.
Though many indirect iterations have come and gone with Lars Von Trier’s The House That Jack Built being perhaps the most beautiful realization of Dante’s sojourn as other directors including Peter Greenaway, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Tom Tykwer, Jean-Luc Godard and even John Erick Dowdle took a stab, this particular subset of Dante’s Inferno films which span the length of the birth of cinema itself to the rollout of digital media at present all try to reckon with the imagery and subtext within Alighieri’s epic poem.
Spectacles for state-of-the-art
visual effects bearing strikingly craggy mountainous set pieces and Hieronymus
Bosch imagery of naked bodies writing together en-masse in agony, each
iteration represents a vastly different take on the material with one being
timeless while the others are arguably dated to their respective eras. Though two of the early films include some
grossly problematic elements which will be mentioned later, they form a kind of
silver screen rendered ‘Map of Hell’ that tries to make sense of as well as
enhance Alighieri’s text while giving moviegoers an audiovisual thrill they’ve
never experienced before.
L'Inferno (1911)
The very first feature length Italian film shown in one sitting and the oldest surviving feature-length film (well over 100 years old), the first horror film distributed in the USA with the 24-sheet billboard posters approach, debatably the first blockbuster and the first movie to show full-frontal male nudity and for many the most authentic realization of Alighieri’s original text to date, Bertolini, Padovan and Liguoro’s three-years-in-the-making silent screen-tinted gargantuan beast of a film remains arguably the definitive screen treatment of the epic poem. Following the text canto by canto, the film is one of the first to include wired flying effects including a spellbinding sequence of fallen angels flying in circles interspersed with unforgettable images of half-buried bodies burning in pits as our terrified Dante Alighieri navigates the red-hot underworld.
Starring Salvatore Papa as the titular Dante Alighieri, aided by the guiding spirit Virgilio (Arturo Pirovano), director Liguoro as Il conte Ugolino and Augusto Milla as Lucifer himself, the seventy-three-minute film unbroken by reel changes unfolds in flickery tinted sepia images as carefully preserved and restored as humanly possible. Largely a showcase for Gustave Dore’s wood-engravings which served as a starting point for the varying circles of Hell, L’Inferno is a silent spectacle with still-striking imagery of writhing bodies clinging to rock amid fires but also pays specific attention to details like the final circle of Hell being a frozen arctic icebox per the original text. One of the only adaptations to include the final circle envisioned as written with striking visual effects of Judas Iscariot in the mouth of Satan being chewed away seared into the memory banks of all who lay eyes on it.
L'Inferno (1911)
The very first feature length Italian film shown in one sitting and the oldest surviving feature-length film (well over 100 years old), the first horror film distributed in the USA with the 24-sheet billboard posters approach, debatably the first blockbuster and the first movie to show full-frontal male nudity and for many the most authentic realization of Alighieri’s original text to date, Bertolini, Padovan and Liguoro’s three-years-in-the-making silent screen-tinted gargantuan beast of a film remains arguably the definitive screen treatment of the epic poem. Following the text canto by canto, the film is one of the first to include wired flying effects including a spellbinding sequence of fallen angels flying in circles interspersed with unforgettable images of half-buried bodies burning in pits as our terrified Dante Alighieri navigates the red-hot underworld.
Starring Salvatore Papa as the titular Dante Alighieri, aided by the guiding spirit Virgilio (Arturo Pirovano), director Liguoro as Il conte Ugolino and Augusto Milla as Lucifer himself, the seventy-three-minute film unbroken by reel changes unfolds in flickery tinted sepia images as carefully preserved and restored as humanly possible. Largely a showcase for Gustave Dore’s wood-engravings which served as a starting point for the varying circles of Hell, L’Inferno is a silent spectacle with still-striking imagery of writhing bodies clinging to rock amid fires but also pays specific attention to details like the final circle of Hell being a frozen arctic icebox per the original text. One of the only adaptations to include the final circle envisioned as written with striking visual effects of Judas Iscariot in the mouth of Satan being chewed away seared into the memory banks of all who lay eyes on it.
While silent aside from newly commissioned soundtracks by Graveface Recording Artist HALEY (the scariest one), Michael Kiker and Laurent Pigeolet, Terror Vision’s new 4K restored blu-ray offers four different restorations including a new 2024 one, a 2022 Redwood Creek restoration tinted red, a slightly modified black-and-white version and a completely different cut of the film in black-and-white. The sonic results compliment if not augment the scratchily painterly imagery beautifully, lensed by Homer’s Odyssey cinematographer Emilio Roncarolo. Supposedly also scored by Tangerine Dream at one point, the film did have an original score at one point by Raffaele Caravaglios which is unfortunately not included with Terror Vision’s release.
The real stars of this visual tour de force aren’t necessarily Salvatore Papa or Arturo Pirovano as Dante and Virgilio, but rather the scantily clad if not naked extras writing about in ornately designed burning and smoking set pieces with lots of superimpositions as well as composite visual effects shots to make the number of extras seemingly larger onscreen. There’s also a depiction of Muhammad’s abdomen exploding that to this day gets the backs up of Islamic viewers. Scenes of dozens of naked bodies both male and female writhing about in sorrow with desperate arms and open clutches clawing at the air stand out as mass performance art that almost overshadow the two main performers. Though some of the effects are dated to their time, much of the rest feels like a peer into another dimension.
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Released theatrically internationally where the film became a global success, L’Inferno despite a startling abundance of nudity, gore and graphic violence onscreen depicting all that is unholy grossed more than $2 million in the United States alone. This also began the still-contested trend of boosting ticket prices while demand is high. At the time the most frightening and shocking film released up to that time, the Milano Films production distributed by Helios saw bits cribbed in other exploitation films such as 1936’s Hell-O-Vision and the 1944 film Go Down, Death! which was later scissored out by censors objecting to the onscreen nudity. Years later, even Kenneth Anger in 1954 just had to sample portions of the film for Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. In spite of the controversy, the sensation the film caused was proof positive the powers that be in the film business would revisit this lava rock Hellscape not once, not twice, but four more times in some official capacity.
Dante’s Inferno (1924)
Circa 1924, thirteen years after the Italians gave the world arguably the definitive screen treatment of Dante Alighieri’s ancient epic poem of pain and suffering lived out in the many circles of Hell, American silent film jack-of-all-trades Henry Otto, best known for The Great Romance and The Folly of Vanity, decided to take another updated crack at the material. This time, grafting plot points and the story structure from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, this version penned by The Razor’s Edge director Edmund Goulding and produced by then-Fox Film Coproration sees a tight landlord and businessman named Mortimer Judd (Ralph Lewis) drive a man forced into bankruptcy to suicide. Cruel towards his bedridden wife and declining donating to charity, he receives a copy of Dante’s Inferno and begins to read it, soon sparking a vivid nightmare of himself being tried and executed for murder by way of electric chair before his soul is sentenced to Hell. In the time-honored tradition of Ebeneezer Scrooge, reading Dante’s Inferno provides a redemption arc for Mortimer Judd.
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Like many pre-code Fox Films at the time, there’s ample nudity with actress Pauline Starke partially naked in the Hell sequences while several of the extras go the full distance, causing some territories to re-edit or censor the film. Then there’s this ugly elephant in the room in the form of then-famous comedian Bud Jamison as a butler donned in blackface. A problem that will come up once again in the subsequent Fox Films remake in 1935 with Spencer Tracy briefly donning blackface near the film’s beginning, these scenes while left intact for historical reference threaten to short circuit both movies entirely in spite of the terrific looking sets, costumes and makeup. While the problem still shows up in films as far as the 1980s for awkward if not dated comic effect, it still took me out of both movies both times it showed up.
If you can get around these parts (most people understandably won’t), this 1924 iteration lensed handsomely by future 1939 The Hunchback of Notre Dame cinematographer Joseph H. August still offers its own measure of unholy spectacle replete with striking visual effects of an oversized Lucifer in his Satanic courtroom judging the film’s central antagonist who gets A Christmas Carol-ed. The cast is generally good with Lawson Butt as Dante and Howard Gaye as the guiding spirit Virgil, though the film keeps coming back to Ralph Lewis who without words is able to convey a kind of Lionel Barrymore miserly aged evil. As with the Dickens Christmas tale, it takes a little while for our sinful bigwig to be cured. Though running a brisk sixty-minutes and despite the offending elements contained therein, it was interesting to see how American cinema in its budding early stages responded to Italy’s Titanic-sized silent film epic in their own words.
Dante’s Inferno (1935)
Harry Lachman was an artist, set designer and filmmaker who worked his way into silent cinema with set designs for Mare Nostrum. Soon working his way from the silent to sound era of films before settling in Hollywood, the It Happened in Hollywood director was assigned to direct not only the last Fox Film Corporation film before merging into 20th Century Fox but the last film of actor Spencer Tracy’s Fox tenure as well with the 1935 sound version of Dante’s Inferno. As with the 1924 film, also by Fox Film Corporation, there’s the problem with blackface early on that will take you out of the picture. But if you can skip past it, there’s some wild apocalyptic imagery realized by Lachman which Ken Russell sneakily sampled in his 1980 sci-fi horror epic Altered States.
Cribbing the A Christmas Carol plot structure from the 1924 silent film with the main character transforming Alighieri’s ancient text into an amusement park attraction, the 1935 version stars Tracy as former stoker Jim Carter who stumbles into a Dante’s Inferno themed circus sideshow exhibit run by Pop McWade (Henry B. Walthall). In tow is Pop’s niece Betty (Claire Trevor) whom Carter woos and soon marries but not before taking over Pop’s show as host and manager and soon begins expanding the scope of the park attraction while missing the point of Alighieri’s text completely. After disaster strikes when Carter silences an inspector over safety concerns involving the attraction and nearly mortally wounds Pop, the hospitalized elder reads the text to Carter in full, shown as a ten-minute visual effects spectacle of writhing naked bodies and pits of fire burning across the screen. Undeterred and unfazed, Carter pushes further into an Al Capone-esque dream of creating a Titanic-sized plainly unsafe floating casino which inevitably begets disaster again including threatening the life of their young son.
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Taking the wraparound narrative of the previous iteration while expanding it to seventy-five percent of the film’s running time, this amusement park movie of an unrepentant sinner misunderstanding, exploiting, learning and finally understanding Aligieri’s text tries to one-up the iterations that came before on a purely visual end. Lensed exquisitely by legendary Polish-Hungarian cinematographer (and future When Worlds Collide director) Rudolph Maté of such medieval gothic fare as Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr, the look of the film is extraordinary and for being in black-and-white full of striking visual wonderment. Capturing Lachman’s sketches drawn from Gustave Dore’s engravings, the film is a triumph of production design from miniatures, composite effects shots, superimpositions and extraordinary scaled set-pieces. The score by Reginald Hazeltine Bassett of David Copperfield is appropriately brooding, particularly as it wades through a wordless ten-minute foray into the deepest of pits.
Spencer Tracy, a two-time Academy Award winner and generally noble figure often cast in the world of good guys or later in his career cuddly elders with an untapped edge lurking beneath ala Boys Town or Bad Day at Black Rock, sinks his teeth into the role of this cretin who worms his way to the top uncaring of who he steps on to get there in arguably his most cynical if not outright evil role yet. If you’re not already mad at this guy about the blackface, scene after scene he deals in ruthless chicanery, wantonly ignoring safety concerns and completely going about the whole Dante’s Inferno attraction from the point of view of a geek showman rather than a word of warning from the wise. Much like Ebeneezer Scrooge who again fills in the skeleton of the character, Tracy’s antihero is not so easily convinced even after seeing the fires of Hell firsthand.
Henry B. Walthall is also quite good as the surrogate Virgil guardian angel running the attraction initially before Jim Carter spearheads it, enjoying the newfound success his new nephew-in-law has brought him and his niece Betty. Equally strong and a counterpoint to Tracy’s ruthless crooked entrepreneur is Claire Trevor as Betty who initially warms up easily to Jim Carter’s wise guy swagger but over time grows increasingly disgusted with his disregard for others. Fans who are really looking will spot a sixteen-year-old Rita Hayworth (then credited as Rita Cansino) in her screen debut as a dancer on Carter’s sordid and sinful casino ship twirling around in moves sure to dizzy the viewer. And as with the prior iterations of Dante’s Inferno, there’s much to be said in-regards-to the bevy of extras tasked with clawing at walls of burning lava rock in the nude.
Released in 1935, the $748,900 screen epic despite being produced by Fox Film Corporation right before the merger came out into theaters as a 20th Century Fox title became a mixed financial success with critics divided over the film’s devotion towards the original text with nothing more than a ten-minute abstract montage (shown in widescreen in Philadelphia). Reportedly a troubled production that sealed the fate of Spencer Tracy who showed up on set one time in a drunken stupor only to fall asleep, wake back up on a locked soundstage and destroying sets in an intoxicated rage, Tracy further demanded his name be taken off the opening credits and that his name be dropped from all promotional materials for the film. Despite this, the film helped usher in the career of Rita Hayworth and soon after Tracy emigrated over to MGM Studios.
Though filled with visual effects splendor and strong performances, problems like the blackface and the glossing over of the text completely save for one effects heavy montage that fails to do more than sensationalize the more salacious elements of the Hellfire and Brimstone imagery while skipping the frozen arctic final circle completely. A technically brilliant exercise that tries to go about Alighieri’s Dante’s Inferno from the sidelines rather than confronting the meat and potatoes of the poem head on, it nevertheless showed up in Ken Russell’s Altered States in one of the film’s many phantasmagorical hyperkinetic montages. Spencer Tracy fans keen on seeing the actor playing a young villain for a change with a glimmer of redemption ahead are inclined to check it out though should fast forward through some egregious sequences on their way to the character’s inevitable downfall.
Dante’s Inferno (2007)
Some seventy-two years later, decades after such things as puppet theaters came and went while Hollywood tried tackling Alighieri’s epic poem twice with mixed success and one unforgivable element in both pictures, a hand-drawn paper puppets on a theater stage version from Sean Meredith was adapted from the book of the same name by artist Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders from 2004. Born in Detroit before thriving in Los Angeles as a graphic visual artist whose themes range from pressing global issues, modern day politics with a distinctly urban underpinning driving his work, Birk’s collaboration with Sanders resulted in three books that sought to rewrite and reimagine Dante Alighieri’s epic: Dante’s Paradiso, Dante’s Purgatorio and finally Dante’s Inferno. A couple of years after the books came out, it was decided the project should be animated into a film directed by Sean Meredith featuring voice acting from Dermot Mulroney and James Cromwell that seems to suggest we’re not headed for Hell so much as we’re already there.
In this version Dante (Dermot Mulroney) is a drunk wandering the primarily American Hellscape of urban city life amid subways, alleyways, used car lots, police protests and riots before crossing paths with Virgil (James Cromwell) who guides our antihero through the many circles of only American Hell. As they wade through circles amassed by priests, politicians, celebrities, policemen and wall street brokers, our duo come across characters such as Lizzie Borden (Martha Plimpton), Marilyn Monroe (Kit Pongetti), Pope Nicholas III (Tony Hale), Dick Cheney (Mike Coleman), Joseph Stalin (Bill Chott) and even L. Ron Hubbard (Matt Besser). The list of modern-day contemporary names goes on and on, all the while narrated by a mordant hungover Dante puppeteering his way through a plainly artificial landscape replete with visible wires creeping into the frame and at one point human hands. Then there’s the Devil himself, played by a man painted in red with devil horns while the puppets must quite literally go through Satan’s bowels to get to paradise.
Snarky with its acerbic tongue firmly planted in cheek with endless pop cultural references, some crude dialogue and a more-than-a-little-graphic celebrity orgy, people condemned for failing to rise up and protest injustices and at one point a chauffeur to another circle of Hell via a Fox News helicopter, this new Dante’s Inferno reimagines the text as a thorny critique of present Americana. Between Dermot Mulroney’s depressive delivery which sounds not unlike Mickey Rourke’s turn in Sin City, James Cromwell’s solemn regard for the Hell they’re wading through, the style of puppeteering with obvious fourth-wall intrusions and the abstaining from anything medieval or archaic in favor of all things modern, this take on Dante Alighieri is primarily concerned with how we’re already in Hell dead or alive.
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Less Alighieri and more geared towards Adult Swim or Comedy Central after hours showtimes, the seventy-eight-minute animated freakout finds a way of making the text more urgent and somehow timeless. Not everyone will take to its political satire or occasional vulgarities and the deliberately shaky, intentionally hasty puppeteering and facial drawings rendered by Elyse Pignolet and Paul Zaloom requires some getting used to. But for those keen on this multiple film festival favorite that rethinks and recontextualizes The Divine Comedy, this Silver Lake Film Festival winner and Audience Favorite IndieFest winner feels like a reverent critique of the subject itself, what it means for our time and how to move forward after all ye have abandoned all hope.
Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic (2010)
While most articles try to save the best for last, in the case of Dante’s Inferno, the worst the subject has had to offer the cinematic medium has finally reached us in the form of Electronic Arts’ direct-to-video tie-in to their 2010 hack-and-slash videogame Dante’s Inferno. Loosely (as much as one can stretch the term) based on The Divine Comedy with the same sensationalism Spencer Tracy’s lost soul peddled in the 1935 film, the game reimagines Dante as a Templar knight from the Crusades who must fight and murder his way through many bosses in Hell with a scythe in order to save his wife Beatrice from the evil clutches of wicked cackling Satan himself.
Conceived by Jonathan Knight and Stephen Barry, the movie tie-in from the same creative team behind Dead Space: Downfall penned by Brandon Auman hired the hands of several renowned animation directors including but not limited to Mike Disa, Shuko Murase, Yasuomi Umetsu (Kite), Victor Cook, Jong-Sik Nam, Kim Sang-jin and Lee Seung-Gyu. Though bringing on the voice-acting talents of Mark Hamill as Dante’s boorish father, Steve Blum as lustful wicked cool Lucifer, Vanessa Branch as the fair and angelic Beatrice, Graham McTavish as Dante and Petter Jessop as Virgil, this US-Japanese-South Korean co-production produced by Starz Media and released through Anchor Bay and Manga Entertainment, I’m sorry to say, is a most juvenile watch.
While the game looks like it might be a fun
play, the animated constantly shifting styles of boss fight after boss fight grow
repetitious and boring as we learn our “hero” Dante may not have been such a
nice guy after all. Oh and the final
battle between Scythed Dante and the Doom 3 videogame version of the
source of all evil, much like the end of the game, is the end of this movie. Maybe the biggest insult yet to Alighieri’s text (the film,
not the game) despite striking animation and decent voicework, it couldn’t be
more off base in reimagining the whole thing as a battle for a pure mortal’s
soul and Satan as a creepy yet cool villain you love to hate eager to seduce
and debauch our near-nude angelic naif crying out for Dante to save her.
It is like they just watched one of the early
Old Hollywood iterations and thought it would be cool to include Mortal
Kombat finishing moves with delicious crimson red sprayed everywhere. Structurally the film is boss fight, little
bit of Virgil taking us through more circles of souls being ground up or burned,
rinse repeat…and then it ends. Yes
perhaps this “spin” on Alighieri is fun when you have a joystick in your hand,
but when you’re the one sitting and watching your buddy play instead of you it
gets old real quick.
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For awhile there rumored to be turned into a live-action feature project circa 2013 with Universal Studios producing and Evil Dead remake helmer Fede Alvarez in the director’s chair before going nowhere, there was also in addition to a six-part comic book series by Christos Gage and artist Diego Latorre a proposed sequel game Purgatorio was briefly in development before underperforming sales of the game cancelled that prospect altogether. In hindsight, the kind of straight-to-video animated film that could only exist in the shadows of Jonathan Knight’s videogame for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PSP, Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic might please anime aficionados considering the caliber of talent involved but for the rest of us keen on all the varying degrees of screen treatment Dante Alighieri’s text go, this one is best avoided altogether.
In the end, it is curious after so many various attempts to bring this saga to the silver screen for good or for ill, it is the very first one from 1911 that still reigns supreme as the best possible transposition of the legendary medieval poet’s text to film. While too literary for some without the “relatable” Dickensian connective tissue of the 1924 or 1934 versions or the biting acerbic satire of the 2007 film, it still nevertheless is the closest canto for canto adaptation yet attempted. For a film well over a century old, it is remarkable how strikingly pure of an artistic visual expression it truly is.
Whether or not
you’ve read the text at hand which engendered all five of these things, the
1911 film is like visual poetry made by three visual artists over the course of
three years working to the very edge of their feverishly unfettered creative
inspirations. Having waded through and
digested the varying angles with which filmmakers attacked the subject of
Alighieri’s text, the friendliest advice I can give is to maybe scope the 2007
film, watch the 1911 film with confidence and skip the rest. Like Dante himself, having seen all the
circles of cinematic Hell unleashed by these movies for good or for ill, it is
the first ring of fire that burns the longest and brightest.
--Andrew Kotwicki