Vesuvius blows its stack

When he spoke in his 60s of Dungarvan's Ormonde Cinema

he saw through the radiant eyes of an eight year old boy.

In the spiral of his memory Last Days of Pompeii summered on,

a Steve Reeves muscle-bulger swords-and-sandal peplum flick,

the mighty spectacle of a bacchanalian city getting pumiced by God.

The returned-home Roman legionnaire Glaucus saves the Christians before Pompeii turns to ash.

We’d agreed to watch his flick at the first night of our movie club.

See! The yawning jaws of the flesh-ripping alligator death pit!

See! The awesome eruption of Mt. Vesuvius as it avalanches down into a boiling inferno!

See! The martyred Christians thrown to the gaping fangs of crazed lions!

Pompeii! City of the pagan hordes, of revels and orgies, of spectacle and splendour,

the city that lived in sin and died in flame. Stuck in the drainpipe of his memory.

We climbed the fiery summit in a wash of Eastmancolour Supertotalscope.

He told us that Sergio Leone not Mario Bonnard was the true director of the movie.

We asked if this was his first encounter with the good, the bad and the ugly.

There is no doubt Mr Universe Steve Reeves was a sthenic hunk in a skirt and a sword,

especially when he grabbed the heroine off her runaway chariot and tossed her on his horse’s back.

He told us that Reeves had ripped his shoulder out for real when he’d hit a tree.

The movie arrived at the most exciting years-waited scene he wanted us to see.

Glaucus is thrown into a hidden pit of water and fights an alligator to the death. 

The hero unjaws the alligator in a far-too-short few-seconds battle where he has to move

a model from side to side to make it look like it's not a bendy flip-flop piece of rubber.

I saw it dawn on disenchanted him that this feeble wiggling scene was the image of heroic
bare-handed combat that had blazed for nearly sixty years at the centre of his memory map.

Now, having got the people out of town, Glaucus is down at the harbour.

The sea is on fire, so Glaucus leaps off the wharf, dives under the flaming sea,

swims underwater out to a waiting boat. He says that when Reeves did his first breast stroke,
his shoulder ripped again. He would have been burned if he'd come to the surface.

He boasted that Reeves had refused to take the lead in Leone’s spaghetti westerns.

And that he’d had the role of James Bond for the asking.

Looking like someone had spat on his dog, he pooh-poohed the notion that Opus Dei
had backed the movie and the martyring of the Christians.
He ignored the question whether the short skirts objectified Mr Universe’s muscle-honed body.

I reminded him that he had remembered Cheyenne knife-fighting in yellowish-red quicksand

when the entire series was actually shot in black-and-white.
He became the resident rowdy face-slapper at our film-theory fest.