Synopsis
Damon is a thief that has no allegiance towards any man or government. He works for himself and does enough to survive. Pythias is a well-off man, who wishes to bring balance between the classes. He wants to make sure that everyone gets their just due. After a series of events, Damon and Pythias become close friends, to the point where Damon sacrifices himself to save Pythias. Of course, Pythias doesn’t allow that to happen, which proves his purpose in his fight for equality and also proves his friendship to Damon.
I’m a stickler for an old film like this. Something that should be on a Saturday morning AMC schedule, Damon and Pythias is a very simple film about two men who meet and grow together through friendship and trust. It’s also somewhat of a political film, which says that you can change how things are by banding together and fighting for what you believe in. I’m not sure what the motivation of making such a picture was at the time, but the content is certainly timeless.
Having said that, the film might had been too simplistic for its own good. This happens a lot with screenplays. The main purpose and focus of the film was building a bond between Damon and Pythias, which makes the end of the film more powerful. This bond gets created early in the movie and that sort of leaves the film wondering what it should be doing. By doing that, you get about 40-50 minutes of the film is basically repeat and reassurance that these gentlemen are friends. It’s like going through the same loop over and over in the story. This might have been where the film faltered just a bit. By the end, we’re very aware of Damon and Pythias’ relationship, as it’s been repeated many times.
It isn’t a bad film, but it’s very shallow in terms of content. It needed maybe a bit more action in some areas and a little more emotional bonding in others. Anyway, the two bright spots in the film were Guy Williams as Damon (you would know him from Lost in Space and Disney’s Zorro) and Don Burnett as Pythias (who, according to IMDB.com, didn’t have much a film career after this one). They did a great job with this film, and they were very fun to watch.
In the end, the film is a fun classic that shouldn’t be taken too seriously. It accomplishes what it sets out to do, though it might have been refined in the process just a bit.
As for the movie being on DVD, it started out just a bit rough with the transfer. When I first popped in the disc and it showed the opening scene, it looked rough. There were lots of graininess in the opening shot, scratchy film that looked aged and just general ugliness. I thought maybe WB had just thrown caution to the wind and didn’t even bother to do any cleaning of the film. As soon as the first few characters start to roll in that changed dramatically. The transfer goes from scratchy to pretty solid and ready for television. It looked like a well-treated archived film by the end of the movie. What’s funny is that I’ve seen Blu-rays do this at the beginning of the movie. For example, the opening scene to Rain Main looks like complete crap, but the movie gets better as soon as Tom Cruise hits the scene. Again, I’m not sure why, but a lot of Blu-rays do this.
The only downer for this release is that it has no special features. Of course, it’s a freaking 1962 film that probably didn’t have that big of a budget attached to it, which means that there would be no production featurette made for it. Back in the day, on high profile films, a studio would put together a featurette about the production of the movie with interviews with stars and crew. That all depended on the size of the film, which I couldn’t imagine Damon and Pythias was a huge film for that time period. The movie on DVD is probably enough to satisfy fans, although I would have loved to see a featurette on Guy Williams. He had quite the extensive career.