. I asked Charles, the producer, if I could get him to work on this picture, which was in Spain, and he said no because he didn’t want to pay for the extra transportation. I prevailed on him to get the guy, and then when he showed up he wanted more money than Charles was willing to pay. I said: ‘Look Charles, never mind. You pay him what you would have paid him and I’ll pay him the rest’. He was so embarrassed by that he paid the man anyway.
He was good. He laid out that fight up and down the stairs [the famous fight sequence with the skeletons]. The skeleton and shields, Kerwin Mathews… He worked all night, it seemed like, and all day in those caves in Arta, and it was hard, hard work and we never did stop. And Kerwin Mathews showed me his hands every morning after he was working all night, and they were all bloody from the sword handles. We did one shot with the Italian sword master and Kerwin Mathews, and the sword master took the place of the skeleton, and we printed that and then Ray [Harryhausen] used that as a guide
So, who was Enzo Musumeci Greco? Well, he was an italian fencing master and stunt director who worked on a considerable number of films from the 1930s on. Some of his bigger budget productions included El Cid (61), 55 Days at Peking (53) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (64) – indicating, perhaps, that he spoke English – but he also worked on numerous genre films like Hercules Unchained (59), Mission Bloody Mary (65) and Hercules (83).
Like many of the Italian stuntmen, Greco came from a family with links to the trade. His uncle, Aurelio Greco, was a famed fencer, a sport that at the time was hugely popular in the 1930s: fencing masters would often display their skills in evening shows at packed theatres like the Quirino or the Eliseo, and it’s most successful practitioners had the status of today’s footballers. Enzo also became a hugely respected swordsman, winning awards such as the Stella d’oro al Merito Sportivo
