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JANET K. KEELERIn Troy, Brad Pitt sets the standard for a long line of actors who haven't been afraid to show a little well-sculpted leg.
Brad Pitt has said that fashion-forward men may soon be wearing Greco-Roman miniskirts after seeing Troy.
Yes, they would, Brad, if they looked like you.
Pretty boy Pitt is even more burnished than usual as the Greek warrior Achilles who won't take no for an answer. He looks like he could bench press the Trojan Horse plus 1,000 extras.
Pitt is not the first actor to show some thigh in celluloid battle, but he just might be the most gorgeous. Not since 1979 when Bo Derek jogged on the beach in 10 has a body of work been so idolized.
Get ready for lots more guys in short dresses and billowing togas. Oliver Stone's biopic Alexander comes out in November with bottle-blond Colin Farrell playing the great Macedonian military leader. HBO's series Rome is in production, as is ABC's Empire. USA Network's Spartacus aired last month.
Maybe the return of the Olympics to Athens this summer is fanning the flame of gladiator lore. More likely, it is the success of Gladiator itself in 2000 that has resold Hollywood on the cast-of-thousands warrior movie. Come to think of it, Russell Crowe also cut a rugged figure in his sword-and-sandals drag.
Daniel Kinne, a costume designer and professor at New York's Parsons School of Design, says Pitt's costumes are a "couple hundred years off but cinematically very worthy."
Accurately, Pitt would be wearing a loose-fitting tunic, cinched at the waist but otherwise not body hugging. Now what fun would it be to look at that? When riding horses, the ancient Greeks wore knitted leggings to prevent riding sores, Kinne says.
Kinne says Troy costume designers have it right when it comes to length. The miniskirts of the '60s were demure compared with these shorties. Some of them in leather, no less.
"The very short chitons (tunics) left the legs free to run," he says. "If you couldn't run, you were dead, whether you were attacking or fleeing."
The sight of Pitt as ancient blond bombshell got us thinking about other men who've donned togas and tunics for the movies. Some carried it off; others, well, they looked like they wished they had been carried off.
-- Janet K. Keeler can be reached at 727 893-8586 or krieta@sptimes.com
THE MOST MEMORABLE MEN IN GRECO-ROMAN GARB:
-- Brad Pitt, the gold-standard warrior. Bad-boy Farrell will have a tough time knocking him off his sartorial pedestal. Pitt has rewritten the classic: Ode to a Grecian Yearn.
-- Marlon Brando sported a micromini tunic as Marc Antony in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1953). Smoldering looks and hot, hot legs. The apocalypse was still very far off.
-- John Belushi got the modern toga party started in Animal House (1978). A lovable slob wrapped in yards of white cloth, Belushi was the anti-Brad Pitt who inspired a generation (or two) of frat boys.
-- Paul Newman looked like a freaked-out freshman in 1954's Silver Chalice. He was so embarrassed that he took out an advertisement in a trade publication apologizing. Wonder how the home ec students who made his costume felt about that?
-- In the famous photos of 1960's Spartacus, Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis look like they're wearing their mothers' underwear. But when Douglas put on his tunic, Momma better have hidden her eyes.
-- Zero Mostel was frumpy and lumpy in his Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) toga. A classic example of what not to wear.
-- Sure, he was handsome, but Richard Burton couldn't compete with wife Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963). She won the battle of the beautiful eyes and softly pleated dresses.
-- Even without a gun, Charlton Heston dominated the enemy in Ben-Hur (1959). He whipped those horses into shape and women into a frenzy.
-- Peter Ustinov played disheveled well as Socrates in Barefoot in Athens (1966). He was also in period costume for Spartacus. Close to god-awful.
-- Russell Crowe is the gladiator's gladiator in the movie that earned him an Academy Award. In torn and tattered tunic, he mowed down the opposition with ease, then looked ready to hoist a few cans of Foster's.