Sybil Danning and the Sirens of 70s Fantasy Cinema: Five Films of Myth and Desire
Before Sybil Danning became the warrior queen of 1980s video shelves, she was a Nibelung princess in a German retelling of Siegfried that nobody's mother would have let them rent. She wasn't alone. In the 1970s, fantasy cinema took off its armor. Gods, genies, sorceresses and swordsmen had always populated the screen, but now the camera lingered on them differently, with the heat of a decade that had discovered that myth was always about the body.
This is a story told through five films and the women who carried them: Susan Hampshire, Sybil Danning, Ines Pellegrini, Jane Seymour, Taryn Power and Erica Creer. Some became stars. Some stepped away. All of them stood at the place where the old heroic fantasy gave way to something warmer, stranger and more adult.
Susan Hampshire's Five Faces: Malpertuis and the Goddesses in the Attic
Start with a house. In Harry Kümel's Malpertuis, the house is everything: a labyrinth of staircases, candlelit corridors and locked rooms in a Flemish port town, where a dying occultist, played by a vast, rumbling Orson Welles, has gathered a strange family around his deathbed.
Shot in 1971 and premiered in competition at Cannes in May 1972, the film is a dream you can't quite wake from. And its sleepwalking heart is Susan Hampshire.
One Actress, Five Women
Hampshire plays five roles in Malpertuis: Nancy, Euryale, Alecto, a nurse, and Charlotte. The film's secret, which I won't spoil completely, is that the old gods of Greece haven't died. They've been captured, shrunk into human form, and shut inside this house.
That gives Hampshire something rare: the chance to be desire in several shapes. As one woman she is warm and inviting. As another she is cool, remote, almost marble. The camera studies her face the way the hero, a young sailor played by Mathieu Carrière, studies the house: room by room, never sure which door leads to love and which to ruin.
British audiences knew her as the refined heroine of period television. Here, she sheds that politeness. Her eyes do much of the work, wide, pale and slightly unreadable under Kümel's amber light, and the effect is closer to hypnosis than seduction.
Sylvie Vartan's Bets
Beside her is Sylvie Vartan, the French pop idol, as Bets. Vartan brought her singer's glamour into Kümel's gloom, a modern face in an antique nightmare, and her presence gives the film a second pole of attraction. Where Hampshire is mystery, Vartan is warmth and flesh.
The Cut and the Myth
The Cannes version ran 100 minutes, trimmed at United Artists' request. Kümel's longer cut was later restored with his involvement, and in 2025 a 4K Blu-ray finally gave the film the attention its admirers always said it deserved. Watch the director's version if you can. The extra time belongs to the atmosphere, and atmosphere is the point.
Malpertuis is the most intellectual of our five films, and the least explicit. Yet it sets the theme for everything that follows. In 1970s fantasy cinema, the gods don't descend from Olympus in thunder. They live upstairs, they wear a woman's face, and they're waiting for you to open the door.
Sybil Danning as Kriemhild: The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried
If Malpertuis hid its goddesses behind locked doors, The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried threw the doors open, along with the castle windows, the bed curtains, and most of the costumes. And standing in the middle of the draught, golden and entirely unbothered, was a young Sybil Danning.
The Nibelungen, Undressed
The German title tells you everything: Siegfried und das sagenhafte Liebesleben der Nibelungen, roughly, the legendary love life of the Nibelungs. Directed by Adrian Hoven in 1971, it takes the national epic that Fritz Lang once carved in stone and turns it into a bawdy romp of feasts, baths, and bedchambers. Raimund Harmstorf, a big, bearded, cheerful Siegfried, slays his dragon, and the rest of the film is about what heroes do between battles.
Danning plays Kriemhild, the princess Siegfried is promised to. Heidy Bohlen plays the warrior queen Brunhild, the woman no man can tame. In Wagner, these two women carry the tragedy of the whole cycle. Here, they carry the comedy, and the curves.
The Girl from Wels
Danning was born Sybille Danninger in Wels, Austria. She grew up partly in America, came back to Europe, trained as a nurse, and studied cosmetology in Salzburg before modelling pulled her in front of the camera. By the late 1960s she was working in the soft erotic films that German-speaking cinema was producing by the dozen.
Siegfried was one of those films, and you can watch her discover, scene by scene, that the camera loved her. She doesn't play the princess as a victim of the joke. She plays her with a knowing ease, a half-smile that tells the audience she's in on it. That self-possession would become her trademark.
The Allure on Camera
The cinematography is the plain, bright lighting of German sex comedy, all daylight and warm interiors. No Kümel shadows here. It hardly matters. Danning's presence does the lighting for the film. Her blonde hair falls loose over bare shoulders, the medieval gowns are cut low and loose, and her strong, athletic figure was already the silhouette she would later carry into science fiction armor.
What strikes me now is her control. In scenes built to show skin, she sets the pace. She looks back at the camera as often as it looks at her. In the language Pauline Kael loved, she has heat, but it's her heat, and she decides when to turn it up.
Siegfried Goes to America
The film had a second life in the United States. The exploitation producer David F. Friedman reworked it for American grindhouses, and he is credited as co-director of that version. The posters played it for laughs, crediting the stars under joke names, "Sybelle Danninger" among them, and the film also circulated as Maidenquest.
For Danning, it was a beginning. The next year she stood beside Richard Burton and Raquel Welch in Bluebeard (1972), and the road to Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), a Playboy pictorial, and her crown as the queen of 1980s cult cinema was open. She retired from acting in 1986, then returned for Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007).
But the warrior queen began here, as a Nibelung princess smiling at the joke.
My Conversation with Sybil Danning
About a year ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Sybil Danning for the Meeting Venus YouTube channel. For 45 minutes, she spoke about her career, from her European beginnings to the cult films that made her a legend. You can watch our full conversation here:
Ines Pellegrini in Pasolini's Arabian Nights
After the German castle comes the desert, and a very different kind of heat. Pier Paolo Pasolini's Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle mille e una notte, 1974) is the third film in his Trilogy of Life, after The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales. It won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes. And its heart belongs to a nineteen-year-old who had never acted before: Ines Pellegrini.
The Girl Pasolini Found
Pellegrini was born in Milan in 1954, with Eritrean heritage, and spent part of her childhood in Eritrea before returning to Italy. Pasolini, who preferred faces to actors, saw her and cast her as Zumurrud, the slave girl at the center of the film's main story.
He later described her small, slightly irregular features as "perfect as those of a metal statue." That's the eye of a poet looking at a face the way a sculptor looks at bronze, and the film photographs her exactly that way.
Zumurrud Chooses
Zumurrud's story is about desire, but its first move is a surprise. At the slave market, she's offered for sale, and she chooses her own buyer: Nur-ed-Din, a beautiful, foolish boy played by Franco Merli. She picks him, laughing, against the old men with money.
Then she's stolen away, and the lovers are separated. Zumurrud escapes disguised as a man, is mistaken for a hero, and ends up ruling as king of a distant city, while Nur-ed-Din wanders the world looking for her. The film travels with them through the landscapes of Yemen, Ethiopia, Iran and Nepal, and stories open inside stories like the doors of a palace.
It's no accident that the woman in this fable is the clever one. In Pasolini's version, desire is a game that Zumurrud plays better than any man.
The Allure on Camera
Pasolini's sensuality is unlike anyone else's in this article. There is no glamour lighting, no seductive gowns, no makeup girl hovering. The light is hard, natural, desert sun on brick and sand. Bodies are shown plainly, with an innocence that can feel shocking precisely because it's so calm.
Pellegrini moves through this world with an unhurried ease. Her dark skin glows in the sunlight against rough walls and white cloth, and she meets the camera with a direct, amused gaze. Stephanie Zacharek might say the film whispers. Its eroticism lives in a smile, a hand on a shoulder, a long look across a market, and in the mutual pleasure of two young people who simply like each other.
After the Thousand and One Nights
Pellegrini appeared in Pasolini's last and darkest film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), then worked through the decade in Italian genre cinema, including Eyeball (1975) and War of the Robots (1978). In all, she made 16 films between 1974 and 1981.
In the mid-1980s she stepped away from acting and moved to Los Angeles, where she opened an antiques shop and did volunteer work. The statue Pasolini saw chose her own life. That suits Zumurrud, too.
Jane Seymour and Taryn Power: Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
From Pasolini's desert to Ray Harryhausen's, and from a poet's realism to stop-motion magic. Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), directed by Sam Wanamaker, was the third of Harryhausen's Sinbad adventures, after The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. It was a family film, with a bronze Minoton, a giant walrus and a sabre-toothed tiger. It also became the Sinbad film that grown-up audiences remember for its two princesses.
Two Daughters of Hollywood and Beyond
Jane Seymour plays Princess Farah, whose brother Prince Kassim has been turned into a baboon by their wicked stepmother, the sorceress Zenobia, played with relish by Margaret Whiting. Farah needs Sinbad's help to break the curse, and Seymour came to the role a few years after playing the tarot-reading Solitaire in the Bond film Live and Let Die (1973).
Taryn Power plays Dione, daughter of the alchemist Melanthius, played by Patrick Troughton. Power was the daughter of Tyrone Power, the swashbuckling star of Hollywood's golden age. And Sinbad himself was Patrick Wayne, son of John Wayne.
That was no coincidence. Producer Charles Schneer said he paired John Wayne's son with Tyrone Power's daughter hoping for chemistry. It was a casting idea from the old studio system, set inside a film that was quietly moving with the new times.
The Allure on Camera
For the eyes of 1977, the most talked-about moment wasn't a monster. It was a bath. On the long journey north, Farah and Dione bathe together in a pool, far from the ship and the men, and Seymour's scene became one of the film's best-known images.
Schneer explained it plainly: "The nudity came about in the development of the picture." He wanted to keep up with what audiences of the decade had come to accept. Even a Harryhausen fantasy now had to acknowledge that its heroines had bodies.
The scene itself is handled with restraint. Water, rocks and soft daylight frame the two women, and the camera keeps a respectful distance. Seymour, slim and porcelain-pale with a cascade of dark hair, carries the moment with the poise of a dancer, which she had trained to be. Power is blonde, open-faced and sunlit, her nineteen-year-old ease a counterpoint to Seymour's elegance.
This is fantasy's sensuality at its gentlest. The scene gives the audience a glimpse, not a show, and it lets its heroines enjoy a private moment before the adventure takes them back.
The Last Voyage
The film was the last Sinbad Harryhausen made, and the end of an era for old-fashioned adventure. Within months, Star Wars had changed the rules of screen fantasy forever.
But the princesses stayed in memory. For many viewers who saw it in cinemas or on television, Jane Seymour and Taryn Power were the first fantasy heroines they noticed as women, not as maidens waiting to be rescued.
Erica Creer's Tara in Circle of Iron: Temptation on the Warrior's Road
Our last film began as a dream of Bruce Lee's. In 1969, Lee, James Coburn and the screenwriter Stirling Silliphant conceived The Silent Flute, a martial-arts fable about a fighter's spiritual journey. Lee walked away from the project, and after his death in 1973 the script was finished by Silliphant and Stanley Mann. It reached the screen in 1978 as Circle of Iron, directed by the cinematographer Richard Moore, with David Carradine in several mystical roles and Jeff Cooper as the young warrior Cord.
The Vow and the Visitor
Cord is searching for the Book of All Knowledge, guarded by the wizard Zetan, played by Christopher Lee. On his way he faces a series of trials, each a lesson. One of them has no sword in it at all.
At a desert festival, its leader offers Cord a wife: Tara, played by Erica Creer. Cord refuses. He has sworn himself to celibacy for his quest. But at night, Tara comes to his tent, and the vow doesn't survive the visit.
When Cord wakes in the morning, the camp has gone. Tara has been crucified. It's the cruelest turn in the film: desire, in this fable, is never free, and the warrior's moment of tenderness costs the woman everything.
The Allure on Camera
Creer has only a few minutes on screen, and she makes them count. The tent scene is lit by the warm glow of lamps against the cold desert night, and Creer comes into it quietly, with a calm self-possession that makes Cord's vow look suddenly fragile. She doesn't seduce with words. She simply stays.
This is the oldest temptation story in the warrior's book, and the film frames her as its living symbol. But Creer gives Tara a human warmth that makes her fate genuinely painful. It's the same lesson Zacharek draws from the best love scenes: what lingers is tenderness, not display.
Creer's screen career was brief. Her credits run from 1978 to 1981, including The Dogs of War (1980) and The Great Muppet Caper (1981), and then she stepped away from the screen.
Where Are They Now?
The women of these five films took very different roads.
Susan Hampshire returned to British television and stage, the career that had made her name before Malpertuis. Sylvie Vartan remained one of France's great pop stars, her singing career long outlasting her film roles.
Sybil Danning became the queen of 1980s cult cinema, retired in 1986, and returned for Rob Zombie's Halloween in 2007. Ines Pellegrini left acting in the mid-1980s for a new life in Los Angeles, running an antiques shop.
Jane Seymour became a household name, from Somewhere in Time to Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and is still working today. Taryn Power, nominated for a Saturn Award for Sinbad, made only eight films. She married the photographer Norman Seeff, raised four children, and died of leukemia on June 26, 2020, in Viroqua, Wisconsin, at 66.
And Erica Creer remains the most mysterious of them all: four films, one unforgettable night in a tent, and then silence.
Myth, Desire and the Women Who Carried Them
Five films, five worlds: a cursed Flemish house, a German castle, a desert of a thousand stories, a Harryhausen ocean and a warrior's road. In each, the old fantasy of heroes and monsters met the new freedom of 1970s cinema, and the meeting point was always a woman.
Susan Hampshire showed that one face could hold five goddesses. Sybil Danning took a Nibelung princess and turned her into the start of a cult career. Ines Pellegrini let Pasolini's camera find a statue, then walked out of the frame and chose her own life. Jane Seymour and Taryn Power gave a family adventure its most remembered quiet moment. And Erica Creer, in a few minutes of lamplight, made temptation tender and tragic.
Their films were sometimes clumsy, sometimes brilliant, and often both. What lasts is the light on their faces: amber in Kümel's corridors, harsh desert sun in Pasolini's markets, the soft glow of a tent at night. Fantasy cinema had always promised other worlds. These women made those worlds warm.
Close your eyes and you can still see one image: a lamp burning low, a woman stepping inside, and a warrior forgetting his vow.
Next on Meeting Venus: Ingrid Pitt, the countess of Hammer horror, who brought a dangerous sensuality to The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who plays Kriemhild in The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried?
Sybil Danning plays Kriemhild in the 1971 German film directed by Adrian Hoven, with Raimund Harmstorf as Siegfried and Heidy Bohlen as Brunhild.
Did I interview Sybil Danning?
Yes. I interviewed Sybil Danning for 45 minutes on the Meeting Venus YouTube channel, and the full conversation is embedded in the Siegfried section of this article.
How many roles does Susan Hampshire play in Malpertuis?
Five: Nancy, Euryale, Alecto, a nurse and Charlotte. The film reveals that Greek goddesses are hidden in human form inside the house.
Who directed Malpertuis?
Belgian director Harry Kümel. It premiered in competition at Cannes in 1972, with Orson Welles, Susan Hampshire, Sylvie Vartan and Mathieu Carrière.
Who is Ines Pellegrini?
An Italian actress of Eritrean heritage, born in Milan in 1954. Pasolini cast her as Zumurrud in Arabian Nights (1974). She also appeared in Salò, and left acting in the mid-1980s.
Who plays Princess Farah in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger?
Jane Seymour plays Princess Farah, and Taryn Power plays Dione, daughter of the alchemist Melanthius.
Is Taryn Power related to Tyrone Power?
Yes. Taryn Power was the daughter of Tyrone Power and actress Linda Christian, and the sister of singer Romina Power. She died in 2020.
Is there nudity in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger?
Yes, briefly, in a bathing scene. Producer Charles Schneer said the nudity came about during the film's development, to reflect what audiences of the 1970s had come to accept.
Who plays Tara in Circle of Iron?
Erica Creer plays Tara, the woman who tempts the warrior Cord to break his vow of celibacy. Her film career ran from 1978 to 1981.
Was Circle of Iron a Bruce Lee film?
Bruce Lee co-conceived the story, originally called The Silent Flute, with James Coburn and Stirling Silliphant, but he left the project before his death. David Carradine starred in the 1978 film.
Where can I watch these films?
Several have recent Blu-ray releases, including a 4K restoration of Malpertuis, and The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried has streamed on Cultpix. Streaming catalogues change often, so check a guide such as JustWatch for your country.
