Goliath and the Dragon
1960 film by Vittorio Cottafavi
Goliath and the Dragon (Italian: La vendetta di Ercole, lit. 'Revenge of Hercules') is a 1960 sword-and-sandal film directed by Vittorio Cottafavi and starring Mark Forest and Broderick Crawford.
The name of the main character was changed from Hercules to Emilius (known in the film as Goliath) for release in North America by American International Pictures to sell it as a sequel to their earlier Goliath and the Barbarians (1959). American International Pictures had announced plans to create a sequel to Goliath and the Barbarians called Goliath and the Dragon based on a script by Lou Rusoff for star Debra Paget, but the project fell through, so they bought the rights to an already-made Italian film called Revenge of Hercules and retitled it Goliath and the Dragon. American International Pictures also added a Wah Ming Chang stop-motion animation sequence inserting a dragon sub-plot into the story. The dragon sequence is only in the Americanized English-dubbed print, not in the original Italian version.
Plot
The film begins with Hercules/Goliath entering the underworld and defeating several monsters including Cerberus to retrieve the blood diamond of the goddess of vengeance. It is later revealed that king Eurystheus has sent Hercules on this task to ensure his death to gain allies who after Hercules' death will join the king in an attack on Thebes. The episode is loosely based on the twelfth of the Labours of Hercules.
Hercules returns to his wife Deianira to find that his teenaged son (his brother in the American version) Hyllus is in love with Thea the daughter of a king that Hercules believes murdered his family. The enraged Hercules refuses to let Hyllus have anything to do with Thea.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Goliath and the Dragon” is 1960 film by Vittorio Cottafavi. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Goliath, Dragon and film, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1215635. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “Goliath and the Dragon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.