Black Gate

The Court Jester (Paramount 1956)

Swashbuckler heroes tend to be boisterous and aggressively cheerful, embracing whatever life throws at them, not reacting so much as over-reacting to every joy and challenge, happy to be outside the constraints that keep normal folk like us from picking up apples in the grocery by impaling them on the points of our swords. Swashbuckler films often have comic overtones because it fits the character of their devil-may-care protagonists. And some swashbuckler movies take the plunge into outright parody. Here are two of the latter, plus an immediate predecessor that helped pave the way.

The Flame and the Arrow

Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1950
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

Burt Lancaster burst onto the Hollywood scene in 1946 playing a tender tough guy in The Killers, a dark film noir based on a Hemingway story, and he soon earned a reputation for excelling at edgy, dramatic roles. But before Hollywood, and before his service in World War II, Lancaster had been… a circus performer. In the 1930s he was one-half of Lang & Cravat, a comical acrobatic act with his diminutive partner and lifelong friend Nick Cravat, who, as part of his shtick, never said a word, leaving all the snappy patter to Lancaster.

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Since the resurgence in interest in the Norse and their far-traveling raiders during the Romantic era of the early 19^th century, the depiction of Vikings in popular culture had been pretty consistent, as a bunch of rugged, hard-drinking, manic-depressive berserkers with a lust for life and horns on their helmets. But except for the silent epic The Viking (1928) they didn’t really get a lot of Hollywood screen time until the 1950s, when a few films established or burnished the visual tropes that are still touchstones today. Here are three movies that demonized, caricatured, and lionized the Vikings—and it was the last, which valorized them on a grand scale, that made the most lasting impression.

Prince Valiant

Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1954
Director: Henry Hathaway
Source: 20^th Century Fox DVD

When I was a kid, Sunday morning meant the eagerly awaited color comics section of the Akron Beacon Journal, and the comic I always turned to first was Prince Valiant. Hal Foster’s adventure tale, set “In the Days of King Arthur,” was gorgeously designed, told an endless story of nearly adult caliber, had engaging characters, was epic in scope and yet ambitious in its attempt to get the details of medieval life credible and accurate. (Its historical setting was highly fictitious, of course, but the Arthur tales are legend, not history.) Prince Valiant was arguably the greatest American adventure strip of the 20^th Century.

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After the box-office success of RKO’s The Spanish Main (1945) and Sinbad the Sailor (1947), in 1948 Warner Bros. re-released The Adventures of Robin Hood to theaters, where it did almost as well as its first time ‘round in 1938. The rest of Hollywood took notice, and soon every studio had two or three historical adventures in the development pipeline. The postwar swashbuckler boom was on!

Walt Disney wasn’t about to be left behind. With a pile of money parked in European banks, he decided to open a British studio to make his first live-action films, using The Adventures of Robin Hood as the template: historical adventures with broad appeal based on familiar stories from public domain sources (because why pay royalties?). And he hit a home run the first time at bat with Treasure Island.

Treasure Island

Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA/UK, 1950
Director: Byron Haskin
Source: Disney DVD

Walt Disney liked to adapt well-known classic tales, so when he decided to make his first live-action feature, it’s not surprising that he chose Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, with its child protagonist and adventures in exotic locales. What is surprising is how hard-edged and gritty it is, considering Disney’s later (well-earned) reputation for peddling bland conformist mediocrity. This 1950 film is as tense and dynamic as its pre-Hays Code 1934 predecessor, and just as closely adapted from the novel, though exact choices of scenes and dialogue vary between the two. Moreover, the Disney version is in vibrant full color.

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This week we’re looking at the spate of Arabian Nights fantasies that came out of Hollywood during World War II, when cinema audiences were looking for colorful distractions from the grim news of the war. And boy howdy, were these films ever colorful distractions, bizarre and often wacky in ways that seem incredible by current standards.

The example was set, not by Hollywood, but by the 1940 British production of The Thief of Bagdad, a serious fantasy film that established the whole genre. We’ll start with that and then introduce Hollywood’s increasingly strange variations on the theme. Hang on to your turbans!

The Thief of Bagdad

Rating: ****
Origin: UK, 1940
Directors: Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, Tim Whelan
Source: Criterion Collection DVD

Everybody loves this movie. It’s got heart, magic, music, adventure, romance, and ambitious special effects that alternate between stupendous and hilarious. Hang it, even I love this movie. And yet, to be perfectly frank, it’s a bit of a mess.

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This week we’re here to praise Olivia de Havilland, the great British/American screen actor who passed away last month at the age of 102. De Havilland was remarkable, not just for her stunning beauty, but for her sharp wits and indomitable spirit, all of which she brought to bear in nearly every performance. She was Hollywood’s first Queen of the Swashbucklers thanks to her defining roles in Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood, which launched her career and that of her co-star Errol Flynn into the stratosphere. (De Havilland’s reign was followed by that of Maureen O’Hara, but we’ll talk about her another day).

No matter how many times you’ve seen Blood or Robin Hood, you can’t help but delight in de Havilland’s performances as Arabella Bishop and Maid Marian. She’s far more than a mere attractive love interest for the hero, especially in the latter role, where she risks her life to save Robin Hood and the Saxons. Capsule reviews of those two films follow, and I’ll warn you in advance, they’re unapologetic raves. I’ve added a review of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, a lesser film in which de Havilland was third billed after Bette Davis and Flynn but which nonetheless has points of interest. Enjoy!

Captain Blood

Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA, 1935
Director: Michael Curtiz
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

After the success of swashbucklers Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo, Warners decided to go all-in on a remake of Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood. (There’d been a silent version in 1924, now lost.) The stars they initially had in mind for the leads bowed out, and in the end the studio took a huge risk and cast two complete unknowns: Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Luckily, they were both excellent, ideal for the roles — and even better, they had great on-screen chemistry together, so good they were paired seven more times in the next ten years. The director’s chair went to studio veteran Michael Curtiz, who in 1938 would co-direct another swashbuckling essential, The Adventures of Robin Hood, before his career pinnacle helming Casablanca. Add in Basil Rathbone as the villain, supported by a slate of the best character actors in Hollywood, with a stirring soundtrack by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and you have the makings of a true classic.

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Douglas Fairbanks, The Black Pirate (1926)

[Check out Part I of Silent Screen Swashbucklers here.]

In the second half of the 1920s, swashbuckler films only got grander and more epic. If you can’t give an audience sound, you might as well give them spectacle, and that’s what filmmakers in America and Europe set out to do. But the industry’s collective skills of cinematic storytelling were also getting more sophisticated, and with more tools at their disposal, filmmakers were able to add more variety and nuance into their moving pictures. And the acting just plain got better. I am frankly amazed that some of these excellent films aren’t better known. I think you’ll find that some of these gems are well worth the trouble it takes to track them down.

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The Mark of Zorro (1920)

The swashbuckler tradition was born out of legends like those of the Knights of the Round Table and of Robin Hood, revived in the early 19th century by Romantic movement authors such as Sir Walter Scott. The genre really caught hold with the publication of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers in 1844, and for the next century it was arguably the world’s leading form of adventure fiction, challenged only by the American Western.

The action and visual flair of the swashbucklers were perfect for the movie screen, and Hollywood brought them to life with brio and panache, starting most successfully with lavish productions of The Mark of Zorro (1920) and The Three Musketeers (1921), both starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. The 1920s through 1950s were the heyday of the Hollywood swashbuckler, but they continue to find favor with moviegoers right up to the present, notably in the recent Pirates of the Caribbean series. So it’s worth going back to see how those visual tropes around the hero-with-a-sword were first established during the silent film era, because much of what you see on the screen today had its roots almost a hundred years ago with those early cinematic pioneers.

I had a good time surveying these early swashbucklers, and I hope you’ll enjoy this overview. With luck, it’ll even inspire you to dip into this rich source of adventure film tradition yourself.

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