Black Gate

Oliver Reed in Gor (USA/South Africa, 1987)

We’ve come to the end of the ‘80s and the last of our Barbarian Boom articles, as fantasy films in the ‘90s diversified to offer a broader portfolio after the waning of Conan fever. And as you’ll see from the movies covered this week, by 1987 the barbarian flick genre had definitely passed into a period of decadence, with filmmakers straining to find ways to keep pumping life into it. Not that there aren’t some weird delights to be had in these desperate final outings, as you’ll see.

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Samurai Spy (Japan, 1965)

By the 1960s, the tropes of chambara films, i.e., samurai adventures, had become through endless repetition standardized and over-familiar. As with the Western film in America and Europe, it was time for variations on the theme less they lose their audience, and so antiheroes raised their unfeeling heads and genre crossovers appeared, such as the samurai-meet-kaiju Daimajin movies. This week we take a look at a couple of interesting antihero adventures plus a crossover with the then-popular secret agent genre, Samurai Spy. Let’s dive in!

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The Viking (USA, 1928)

Considering there were only about a dozen-and-a-half movies about Vikings released in the first hundred years of filmmaking, they had a cultural impact far exceeding their number, establishing a clear and consistent archetype of the Viking warrior that holds true even today. All the tropes and visual hallmarks of that archetype were in place in the first full feature, 1928’s The Viking, and didn’t really change much over the subsequent 80 years. Interest peaked in the early ‘60s with a spate of films from both Hollywood and Italy, represented here by Mario Bava’s Knives of the Avenger, and didn’t get much of a rethink until Terry Jones’ Erik the Viking (1989), with its attempt to turn the genre on its head and simultaneously explore its mythic roots.

The last ten years have seen another upswing in interest in Vikings onscreen, starting with video game Skyrim in 2011 and the Vikings TV series in 2013, and there’s no sign of it slacking off, so it seems a timely moment for a quick survey of the genre’s beginnings. I hope you enjoy it.

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The Moonraker (UK, 1958)

In many ways, 1958 was a peak year for British screen swashbucklers. On the TV screen, The Adventures of Robin Hood continued its popular run, and was joined by other series, including Ivanhoe, William Tell, and Sword of Freedom. On the big screen, the swashbuckler hit of the year was The Moonraker, a fine cloak-and-sword production that did well in Europe but didn’t really make it across the pond to America. This week, let’s take a close look at UK swords ’58.

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Master Swordsman Hirate Miki (Japan, 1951)

If you’re just getting into watching older samurai adventures movies, you can’t go wrong picking those directed by Akira Kurosawa or starring Toshiro Mifune and/or Tatsuya Nakadai. However, eventually you’ll run through all those, and then where do you look?

Fortunately, in the ‘50s through ‘70s, chambara action films were as common in Japanese movie theaters as Westerns were in America, and a lot of the very best samurai features are available with fairly decent English subtitles. This week we’re going to look at four lower-profile samurai films from the 1950s, the first three of which, though obscure, are well worth the trouble of seeking them out.

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The Princess Bride (USA, 1987)

George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg: we may love their movies, but those guys have a lot to answer for. Their early fantasy action blockbusters, especially the Star Wars series, were such global mega-hits that they spawned countless imitators making noisy, busy, and sadly shallow films that flooded the theaters from the late ‘70s throughout the ‘80s. Everyone was chasing the golden youth market that was supposedly hooked on broad, colorful action enhanced by flashy special effects — and this pursuit infected not just Hollywood, but European and Asian studios as well.

There were some worthwhile films that followed that formula, of course — Excalibur, Time Bandits, Highlander — but in general, we got an endless series of loud actioners bloated by chase scenes, slo-mo heroic leaps, and large explosions (so many explosions). But then, in 1987, along came The Princess Bride, a small miracle of a movie with brains, heart, courage, sly wit and sharp dialogue, a film that made it possible to forget all about Red Sonja. And suddenly, the ‘80s didn’t look so bad after all.

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The Golden Horde (USA, 1951)

Huns and Mongols, the mounted hordes who swept out of Central Asia into eastern and central Europe in the Middle Ages, made a lasting impact on the psyche of the folk of the lands they invaded, all the way down the 20th century—as shown by the fact that Allied propaganda during World War I successfully branded their German opponents as “the Huns.” Invoking the Mongol Horde was a reliable source of terror in mid-century movies from Russia to Italy to Hollywood, as we see in the films covered in this week’s article. All three suffer from the casual racism of the time in which they were made, but it’s better to see that and note it than to pretend it never happened or doesn’t matter. History is always seen through the lens of the time it’s viewed from, and we learn interesting lessons from its distortions.

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The Buccaneer (USA, 1958)

Pirates were a popular subject in midcentury Hollywood — but piracy, not so much, because it was obviously committed by bad people who would take all your stuff, given the chance (and maybe do worse). Thus the common cinematic usage of the term buccaneer, which sounds like it just describes a gentleman adventurer with an attitude rather than someone who would casually cut your throat and throw your corpse over the side. Aye, call your pirate movie a buccaneer’s tale, and even theatrical markets in the iron grip of the Legion of Decency will smile and let your film be shown at Saturday matinees to audiences full of kiddies. All keelhauling is to be conducted offscreen, if you please.

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The Valiant Ones (Taiwan/Hong Kong, 1975)

Wuxia, which can be translated as martial chivalry, is the term usually applied to tales of ancient Chinese armed martial arts, especially when retold in the context of the Hong Kong action film tradition that began in the Sixties. Wuxia movies were eclipsed by the Seventies kung fu boom but never quite went away, reviving full force in the Nineties and staying strong to this day.

By the late Seventies there was a changing of the guard, as the founding knights, directors King Hu and Chang Cheh, gave way to rising stars of chivalry such as Sun Chung and John Woo. The latter took the lessons of the founders, absorbed the frenetic dynamism of the kung fu years, and carried wuxia films forward with a new joy and energy.

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