Black Gate

Zorro and the Three Musketeers (Italy, 1963)

Everyone likes crossovers and mash-ups, right? If you’re a fan of two heroes in the same genre, then of course you’d like to see a story in which they meet and confront a challenge together. That is the commercial calculation for crossovers in every medium, whether it’s comics, games, TV shows, or movies. It’s assumed a crossover or mash-up is a sure thing that will draw in the fans of both franchises. It’s a no-brainer.

In principle, maybe, but not in practice. In practice, the story or personality elements that create the appeal of one character don’t always fit comfortably with the elements of another. Zorro and the Three Musketeers, for example: all cheerful swashbucklers, but the musketeers are a disparate bunch that rely on teamwork, while Zorro is fundamentally a loner, so mashing them together in a coherent and credible plot is a task that shouldn’t be underestimated, calling for a top-notch screenwriter. Or what if you put together two characters like Yojimbo and Zatoichi, each of whom usually functions as the fulcrum of the plot? What do you do with two fulcrums? Solving these problems can be a high bar to get over, and sometimes a low-budget genre picture just isn’t up to it.

Though one has to admit, Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman actually pulls it off.

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Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (UK, 1974)

William Hobbs (1939-2018) was the greatest director of European-style stage fencing of his generation. An English actor trained to the stage at the Old Vic, Hobbs was fight director at Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company in the Sixties before making is first big splash in films with Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers in 1973. As a fencing choreographer, he was known for his more realistic, rough-and-tumble approach to cinematic fighting, having the actors expend effort to exhaustion, depicting combat as a desperate and fearful endeavor. This was a revelation that overturned the Hollywood standard of elegant and balletic fencing as exemplified by the swordwork of actors like Basil Rathbone, Stewart Granger, and Cornel Wilde. In a William Hobbs fencing match, an actor was as likely to strike a blow with a handy broomstick as with a rapier.

Hobbs’ most influential work was certainly the swordplay he choreographed for Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, after which he was the go-to guy for decades for any British or American production that featured fencing, his credits including Excalibur (1981), Ladyhawke (1985), Rob Roy (1995), all the way through to Game of Thrones (2011). In between he continued to work as a director for stage fencing, mainly for productions of Shakespeare plays — he directed the swordwork in Hamlet over two dozen times, including the 1990 film with Mel Gibson. “I do think, what the hell am I going to do this time to make it different?” Hobbs said in 2008. “A fight has to grow out of the situation of the play. There’s the text, and you’ve got to follow it truthfully and honestly.”

This week, let’s take a look at three of Hobbs’ earliest films as fight director.

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Hercules and the Captive Women (Italy/France, 1961)

The Steve Reeves Hercules (Italy, 1958) was a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic, proving there was a market for shirtless strongman movies in drive-in movie theaters across America. The Italian movie industry obliged by churning out reams of low-budget sword-and-sandal “peplum” films, many of which had heroes named Goliath or Maciste in their original forms. When they were dubbed into English, for name-recognition purposes most of these strongmen were renamed Hercules, giving us a bewildering array of Hercules and the… movies from 1960 through 1965, when they were abruptly replaced by the so-called Spaghetti Westerns. Not many of these slammed-out Herc films are worth spending 80 minutes on today, but a few of them hold up and are worth a look. Here, for your delectation and delight, are three very different examples.

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Son of Sinbad (USA, 1955)

Sinbad movies loom so large in the history of fantasy film that it’s remarkable there weren’t more of them — only six or seven live-action features from the Forties through the Seventies. Before the sword-and-sorcery boom of the Eighties, if you wanted to watch a film of heroic fantasy, the first thing you reached for probably had Sinbad in its title.

We’ve already covered three of them in this series: Sinbad the Sailor (1947), The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), and Captain Sindbad (1963), but we still have three to go, and two of them are by the moviemaker most closely associated with the most splendid of Sinbad movies: Ray Harryhausen. Unfurl your lateen sails for adventure!

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Monty Python and the Holy Grail (UK, 1975)

So, you think The Green Knight is a different cinematic take on the Arthurian legends? Well, okay, it is, but let’s go back to the early Seventies, the first time the Brits were really breaking the mold of Camelot and rolling out the Round Table.

Arthur of the Britons, Season One

Rating: ***
Origin: UK, 1972
Director: Sidney Hayers, et al.
Source: Network DVDs

Britain’s ITV network had several fine historical adventure shows early on, including The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956) and Sir Francis Drake (1961), but it was a long decade until their next one, Arthur of the Britons, in 1972, and in that time a lot of things changed, including tastes in historical sagas. Hollywood’s Technicolor past was out, replaced by gritty realistic history, at least as it was seen fifty years before now. This series was set during the time of the historical Arthur — if he existed — a time shortly after the Romans left British shores and the Saxons came across the narrow sea to fill the power vacuum. Here, “King” Arthur is one of many Celtic warlords resisting the Saxon advances, but the only one with the vision to see that the Celts must unite under a single leader if they are to hold the parts of Britain still under their control.

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The Mandalorian

We’ve already gone into the origins of the Lone Wolf and Cub films in the manga series by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, so this week let’s look at its influence on later productions, particularly the Star Wars series The Mandalorian. I’m far from the first person to point out the connections between the two, but as they show the continuing relevance of Lone Wolf and Cub even fifty years later, I think it’s worthwhile to revisit them.

To state the obvious, The Mandalorian draws most of its inspiration from the Western genre, especially the Italian variety known as Spaghetti Westerns, and of course from the Star Wars saga itself. But the Lone Wolf influence is strong: the visual archetype of the solo martial artist fighting off waves of enemies with a young son by his side or in his arms is powerful, and was adopted in whole.

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The Three Musketeers (1973)

Richard Lester directed the best-ever screen version of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and the worst version of its sequel, Twenty Years After. Those films are discussed below, so let’s talk about Lester up here.

An American Jew from Philadelphia, Dick Lester had to go to the UK to make his mark in the movies, though he worked first in television, short subjects, and commercials. His early work was in comedy, and he was part of the gang of English comics that included Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers who created The Goon Show, a direct predecessor to Monty Python. John Lennon was a huge fan of the Goons and of Lester’s hilarious short, The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, and Lester got his big break when he was tapped to direct the Beatles’ first feature, A Hard Day’s Night. This kicked off what you might call the Swinging London portion of Lester’s career, during which he made some of the funniest movies of the Sixties, including Help! (1965) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966).

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Red Lion (Japan, 1969)

The Tokugawa Shogunate of the samurai military caste ruled Japan for over 300 years, keeping the island nation in a sort of stasis enforced by rigid regulation and an entrenched hierarchy. But outside, the rest of the world was changing, as the western powers of Europe and America developed economies based on global trade on terms backed up by military might. In 1853, when the United States came knocking on Japan’s door, insisting on trade concessions, the Shogunate had only swords and matchlock muskets with which to oppose armored warships, and had to comply with the American demands. Other western nations followed suit, and Japan began to open its borders, resulting in economic and political instability that the Shogunate was too weak and hidebound to manage successfully.

This period before the imperial restoration of 1868, known as Bakumatsu, was a sort of slow-burning civil war in which a number of factions struggled for ascendancy, all sides resorting to death squads and assassinations. The time of the sword, which had ruled Japan for almost a thousand years, was coming to an end.

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The Last Valley (UK/USA, 1971)

Was it, though? In the case of the 1972 Treasure Island, absolutely. With a book that good, and with such stirringly visual material, it’s hard to fail at a cinematic adaptation, though this version comes closer than most. However, when it comes to Ivanhoe, give me a screen version, any screen version, over having to read the book again. Brrr! Then, there’s The Last Valley, based on a novel by J.B. Pick that hasn’t crossed my path, so whether the movie is better than the book is a question I can’t answer. Maybe you can, though, so we’ll start with that one. As you’ll see, books win in the end.

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(Goliath and the Sins of Babylon, Italy, 1963)

If you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you’ll like. Between 1959 and 1964, the leading genre of Italian adventure films was the peplum, or sword and sandal movie. The fad for these began in 1958 with the first Steve Reeves Hercules film, and there were a whole lot of Hercules films to follow, but we’re going to save those for another day and cherry-pick our way through the non-Herc movies. Peplum films tended to be made quickly and cheaply: indifferently written, poorly acted, and with weak production values. Even those with larger budgets often ran aground on the rocks of tedium and cliché. But there were a few silk purses among the sow’s ears, so this week let’s point out some fun exceptions that might be worth your time. If, you know, this is the kind of thing you like.

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