Black Gate

The Three Musketeers miniseries (UK, 1966)

At last! Because you demanded it. (I’m pretty sure that happened,) Finally, the subject everyone wants an article about, French Swashbuckler Tales Adapted for British Television! I know, right?

In the Sixties, one of the BBC’s stocks in trade was popular literature adapted into mini-series of six to sixteen half-hour episodes, usually shown on Sunday afternoons. In this context, Alexandre Dumas worked well for them: they’d had such success with The Count of Monte Cristo that they went back to the Dumas well twice more with his musketeers, and then picked up and dubbed a French serial called Le Chevalier Tempête set in the same period. En garde, old boy!

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Atomic Submarine, The (1959: 7+)

Lots of stock footage, as usual for this era, but also decent miniature work and excellent alien design. It seems that this alien hanging around the North Pole in a magnetic-powered UFO is a scout looking for worlds to colonize, and the Earth really fits the bill. The submarine pursues him as he preys on shipping. It takes awhile to really get going, so stick with it, but the atomic sub finally gets their alien.

Though a number of name actors appear in this film, the acting is rather wooden. Arthur Franz, a second-string leading man, leads the way in a cast that includes a tired-looking Dick Foran, the old cowboy movie star Bob Steele, and Tom Conway (see below for another Conway appearance) as a Nobel Prize winning oceanographer, though I’m pretty sure they actually don’t give Nobel Prizes for oceanography. The only one who lights up the screen is the beautiful but ill-fated Joi Lansing in a brief appearance. She and the alien are the film’s highlights.

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Sword of the Beast (Japan, 1965)

As outlined in Part One, in the Fifties postwar Japan’s film industry gradually returned to making chambara movies that glorified the samurai warrior code of bushido, but in the counter-cultural Sixties some filmmakers took an opposite tack, blaming bushido for supporting a culture of rigid oppression and cruelty. Some remarkable films came out of this movement, pictures of high art that depict the samurai’s wonderfully skilled swordplay while skewering the society that relied on the sword as a tool of domination. Let’s look at three films that exemplify this movement from three brilliant directors: Hideo Gosha, Kihachi Okamoto, and Masaki Kobayashi.

Sword of the Beast (or Samurai Gold Seekers)

Rating: ****
Origin: Japan, 1965
Director: Hideo Gosha
Source: Criterion DVD

Co-writer and director Hideo Gosha’s follow-up to Three Outlaw Samurai takes an even less forgiving view of society than its predecessor: individuals may be good, bad, or both, but hierarchical authority cares only for power and does only ill.

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The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (USA, 1963)

1963: Lerner and Loewe’s Broadway musical Camelot finally closed after almost 900 performances, Disney’s The Sword and the Stone was preparing for release at the end of the year, and President John F. Kennedy’s administration was being compared to King Arthur’s. This didn’t go unnoticed in Arthur’s Great Britain, and the British movie industry obliged with two Camelot movies, one of them quite ambitious, that have now been largely forgotten. Indeed, Olde England was still the favorite screen setting for historical adventure, as Walt Disney, looking for a follow-up to Zorro, was well aware. And so Disney’s last great swashbuckler, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, was shot on location on England’s south coast, one classic that hasn’t been forgotten.

Sword of Lancelot (or Lancelot and Guinevere)

Rating: ****
Origin: UK, 1963
Director: Cornel Wilde
Source: Alpha Video DVD

This is a worthy attempt to film the tragedy of the doomed love triangle of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot, and if it falls short of greatness, it isn’t because writer, director, and star Cornel Wilde didn’t give it his all, it’s just that he wasn’t David Lean or Sergei Eisenstein.

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Morgan the Pirate (Italy/France, 1960)

We tend to think of pirate tales as mainly an English language thing, since the first early modern histories of pirates were in English, as were the genre-defining stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Kidnapped), Rafael Sabatini (The Sea Hawk, Captain Blood) and Howard Pyle. But pirate stories were extremely popular in Continental Europe as well, especially in Italy, where Emilio Salgari (1862-1911) wrote as many as 200 adventure novels, mostly about pirates or colonial adventurers who might as well have been called such. His most famous novel is The Black Corsair (1898), which has been filmed at least five times.

During the period of 1960 through 1965, the Italian film industry was famously focused on making peplum, or sword-and-sandal films, but they also dabbled in other historical adventure genres — and in the case of pirate movies, more than dabbled. At lot of these are quickies that might not be worth your time, but Italy loves a good keelhaulin’ cutthroat, and some of the Italian pirate films of the early Sixties were standouts.

Morgan, The Pirate

Rating: ****
Origin: Italy/France, 1960
Director: André DeToth/Primo Zeglio
Source: Turner Classic Movies

This is a fine Franco-Italian production, one of the best Continental pirate movies, starring Steve Reeves as Henry Morgan and Valérie Lagrange as Doña Inez, his daughter-of-the-Spanish-governor love interest. Its taut direction is primarily credited to the Hungarian-American director André DeToth, who (you can’t make this up) later in life lost one eye and wore a black eyepatch. But seriously, Morgan’s production values are good, it has topnotch cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli, excellent costumes and locations, and a rolling nautical score by Franco Mannino.

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