Black Gate

After the grim years of World War II, a large part of the moviegoing public was looking for lighter fare in their entertainment, and Hollywood returned to making swashbucklers, many of them in the happy hues of Technicolor. Pirates were back on the menu, but as America headed into the conformist Fifties, the pirates on its movie screens were more rascals than cutthroats, good-hearted rogues who would plunder some buried treasure and maybe hold a lady for ransom, but for whom keel-hauling and suchlike barbarisms were out of the question. Wholesome buccaneers as family entertainment! Absurd, of course, but fun if it was done with a wink at the viewer.

Anne of the Indies

Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1951
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Source: Amazon Streaming Video

We usually award the title Queen of the Swashbucklers to Maureen O’Hara, but Jean Peters makes a grab for her crown in this fine pirate melodrama. As an orphan girl, Anne (Peters) was raised aboard ship by Edward Teach — Blackbeard himself! — and now commands her own fighting ship, the Sheba Queen, under the name Captain Providence, and she’s a real hellion. Since her brother was hanged as a pirate by the English, she preys on English shipping and kills English sailors without mercy, making the captives walk the plank. But one captured sailor is the strikingly handsome Louis Jourdan playing a Frenchman named (what else?) François, who claims to be a privateer’s navigator who’d been captured by the Royal Navy. Captain Providence frees him, adds him to her crew, and takes him to Nassau to meet Blackbeard — which is where the real trouble starts.

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Television and TV broadcasting had many forebears, but the first regular national service was Great Britain’s BBC TV in 1936. It was suspended in 1939 during World War II so enemy aircraft couldn’t home in on its signals, but broadcasting resumed in 1946 and expanded rapidly thereafter. In 1955 the BBC was joined on the British airwaves by the Independent Television network, or ITV. Unlike the BBC, ITV was a commercial network, its programming supported by advertising and, it was hoped, by selling its content for rebroadcasting in the burgeoning American markets.

ITV broadcast a range of content, but what’s important to us is that there were entertaining swashbuckler series in the mix, starting from the very beginning in September 1955 with The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel. In Robin Hood, at least, ITV had a smash success, and its production company added two additional series in 1956, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers. (There was also an independent Count of Monte Cristo series, but we’ll save that for another day.) All of these shows were syndicated regionally across the United States, and Robin Hood in particular is fondly remembered.

The Adventures of Robin Hood, Season One

Rating: ****
Origin: UK, 1955
Director: Ralph Smart, et al.
Source: Network DVD

This series, which premiered in 1955 in both the USA and UK, heralded a brief vogue for swashbuckling TV shows, most of them produced in Britain — but this is the one that really mattered, because it was smart and dependably entertaining, found a devoted audience, ran for four seasons in the Fifties and then for decades in syndication. Its success inspired its only significant rival in Disney’s Zorro. Though shot in the UK with a British cast and crew, its producers were Americans whose politics leaned left, and most of its scripters were American screenwriters such as Howard Koch and Waldo Salt who’d been blacklisted in Hollywood. They gave the stories an anti-authoritarian edge that accorded well with Robin Hood’s outlaw legend.

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Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai had done well for Toho Pictures so Kurosawa was encouraged to produce other samurai-era films, and during the late Fifties and early Sixties he alternated making historicals with crime films. Kurosawa was at the height of his creative powers, with a brilliant production team that was devoted to him, and a reliable revolving cast topped by his go-to lead, the versatile and charismatic Toshiro Mifune. These movies had a huge influence on American and European films of the Sixties and Seventies, an influence that persists today several creative generations later. These are deep films, richly nuanced and technically impressive — but best of all, they’re so much fun to watch.

The Hidden Fortress

Rating: *****
Origin: Japan, 1958
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Source: Amazon streaming video

The sound bite on The Hidden Fortress is that it’s the Kurosawa film that inspired Star Wars, but if you go into it expecting to see some kind of samurai cognate to the Skywalker saga, you’re going to be disappointed, and worse, you may overlook the very real pleasures this film has to offer. Yes, Hidden Fortress did inspire some aspects of George Lucas’s approach to Star Wars, but just put that aside and let this movie win you over on its own terms.

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The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

Nowadays you can’t walk down a store’s DVD aisle without tripping over a stack of fantasy films, but not that long ago they were as rare as roc’s teeth and finding a good one was like stumbling on a magic lamp. In that regard, Ray Harryhausen’s 7^th Voyage of Sinbad was a watershed, a top-notch fantasy that seemed to leap out of nowhere into magical life (though it had predecessors in the 1924 and 1940 Thief of Bagdad films). Hollywood didn’t quite know what to make of it, so 7^th Voyage was followed by just a few copycats that were pitched at children. But it inspired an entire generation of young filmmakers, special effects artists, and game designers, whose work would bear fruit in the fantasy boom that would begin in the early Seventies.

The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad

Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA, 1958
Director: Nathan Juran
Source: Viavision Blu-ray

Before 7^th Voyage, Ray Harryhausen was just the creature guy for black-and-white monster movies; after this big-budget full-color fantasy adventure, he was the premier special-effects wizard of his time, not simply because he presented the most convincing and magical fantasy creatures in world cinema, but also because it proved he was a top-notch storyteller into the bargain. This film delights the child, adult, and professional storyteller in me equally, and I love it without reservation.

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Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie in The Prince Who Was a Thief (1951)

In the early Fifties, Tony Curtis was still honing his skills as an actor, but he was good-looking, athletic, and gosh, people liked him, so Universal decided to make him a star. Fortunately for us, for his first two swashbucklers Universal paired him with Piper Laurie, who was even more good-looking, athletic, and likeable than Curtis. And knowing that by the late Fifties Curtis would become a pretty decent actor, it’s interesting to watch him develop over his first few features.

The Prince Who was a Thief

Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1951
Director: Rudolph Maté
Source: ATI Entertainment DVD

This is the first of many sword-swinging starring roles for Tony Curtis, whom you really can’t avoid if you’re watching historical adventures made in the Fifties. Everybody mocks Curtis, and it’s somewhat deserved, since he didn’t have the smarts of a Burt Lancaster or even a Louis Hayward, but he wasn’t terrible so much as mediocre. Somebody was persuaded that he was movie star material, but it took Hollywood about ten years to figure out that he was best employed as a reliable second banana. Fortunately, he’s offset in this film by engaging performances from Everett Sloane and Piper Laurie, who even this early in her career knew exactly what she was doing.

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Laurence Olivier is justly renowned, even revered, as one of the finest actors of the 20th century, and was arguably the greatest English thespian of his generation — which is saying something, since his generation included John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Acclaimed as a stage actor, he also appeared in over fifty movies, and happily for us three of them fit under the umbrella of the Cinema of Swords.

Fire Over England

Rating: ****
Origin: UK, 1937
Director: William K. Howard
Source: Nobility Studios DVD

This film was adapted from the 1936 novel of the same name by A.E.W. Mason, the English historical fiction author best known for The Four Feathers (1902). Producer Alexander Korda was looking for a suitably inspiring and cautionary tale that would evoke the rising threat of Hitler’s Germany, and he found it in this story of England’s resistance to Spain’s warmongering King Philip and his invading Armada. Korda was also looking for a vehicle with a romantic subplot to show off his drop-dead gorgeous new stars, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who were already lovers off-screen. However, as undeniably attractive as Olivier and Leigh were, this picture really belongs to the actors in the roles of the opposing monarchs: Raymond Massey as King Philip II, and the unforgettable Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth I.

It’s 1588, mighty Spain threatens tiny England, and at the English Court, Spanish spies are everywhere and their assassination plots threaten the life of the queen. In her audience hall, Elizabeth receives the Spanish Ambassador, come to complain of the raid on Cadiz by Francis Drake, where he burned a Spanish fleet. Robson’s Elizabeth immediately establishes herself as a commanding presence, adroitly alternating between defiance and conciliation; she refuses to reign in Drake and the sea rovers, but gives Spain leave to punish them… “If they can.”

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Hang on to your hauberks! This week we’re taking a gander at veteran director Richard Thorpe’s quasi-trilogy about knights in shining armor, three films all starring Robert Taylor that set the look and feel of screen stories about medieval knights for more than a decade.

Ivanhoe

Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1952
Director: Richard Thorpe
Source: Amazon streaming video

In 1814 the poet Walter Scott began publishing his popular Waverly novels of recent Scottish history, and then switched, with Ivanhoe in 1820, to the medieval era and the history of England, in the process co-inventing (along with Jane Porter) the modern genre of the historical adventure novel. Ivanhoe was a landmark in other ways as well, for its sympathetic treatment of Jews in Western societies, for establishing the character and tone of our modern version of Robin Hood, and for promoting the medieval background as a setting for adventure tales, still as popular today in the 21^st century as Scott made them in the 19^th. (That’s right: no Ivanhoe, no Game of Thrones.)

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The Man in the Iron Mask (1939)

Independent Hollywood producer Edward Small had his biggest hit in 1934 with a version of The Count of Monte Cristo and was determined to follow it up with more swashbucklers. But he needed a leading man, and after several years’ delay finally found him in Louis Hayward, an actor trained on the British stage who’d come to America in the early Thirties, where he mainly played romantic leads in light comedies and the occasional prestige drama. Hayward was charming, well-spoken, looked good in period costume, and had a deft hand with sword, so Small signed him to a three-film contract. Small’s new star ending up making half a dozen swashbucklers for him and several more for other producers. Some of these are forgettable, but most of them are pretty good or better and are nowadays unfairly overlooked. Let’s start with the earliest and most successful.

The Man in the Iron Mask

Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1939
Director: James Whale
Source: Hen’s Tooth Video DVD

This is the first sound version of Iron Mask and stars Louis Hayward in the dual role of King Louis XIV/Prince Philippe. Hayward was a leading man who appeared in a variety of parts, heroic and romantic, from the late 1930s to the early ‘50s, but if he’s remembered today, it’s as the star of eight or nine small to medium-budget swashbucklers made mainly for independent producer Edward Small (of which this is the first). The genial Hayward didn’t have the compelling screen presence of Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power, but he was likeable and determined, with enough handsome charm to carry off the romances.

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