Black Gate

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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The Three Musketeers (1948)

When you say “French swashbuckler,” two names leap instantly to mind: d’Artagnan and Cyrano. Both were actual historical figures, but it’s through their fictional incarnations that they’re known around the world. Both d’Artagnan and Cyrano de Bergerac have been fictionalized repeatedly dating back to the 17^th century — zut alors, Cyrano even fictionalized himself! — but they’re overwhelmingly best known from two sources, d’Artagnan from Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and it sequels, and Cyrano de Bergerac from Edmond Rostand’s play of the same name. There have been several memorable screen versions of Rostand’s Cyrano, but none more so than the version reviewed below. The Three Musketeers, of course, is one of the greatest adventure novels ever written, and has been filmed for movies and TV dozens of times, with varying degrees of quality and fidelity to the source material. This week we’re looking at one of the best, and throwing in an oft-overlooked sequel as a bonus.

The Three Musketeers

Rating: *****
Origin: USA, 1948
Director: George Sidney
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

There were a lot of movie and TV adaptations of The Three Musketeers in the 20^th century, but three of them tower above all the others: the Fairbanks film from 1921, Richard Lester’s 1973 version, and, falling almost exactly in between them, MGM’s star-studded entry from 1948.

This is an interesting adaptation: it starts out as a typical Hollywood vehicle for star Gene Kelly, bright, colorful, charming, and light-hearted, a musical without songs, as d’Artagnan (Kelly) finds camaraderie with the musketeers and romance with Constance (June Allyson). But the top-billed actor at the time was actually Lana Turner, then at the height of her fame, and based on her roles as a femme fatale in films noir, she was cast as the wicked Milady de Winter. Now Milady appears mostly in the second half of Dumas’s novel, so to give Turner enough screen time, the movie races through the Affair of the Diamond Studs in its first hour, enabling it to spend its second hour on the schemes of Milady.

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I have a new obsession. I seem to be switching obsessions a lot, but the truth is I’m not switching anything at all. I’m simply adding. This time around, I’m absolutely infatuated with a show on Netflix that I’m a little mad took me so long to check out. That show is The Untamed, a 2017 live-action adaptation of the Chinese fantasy novel Mo Dao Zu Shi (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation is the English title) by author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. The novel is not yet officially translated into English, but I’m desperate for it to be. I want this thing on my shelf. Like, yesterday. Granted, since it’s a web novel, it’s not likely to be on anyone’s actual shelf, but lordy do I want this book as a real thing in my hands.

Anyway, the show is wonderful. I understand that, from my very basic research from this post, that the live-action adaptation is quite divergent from the novel, so I’m content to watch the show while waiting for that official English translation (there are unofficial online translations, but I would like to put money into the hands of the author, you know?), knowing that the two are different enough that my enjoyment of the novel won’t be impacted by having watched the adaptation first. Also, apparently this adaptation is only one of many, and so I might have to go and find other adaptations.

The story itself is a multi-layered fantasy epic drama with grand themes of belonging, family, clan rivalry, justice and love. Centering around Wei Wuxian, also known as Wei Ying or the Yiling Patriarch, an orphaned child who was adopted by his father’s master’s family and is considered a sibling of the master’s two children Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli, the story is often funny, and terribly sweet, and also very, very dark.

It doesn’t pull punches, killing many folks, straining and breaking relationships, and turning heroes into villains. Everything is difficult, and you can understand why people act the way they do, calling into question what you might do if you were caught in these positions. Essentially, it’s my favorite kind of story. Give me the darkness. Give me unsure characters and well-meaning people who unwittingly make bad choices. Give me consequence and heartache and despair. Those alone, however, do not make this one of my recent favorites. What really makes it for me is the thread of a deep abiding love that moves like gossamer throughout the whole piece; a glittering filament of hope that grabs a hold of the heart and doesn’t let go.

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The Sea Hawk (Warner Bros, 1940)

We’ve already covered Errol Flynn’s breakthrough swashbuckler Captain Blood (1935) in this series, and you’ve probably seen and savored it, but you might not be familiar with Rafael Sabatini, the author who wrote the novel it was so memorably adapted from. In the Nineteenth Century Alexandre Dumas père was the king of historical adventure, but in the Twentieth Century that crown passed to Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950). Born in Italy, Sabatini was raised and schooled in Britain, Italy, and Switzerland, and was fluent in at least five languages. He settled in England in the early 1890s and in 1902 published The Suitors of Yvonne, the first of thirty-one historical novels, pretty much all of which can be classified as swashbucklers. In fact, in the early twentieth century the name Sabatini practically defined the genre. (He’s the only author who’s included twice in my Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure anthology.)

Sabatini’s novels were perfect film fodder; a half-dozen of them made it to the screen in the silent era, and after the success of Flynn’s Captain Blood Hollywood revisited Sabatini’s backlist for another round in the forties and fifties. The three covered below are the best of the lot — and two of them are as good as it gets!

The Sea Hawk

Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA, 1940
Director: Michael Curtiz
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

Shortly after the success of Captain Blood (1935), Warner Bros. optioned Blood author Rafael Sabatini’s The Sea Hawk as a follow-up vehicle for Errol Flynn; but production was postponed, partly because the plot of Hawk was too similar to that of Blood. Several years passed, war between Britain and Germany began to appear inevitable, and the British production of Fire Over England (1937) provided a model for an American approach to the same historical events.

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As the Japanese economy recovered from the disaster of World War II, its film industry rebounded as well, though under the American occupation the kinds of films that could be made were strictly limited. Censorship on themes of nationalism and warfare was in force until 1952, but once the ban was lifted the industry returned to the popular genre of historical dramas, making some of the finest films ever produced in Japan.

Rashomon

Rating: *****
Origin: Japan, 1950
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Source: Criterion Collection DVD

Although this is director Akira Kurosawa’s first samurai film, it arguably doesn’t belong in the Cinema of Swords as it’s not really a chambara — a swordplay movie — but rather a historical crime tale. You probably have a general idea of what it’s about even if you’ve never seen it, as its title has come to stand for the principle of the unreliable narrator, the same story told differently from several different viewpoints. In this case it’s the history of a crime, a rape and a murder in a lonely grove on a remote wooded mountain. The tale is told from four different points of view, and the viewer is left to tease out the truth for themselves.

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