The Count of Monte Cristo (1934) Your honor, I stand before you charged with three counts of Monte Cristo, and while I could plead insanity, instead I’ll Dumas best to explain. (I slay me.) Alexandre Dumas’s most popular and enduring novels are The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, and one of the most remarkable things about them is that he wrote them at the same time! They were published in simultaneous serial form in two different Parisian…

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Blackbeard the Pirate (1952) The role of Long John Silver in Disney’s 1950 Treasure Island finally launched the talented English actor Robert Newton into international stardom. As Silver, Newton popularized the broad West-Country accent that’s become the default talk-like-a-pirate voice of buccaneering rogues ever since. (You can blame—or acclaim— Newton for the ubiquitous piratical “Ahr!”) But fame ruined the actor, enabling endless rounds of drink, gambling, and the kind of wild behavior that made him a role model for Oliver…

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The Tale of Zatoichi (1962) During the American occupation of Japan after World War II, one of its many social restrictions was a prohibition on the making of violent movies, which meant no historical samurai adventures. When the occupation was lifted in 1952, the chambara, or swordplay action films, gradually returned, and by the late Fifties they made up a significant portion of the movies and TV shows made for Japanese domestic consumption. Based on a story by the novelist…

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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…

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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….

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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…

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Ronald Colman and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was a fine actor with a considerable range, but he never got out of the shadow of his more famous father. Douglas Fairbanks Sr., after all, was more than a fine actor, he was a force of nature who single-handedly established the conventions of the cinematic swashbuckler in a series of grand, albeit silent epics. Doug Jr.’s parents divorced when he was young, and against…

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After the box-office success of RKO’s The Spanish Main (1945) and Sinbad the Sailor (1947), in 1948 Warner Bros. re-released The Adventures of Robin Hood to theaters, where it did almost as well as its first time ‘round in 1938. The rest of Hollywood took notice, and soon every studio had two or three historical adventures in the development pipeline. The postwar swashbuckler boom was on! Walt Disney wasn’t about to be left behind. With a pile of money parked in…

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