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Olivia de Havilland: First Queen of the Swashbucklers

Captain Blood

This week we’re here to praise Olivia de Havilland, the great British/American screen actor who passed away last month at the age of 102. De Havilland was remarkable, not just for her stunning beauty, but for her sharp wits and indomitable spirit, all of which she brought to bear in nearly every performance. She was Hollywood’s first Queen of the Swashbucklers thanks to her defining roles in Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood, which launched her career and that of her co-star Errol Flynn into the stratosphere. (De Havilland’s reign was followed by that of Maureen O’Hara, but we’ll talk about her another day).

No matter how many times you’ve seen Blood or Robin Hood, you can’t help but delight in de Havilland’s performances as Arabella Bishop and Maid Marian. She’s far more than a mere attractive love interest for the hero, especially in the latter role, where she risks her life to save Robin Hood and the Saxons. Capsule reviews of those two films follow, and I’ll warn you in advance, they’re unapologetic raves. I’ve added a review of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, a lesser film in which de Havilland was third billed after Bette Davis and Flynn but which nonetheless has points of interest. Enjoy!

Captain Blood

Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA, 1935
Director: Michael Curtiz
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

After the success of swashbucklers Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo, Warners decided to go all-in on a remake of Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood. (There’d been a silent version in 1924, now lost.) The stars they initially had in mind for the leads bowed out, and in the end the studio took a huge risk and cast two complete unknowns: Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Luckily, they were both excellent, ideal for the roles — and even better, they had great on-screen chemistry together, so good they were paired seven more times in the next ten years. The director’s chair went to studio veteran Michael Curtiz, who in 1938 would co-direct another swashbuckling essential, The Adventures of Robin Hood, before his career pinnacle helming Casablanca. Add in Basil Rathbone as the villain, supported by a slate of the best character actors in Hollywood, with a stirring soundtrack by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and you have the makings of a true classic.

The story starts in 1685 during Monmouth’s Rebellion against England’s King James II. Dr. Peter Blood, treating one of the wounded, is swept up among the captured rebels and sentenced to death in the Bloody Assizes, where we first get a sense of his indomitable character. Throughout the film Blood is aflame with a mocking defiance of oppression and tyranny, but Flynn’s characterization also sparkles with wry intelligence, and he delivers razor-sharp remarks with such conviction it seems he’d thought them up himself. Blood’s death sentence, and that of his fellow rebels, is commuted to slavery on the plantations of Jamaica, and the crew is shipped off to Port Royal. At a degrading slave sale, Blood catches the eye of Arabella Bishop (Olivia de Havilland), daughter of one of the plantation owners, and in order to save the sullen Irishman from being bought by the most brutal rancher on the island, she buys him herself — now there’s a “meet cute” for you!

The film’s next half hour is this amazing back and forth as the story contrasts the luxury and brutality of colonial Jamaica with Blood step-by-step engineering an escape attempt by himself and his fellow slaves, meanwhile currying favor with the governor (only Blood can cure his gout) and engaging in a half-serious courtship dance with Arabella. (Neither of them really mean it — or do they?) Then the escape plans go awry and all seems lost, until the “timely interruption” (as Blood himself puts it) of a raid by Spanish pirates. The slaves take advantage of the chaos to turn the tables on both Spanish and English, and after some derring-do, Blood and his crew are free and in command of a fighting ship. And then, with all the world their enemy, what option do they have but to sail to Tortuga and join the Brotherhood of the Coast? However, when you ally with pirates, you must consort with such scoundrels as Captain Levasseur (Basil Rathbone) — and that might not end well.

But oh, those scenes of Caribbean piracy: the buccaneers swearing to the Articles, drunken pirates pillaging a seaport, freebooters roistering in the taverns of Tortuga, the boarding actions — “Grappling hooks to larboard!” They’ve all been done many times since, but never better, to my mind. The rapier duel in the surf between Flynn and Rathbone fighting over the captured de Havilland is worth the price of admission alone. Guilty pleasure: Basil Rathbone’s outrrrrrageous French accent.

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex

Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1938
Director: Michael Curtiz
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

This film tells the story of the doomed romance between Queen Elizabeth I (Bette Davis) and the Earl of Essex (Errol Flynn), their love thwarted by the machinations of rival courtiers and by the lovers’ own unbending pride. Based on a hit 1930 play by Maxwell Anderson, it’s darker and talkier than most Flynn vehicles, and Bette Davis famously didn’t want him for the role, afraid he didn’t have the dramatic chops for it. She preferred Laurence Olivier — but as it happened the part suited Flynn and he did just fine, as Davis herself admitted years later.

Elizabeth and the much younger Essex adore each other but can’t get along because each is ambitious to rule. As a result, Essex is always getting sent away from Court, and when separated he and Elizabeth both get to gnash their teeth and pine and yearn. Meanwhile in the palace, quarreling and conspiring, are the royal courtiers, vicious rivals to Essex played by a fine bunch of English actors, including Henry Stephenson, Donald Crisp, and Henry Daniell — though all are overshadowed by the delightfully supercilious Vincent Price as Sir Walter Raleigh. Wow, he’s good, even wearing ridiculous silver armor and pink trunk hose for the purpose of being mocked for it by Essex. Also at Court is Olivia de Havilland as a lady-in-waiting who’s pining for Essex, but her brains and poise are mostly wasted here, as the role gives her little scope for them. At least she gets to be called a “brazen wench” and “shameless baggage” by Davis.

This is a top-of-the-line production, in brilliant Technicolor, with fabulous costumes by Orry-Kelly and a swooning score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. It looks great. The bickering between Elizabeth and Essex does get tiresome, though to their credit Davis and Flynn manage to carry it off. By the time the smirking courtiers manipulate Essex into undertaking a hopeless invasion of Ireland, we’re ready for some swordplay as a break from the wordplay. Of course, it all goes wrong, as invading Ireland is always a sucker move. And there among the bogs Essex is defeated by — oh, ignominy of ignominies — the wretched Alan Hale, Sr., as Lord Tyrone. Beaten, Essex returns to England, and yet more angst. There’s still a good deal of playwright Anderson’s talk ahead before the final, tragic end — and fine talk it is, too. You might like it.

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood

The Adventures of Robin Hood

Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA, 1938
Director: Michael Curtiz and William Keighley
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

This is a nigh-perfect film — as you know, because you’ve seen it (and if you haven’t, then I’m very sorry, but we can no longer be friends). Let’s just mention in passing some of the many reasons why you’ll want to watch it again sometime soon:

— The matchless and heart-uplifting romantic chemistry between Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland
— The rich and vivid look of this many-hued Technicolor fairy tale of the Middle Ages
— The edgy interplay between the unforgettable villains, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, and Melville Cooper
— The best Merrie Men ever assembled on screen, most memorably Eugene Pallette as Friar Tuck
— The brilliant script, witty, terse, thoughtful, romantic, and inspiring
— The rousing, Oscar-winning score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold
— That final climactic battle and duel in Nottingham Castle

Many 55-gallon drums of ink have been spilled praising, analyzing, dissecting, and interpreting this film, for which the word “classic” almost seems to have been invented. I’ll just cite a few things you might not have heard or considered. First, for a film that was perfectly cast, it’s curious that the initial choice of director was not as on-target (archery reference intentional). William Keighley, who had directed Flynn in The Prince and the Pauper, occupied the director’s chair for the first half of the movie’s extensive shoot, but he turned out to have no knack for lensing large-scale action scenes, which were essential in a film intended to evoke the spirit of Flynn’s predecessor Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. So halfway through production Keighley was replaced by the more versatile Michael Curtiz, who had also directed Flynn before (in Captain Blood). It was Curtiz who helmed the fights and chase scenes, the arboreal antics in Sherwood Forest, and the battle in the castle.

Then there’s Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s personal tale of involvement with the film. An Austrian Jew, the famous composer and his family were natives of Vienna, where in early 1938 he was engrossed with completing a new opera for performance later in the year. But the opera was postponed, so when the call came from Warner Bros. asking him to do the music for Robin Hood, Korngold was unexpectedly available. Shortly after he arrived in Hollywood the news came from Vienna that the Anschluss, Hitler’s merger of Austria into Germany, was imminent. Korngold instantly sent for his family to join him, and they got out of Austria on the very last train before travel for Jews was interdicted. It was a daring escape for his family, and poetically appropriate for the composer to a film about resistance to tyranny. Thereafter Korngold always said that his and his family’s lives had been saved by Robin Hood.

Back to the movie: you know those sheriff’s goons who looked like they got shot in the chest with arrows? They got shot in the chest with arrows. Each wore a chest plate of metal to stop the arrow, covered with a slab of balsa wood so the arrow would stick. A $150 bonus compensated for the risk, pain, and shock.

Our final fun factoid involves “Golden Cloud,” the horse ridden in the film by Lady Marian. Another Hollywood character, Roy Rogers, was so taken with Golden Cloud’s looks and obvious intelligence that he made inquiries, and eventually bought the horse from Warner Bros. Rogers took Golden Cloud over to the Republic Pictures lot, renamed him Trigger, and made him the most famous horse in Hollywood.

Now go watch The Adventures of Robin Hood again. You know you want to.


LAWRENCE ELLSWORTH is deep in his current mega-project, editing and translating new, contemporary English editions of all the works in Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle. Three volumes are in print, with the fourth, Blood Royal, coming from Pegasus Books this fall. His website is Swashbucklingadventure.net.

Lawrence Ellsworth’s secret identity is game designer LAWRENCE SCHICK, who’s been designing role-playing games since the 1970s. He now lives in Dublin, Ireland, and is co-designing a new mobile RPG for the WarDucks game studio.

By |2020-10-15T13:41:06-04:00October 15, 2020|First Queen of the Swashbucklers|Comments Off on Olivia de Havilland: First Queen of the Swashbucklers

Silent Screen Swashbucklers, Part 2 of 2: Black Pirates and Beloved Rogues

Douglas Fairbanks, The Black Pirate (1926)

[Check out Part I of Silent Screen Swashbucklers here.]

In the second half of the 1920s, swashbuckler films only got grander and more epic. If you can’t give an audience sound, you might as well give them spectacle, and that’s what filmmakers in America and Europe set out to do. But the industry’s collective skills of cinematic storytelling were also getting more sophisticated, and with more tools at their disposal, filmmakers were able to add more variety and nuance into their moving pictures. And the acting just plain got better. I am frankly amazed that some of these excellent films aren’t better known. I think you’ll find that some of these gems are well worth the trouble it takes to track them down.

[Click the images for bigger versions.]

1925

Cyrano de Bergerac 1925 poster-small

Cyrano de Bergerac
Rating: ***
Origin: France
Director: Augusto Genina
Source: Image Entertainment DVD

Augusto Genina’s Cyrano de Bergerac, based on Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, was actually shot in 1922, but it took three years to hand-color every frame of the movie using a painstaking process called “Stencil Color.” Dubbing prints of the result proved to be very expensive, so few copies were made, and it’s a wonder the film has survived. For all that effort to give the film color, the results are strange — unconvincing, garish, and unevenly applied.

But is the movie any good? Adapting a beloved play known for its language to a silent medium was a major challenge, and you have to give Genina credit for trying. For one thing, he uses a lot of close-ups, relying on his actors’ very expressive features to convey the story. For another, he just plain slaps more words up on the screen than is typical of most silents, sometime three cue cards’ worth in immediate succession.

Cyrano de Bergerac 1925

And during Cyrano’s big duel in the theater, in place of cue cards, the words are printed right over the images as surtitles, so the action doesn’t have to cut away. Unfortunately, this is more jarring than effective. And all these expedients don’t quite add up to success — the play is still a talk-fest, and watching a silent talk-fest is a strain.

That said, shooting the film in the actual older streets of Paris gives it a richness of setting no Hollywood backlot could match, and the costumes are uniformly excellent. Pierre Magnier, who plays Cyrano, is inspired, and the film overflows with character actors who mug up a storm. The swordplay, alas, is mediocre stage-combat, but the classic story is as good as ever, the soldiers’ camp at the Siege of Arras is convincingly depicted, and Linda Moglie is one of the best Roxanes I’ve ever seen, radiating intelligence, spirit, and wit, as that character should. Unfortunately, the lugubrious last act is way too long, and the ending is sentimental sludge. All in all, a thoroughly mixed bag.

Don Q, Son of Zorro

Don Q, Son of Zorro
Rating: ****
Origin: USA
Director: Donald Crisp
Source: Kino Video DVD

Douglas Fairbanks returns to the well in Don Q, Son of Zorro, once more donning the mask and cape that made him a superstar in The Mark of Zorro. This time around Fairbanks plays both the aging Don Diego de Vega — Zorro — and his son, Cesar de Vega, in a story adapted from a non-Zorro novel, Don Q’s Love Story. Returned from California to Spain, young Cesar astounds his high-society friends with his tricks with an American bullwhip. (Fairbanks trained with the whip for six weeks to get it right.) Shenanigans with the whip get him into trouble with the queen’s guards, and in no time he’s using it in signature Fairbanks style to hogtie sergeants, swing from balconies, and lasso a bull that broke out from the corrida.

But then, escaping the guards through a noble’s garden, he meets the luminous Dolores de Muro, played by Mary Astor. You know Astor as the femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy in John Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon, but fifteen years earlier she was a silent movie star, a dewy ingénue with a languishing look. Cesar falls in love with Dolores at first sight—but so does the pursuing guard captain, Don Sebastian, and soon he and Cesar are rivals for Dolores’s affection. Sebastian is a dastard, however, who stoops to foul play.

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After the colossal epics painted on broad canvasses in Robin Hood and Thief of Bagdad, it must have been a relief to return to the drawing rooms and cabarets of a romantic melodrama, and indeed, the ever-charismatic Fairbanks seems relaxed and comfortable in this film, happy to be doing what he did best. He dances flamenco with a Gypsy, brawls with a gang of back-alley goons, and cuts out his rival at the archduke’s ball.

When Cesar is framed by Sebastian for the murder of the archduke, things get serious. He fakes his own death in a trick worthy of his father, and then it’s outlaw time until he can clear his name. It takes both clever chicanery and dashing sword (and whip) play, but virtue wins out in the end, as the son of Zorro proves himself the equal of his father. The exciting finale, with its call-backs to the first film, is genuinely satisfying.

1926

Bardelys the Magnificent-poster-small

Bardelys the Magnificent
Rating: ***
Origin: USA
Director: King Vidor
Source: Flicker Alley DVD

Here is another adaptation of an early novel by Rafael Sabatini, a book revived like The Sea Hawk in the wake of the worldwide success of Scaramouche. Its star, matinee idol John Gilbert, was riding high at the time, and was paired here with the hit-making director King Vidor, best known for The Big Parade and (much later) Duel in the Sun. The setting is France in 1632, midway through the reign of King Louis XIII, who is putting down the last major revolt of rebel Prince Gaston. Gilbert plays the Marquis de Bardelys, an elegant Paris playboy who excels at romantic conquest, his seductions fueling the gossip and petty scandals of the French Court.

Bardelys is one of King Louis’s spoiled favorites, and rivals with another favorite, the supercilious Comte de Chatellerault (in a delicious mustache-twirling performance by Roy D’Arcy). When Chatellerault tries and fails to win the hand of a provincial heiress, Bardelys mocks him, and is then maneuvered into accepting a challenge to win her himself—much to the displeasure of the king, played with epicene preciosity by Arthur Lubin. Against the royal wishes, Bardelys sets off into rebellion-torn Languedoc to win the hand of Roxalanne de Lavedan, whom he’s never even met.

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Complications ensue, and after a couple of far-fetched coincidences, Bardelys ends up recovering from wounds in the Château de Lavedan, but under an assumed name, that of a slain rebel and traitor. Once he meets Roxalanne, Bardelys finds himself in true love for the first time, but faced with wooing Mademoiselle de Lavedan under a false name while being hunted by royal troops. There follows a tangle of honor and dishonor, spies, jealous rivals, secret vows, betrayals, athletic escapes, and a fine climactic duel.

John Gilbert is genuinely charming and charismatic as Bardelys, and fortunately the smart and spirited Joan Boardman is cast opposite him as Roxalanne. They play well off each other, and their scenes together are the best in the film, especially the famous episode in which Gilbert woos her in a sun-dappled boat drifting through a long screen of trailing willow branches. Sadly, everyone else in the picture hams it up outrageously, which I guess we have to blame on King Vidor’s direction. One caveat: this film was thought lost for decades, until a single copy was discovered in Paris in 2006. It’s been magnificently restored except for several scenes in the middle of the film that had to be reconstructed from stills and the shooting script. That, and the fact that almost everything in this movie is strictly to formula, is what keeps it from being a four-star film. Lurid visual bonus: skull-faced priests with sinister pointy-cowled monkshood minions!

Douglas Fairbanks The Black Pirate-small

The Black Pirate
Rating: *****
Origin: USA
Director: Albert Parker
Source: Kino Video DVD

The Black Pirate was a risky experiment with a new technology that went by the name of “Technicolor” — a risk that, in the main, paid off. It was also the first big-budget Caribbean pirate movie, and Douglas Fairbanks went all-in on an original story that drew heavily on Howard Pyle’s tales, drawings, and paintings, and on Stevenson’s Treasure Island — the best possible sources, really.

The film opens with a pirate crew plundering a captured merchantman, and immediately establishes that these sea rovers are bad, bad people, as atrocities are committed in the name of plunder and sheer bloody cruelty. The pillaged ship is sunk, its powder magazine exploded, after which Fairbanks, the sole survivor, makes it ashore to a desert island, where he vows to live for revenge.

This is the film that established the visual look of all Hollywood pirate films to follow — right up to the current day, really. Waistcoats and sashes, peglegs and parrots, eye-patches and cutlasses, tattoos, piercings, and questionable facial hair — it’s all here. And then there are the familiar tropes: treasure buried in hidden caves, dividing the spoils on the quarterdeck, drunken roistering, walking the plank — look no further for their cinematic origins.

Douglas Fairbanks The Black Pirate 2-small

Posing as a cutthroat, Fairbanks boldly makes a bid to join the band of buccaneers, as they are conveniently burying their treasure on the island where he was marooned. He beats their best fighter in a fencing match—some nice sword-fighting, with some fine rapier-and-dagger work — and joins the crew. Challenged by a Basil Rathbone-cognate to show he understands that there’s more to piracy than swordplay, Fairbanks proves he has brains as well as brawn by taking a merchant ship by stratagem.

The stunts in this film are amazing, as Fairbanks swings through the rigging like Spider-Man. This is the movie where the riding-your-dagger-as-it-slices-its-way-down-the-sail gag was invented — it’s such a great stunt, he does it three times.

Clad all in black silks and leather, Fairbanks takes the name “the Black Pirate,” and sets out to become the pirates’ leader — and then immediately betray them. There’s a captive princess to rescue into the bargain, with whom he’s fallen in love at first sight. But his plans are foiled by a clever rival, and there follows a series of sudden reversals, clever ruses, daring escapes, and unexpected twists. Most unexpected of all, for Your Editor at least, is when Fairbanks, having escaped from the pirates, returns to rescue the princess in command of a long, slim galley rowed by three dozen body-builders clad mainly in shiny leather straps. And then, frankly, things just get weird. But the weird ending notwithstanding, this is a fabulous picture, grand and exciting, and not to be missed.

Don Juan
Rating: *****
Origin: USA
Director: Alan Crosland
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

Don Juan features screen idol John Barrymore in the title rôle, playing a character quite a bit different from the standard swashbuckling hero. He’s pretty much a bad apple, a vain, selfish, dishonest conniver obsessed with the seduction of women, who if he does the right thing, it’s usually for the wrong reason. In short, he’s nothing like the sanitized Don Juan of the later Errol Flynn movie, and for most of the picture we wonder how he and his lady love are ever going to get together and win free of his appalling situation and conduct. In this the story draws heavily on the forty-something Barrymore’s own reputation as “the world’s greatest lover,” a rake and roué with a string of abandoned starlets behind him. In a bit of inspired casting, one of his real-world discarded lovers, the barely-legal Mary Astor, was given the part of Don Juan’s one true love, Adriana Della Varnese, and their scenes together are smoking. In fact, generally speaking the acting in this film is unusually good, especially from the villains, who are delicious — but more about them below.

After a short gothic-horror first act that establishes the reasons for Don Juan’s eternal distrust and disloyalty to women — adultery, murder, and bad parenting, the usual excuses — the story moves to Rome circa 1499 during the bloody reign of the Borgia family. To further establish Don Juan’s character, we then get a twenty-minute bedroom farce in his Roman town-house during which the great lover simultaneously juggles the affections, and locations, of three different young ladies.

john-barrymore-don-juan 2-small

Eventually the women’s husband/uncle/lover intrudes in high dudgeon, hilarity ensues, and everyone runs off, leaving Juan to consult with his valet on his romantic schedule for the evening ahead. But Lucrezia Borgia (the sneering and lascivious Estelle Taylor) has cast her acquisitive eye on Don Juan, and he is summoned to a ball that evening at the palace of the Borgias. Lucrezia is determined to have Juan to herself, and she’s a lethally jealous lover, but all too soon he sees and is smitten by the innocent young Andrea Della Varnese — who is herself desired by Count Donati, a Borgia crony. In no time we are hip deep in burning gazes, derisive taunts, poisoned chalices, and any number of balcony climbs.

Love and politics are intertwined, and when the Borgias finally break with the Varneses, blood runs in the streets of Rome, and Don Juan has to decide what’s really worth fighting for. The bells announcing the impending forced marriage of Andrea to Donati drive him nearly mad, and during his climactic confrontation with the Borgias he seems more dangerous than they do, genuinely unhinged, where the villains are merely wicked. There’s a very satisfying and acrobatic sword duel, but though that’s where most swashbucklers conclude, here it’s just the prelude to the lurid final act, where both Andrea and Juan are clapped in durance vile. By the time Juan escapes the dungeon, it may be too late to redeem himself.

john-barrymore-don-juan 3-small

This film looks fantastic: “lush” and “opulent” don’t even begin to describe it. It also marks a technical advance in the march to the talkies, a process called “Vitaphone,” with a pre-recorded musical soundtrack synced up to the action, augmented by sound effects like bells, thumping blows, and clashing swords. The Borgias’ Roman orgies, with their dancing damsels clad only in swirling veils, and a bibulous Bacchus surrounded by vine-draped maenads, are very persuasive, plus this overstuffed film gives us leopard-skin-clad African sedan chair porters, an evil dwarf castellan, a sinister poison-making alchemist, and a jilted lover sealed up alive in a castle’s walls.

Also, watch for the striking Myrna Loy in an early rôle as Lucrezia’s intriguing maidservant. And did I mention that Don Juan wears striped asymmetrical trunk hose? Don’t miss this one.

1927

the-beloved-rogue-1927-small

The Beloved Rogue
Rating: ***
Origin: USA
Director: Alan Crosland
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

The Beloved Rogue is a strange one: it’s ostensibly based on events from the life of the first great poet of the French language, François Villon (1431-1463) – a man whose life we know next to nothing about, and what little we do know doesn’t exactly support this movie’s story. About the only thing they got right is that the great poet was also a petty criminal, a thief and ruffian who frequently ran afoul of the law. But this film is no bio-pic, it’s more a romantic fable of the Middle Ages, so maybe the facts don’t matter.

We know we’re in fable territory from the very first scenes set in a medieval Paris deep in the grip of winter, the city’s crazy gambrel roofs covered in snow and dripping with icicles. (The exaggerated sets are by William Cameron Menzies, who also did The Thief of Bagdad.) Villon, who enters the film in mid-robbery, stealing a jug of frozen wine, is played by John Barrymore, who gives his daring rogue a devil-may-care insouciance lacking in Douglas Fairbanks’ earnest heroes. Barrymore switches back and forth from heartthrob to buffoon without hesitation, always three sheets to the wind, and as the King of Revels on All-Fools’-Day, he clowns like he just don’t care.

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Already famous for his poetry, darling of both the beggars and the nobility, Villon gets caught up in a political struggle between King Louis XI and the Duke of Burgundy, who wants the throne. The poet writes scathing satirical doggerel skewering both king and duke, romances the king’s adorable ward, dodges death and exile, and engages in assorted drunken shenanigans involving a catapult, a performing bear, a capering dwarf, Burgundian crossbowmen, and an army of beggars from the Court of Miracles. Barrymore’s Villon is a blond Byron who does all his fighting with his words and his wits, winning the day through sheer cleverness.

But the impish Villon doesn’t own this picture, he has to share it with King Louis XI, the master conniver of his day, played here by the great German actor Conrad Veidt (in his first Hollywood role) as a saturnine vulture, alternating between cruel gloating and cowardly cringing. It’s a bravura performance that even overshadows Barrymore’s in the scenes they share. There’s also some fairly daring direction for the day from Alan Crosland, who shoots at unusual angles, splits an image tenfold through a mullioned window, and employs long takes dwelling on Barrymore’s features as he has an inspiring idea or comes to a horrified realization, his every thought written clearly on his face. Good stuff.

1928

the-gaucho-douglas-fairbanks-1927 poster 2

The Gaucho
Rating: ****
Origin: USA
Director: F. Richard Jones
Source: Kino Video DVD

The Gaucho was a very different swashbuckler for Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. In his mid-forties by the time he made this film, he could no longer convincingly play the endearingly earnest youthful hero, and besides, such rôles were increasingly passé. By the late ‘20s the vogue was for darker and more openly erotic characters as exemplified by Rudolf Valentino and John Barrymore, the latter of whom had openly challenged Fairbanks on his own turf with Don Juan and The Beloved Rogue. Perhaps it was time for Fairbanks to take a turn as a dangerous Latin lover.

At any rate, this seems to have been the thinking behind The Gaucho, in which the hero is a mocking, womanizing, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, bolas-swinging outlaw, a bandit chief known only as — you guessed it — “The Gaucho.” He and his gang come across the Andes and swarm into a mountain town, where the Gaucho finds an ardent young admirer in a fiery local woman, who cuts out a rival by doing a torrid tango with the Gaucho while bound tightly to him by his bolas. This “Mountain Girl” (the only name she’s given) is played with hot salsa by Lupe Velez, better known later in her career as “The Mexican Spitfire,” here in her American film debut.

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Meanwhile, a South American comic-opera tyrant named Ruiz has sent his troops to occupy the City of the Miracle, a town built around a holy shrine, to confiscate the wealth brought there by pilgrims, and enslave the poor peasants who depend on the shrine’s generosity. However, the Gaucho has come over the mountains to take that wealth for himself.

The bandit chief, disguised in a captured Ruiz trooper uniform, sneaks into the occupied city to scout it out. He reveals himself to test the troops, and a stunt-studded pursuit ensues. After half a dozen films you’d think we’d have seen every aerial trick Douglas Fairbanks could perform, but no — he continues to astound, still doing all his own stunts.

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By means of a clever stratagem the Gaucho’s bandits take the city, but when he goes to loot the shrine he meets its beatific holy-virgin-nun-lady, and for the first time feels the power of purity and sanctity. But the Mountain Girl is jealous, the shrine’s loot is in play, Ruiz is on the march, and the pot is soon bubbling over with passion, envy, treachery, and betrayal. The morality play that follows doesn’t go quite the way you might expect, and though the religious aspect gets a bit mawkish, there are some clever twists and turns before it ultimately resolves for the best. (Hey, rogue hero or no, it is still a Doug Fairbanks swashbuckler.)

Interestingly, here we are at almost the end of the silent era, and yet this story — written by Fairbanks, by the way — is told almost entirely with visuals, and sometimes many minutes pass between one cue card and the next. But with this master at the height of his cinematic game, you truly don’t miss the words. Happy discovery: Lupe Velez fights and rides as well as she dances!

1929

Monte Cristo 1929-small

Monte Cristo
Rating: *
Origin: France
Director: Henri Fescourt
Source: Grapevine Video DVD

Except for the Mister Magoo version from 1965, at forty minutes this must be the shortest Count of Monte Cristo ever filmed. The main thing it has going for it is that they shot many of the scenes from the novel at their actual locations, so if you’re a fan of the book, that’s a reason to watch it. Otherwise, not so much. There’s time for no more than a précis of the events of the novel, but at least we get to see Edmond Dantès, in the shroud of the Abbé Faria, tossed into the sea from the parapet of the actual Château d’If.

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The Iron Mask
Rating: *****
Origin: USA
Director: Allan Dwan
Source: Kino Video DVD

The Man in the Iron Mask is the conclusion of Alexandre Dumas’s long tale of d’Artagnan and company that began a million words earlier with The Three Musketeers. Here all the characters are thirty years older than in that first story, which makes it a fine valedictory for Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s last silent swashbuckler. Fairbanks reprises his rôle as d’Artagnan, as do many other members of the cast of the 1921 Three Musketeers, with the exception of Eugene Pallette, who’d grown too portly to play Aramis, and was replaced by Gino Corrado. (We’ll next see Pallette as Friar Tuck in the 1938 Errol Flynn Robin Hood.)

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The story, involving young King Louis XIV and his imprisoned identical twin brother, is one of Dumas’s greatest tales, exceeded only by The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers itself. Fairbanks, who wrote the screenplay, wisely tacked on an extended prologue set back when the Inseparables were all still musketeers to remind the audience of their characters and camaraderie. This adds some jolly roistering to what is otherwise a relatively somber story, and incorporates elements from the latter half of the first novel that didn’t appear in the 1921 adaptation.

The second half of The Iron Mask is more faithful to the spirit of Dumas’s novel than it is to the details of its plot, but even to this Dumas fanboy, Fairbanks’s deviations make sense from the cinematic standpoint. We still get secret passages, a dark conspiracy to replace King Louis XIV, and his ultimate salvation thanks to d’Artagnan’s courage and unswerving loyalty. The pacing of the film never flags or falters, the acting is consistently solid, and it’s gorgeous to look at.

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As noted in the opening credits, “This entire production was under the supervision of Maurice Leloir,” the veteran French artist who was the most celebrated of the many illustrators of The Three Musketeers, and an expert on the period. The costumes and sets, therefore, are visually sumptuous and historically impeccable. Watch for Nigel de Brulier reprising his rôle as the domineering Cardinal Richlelieu, and totally nailing it. A fine production in every way: don’t miss it.


Lawrence Ellsworth is the editor of the 2014 anthology The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, and editor and translator of The Red Sphinx by Alexandre Dumas, a forgotten sequel to The Three Musketeers just released in hardcover, ebook, and audio book formats by Pegasus Books. He is also the game designer Lawrence Schick, best known for his work with role-playing games, from the D&D scenario White Plume Mountain in 1979 up to his current role as Lead Loremaster on The Elder Scrolls Online. See more at his website at swashbucklingadventure.net.

By |2020-10-15T13:39:06-04:00October 15, 2020|Silent Screen Swashbucklers|Comments Off on Silent Screen Swashbucklers, Part 2 of 2: Black Pirates and Beloved Rogues

Silent Screen Swashbucklers, Part 1 of 2: Zorro Makes his Mark!

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The Mark of Zorro (1920)

The swashbuckler tradition was born out of legends like those of the Knights of the Round Table and of Robin Hood, revived in the early 19th century by Romantic movement authors such as Sir Walter Scott. The genre really caught hold with the publication of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers in 1844, and for the next century it was arguably the world’s leading form of adventure fiction, challenged only by the American Western.

The action and visual flair of the swashbucklers were perfect for the movie screen, and Hollywood brought them to life with brio and panache, starting most successfully with lavish productions of The Mark of Zorro (1920) and The Three Musketeers (1921), both starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. The 1920s through 1950s were the heyday of the Hollywood swashbuckler, but they continue to find favor with moviegoers right up to the present, notably in the recent Pirates of the Caribbean series. So it’s worth going back to see how those visual tropes around the hero-with-a-sword were first established during the silent film era, because much of what you see on the screen today had its roots almost a hundred years ago with those early cinematic pioneers.

I had a good time surveying these early swashbucklers, and I hope you’ll enjoy this overview. With luck, it’ll even inspire you to dip into this rich source of adventure film tradition yourself.

 

1913

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The Count of Monte Cristo
Rating: **
Origin: USA
Director: Golden/Porter
Source: Grapevine Video DVD

Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo is a long and complicated novel, one of our greatest revenge fantasies, and even if you were adapting it from a truncated theatrical play version (as this was), trying to tell its story in just over an hour necessitates stripping it down to its barest skeleton. James O’Neill, who plays Edmond Dantes/Monte Cristo, had been famous for his stage production of the novel, and this is what he brought to the screen. The story moves right along (it has to), they moved a lot of the scenes to appropriate external locations, and it ends with some brief but satisfying swordplay. Still, as Monte Cristoadaptations go, this one’s pretty perfunctory.

1916

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The Three Musketeers
Rating: ***
Origin: USA
Director: Charles Swickard
Source: Alpha Home Entertainment DVD

This very early version of Alexandre Dumas’s greatest swashbuckler is enjoyable and, at only 50 minutes long, very fast-paced, though it only adapts the first half of the novel, the affair of the queen’s diamond studs. D’Artagnan is active, Richelieu is imposing, and Queen Anne is majestically pouty. As will be typical of American film versions to follow, it makes d’Artagnan’s love interest Constance into something other than Bonacieux’s wife — in this case, his daughter — and had Rochefort play both his role and that of the Comte de Wardes, which occurs in almost every film version. A good early effort.

1920

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The Mark of Zorro
Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA
Director: Fred Niblo
Source: Kino Video DVD

Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., on his way to Europe on his honeymoon after marrying screen darling Mary Pickford, had brought a stack of All-Story Weekly pulp fiction magazines with him to read during the crossing on the steamer Lapland. He was struck by the hero of Johnston McCulley’s The Curse of Capistrano — Zorro, of course — and decided that he’d found the subject of his next movie. The next year Fairbanks played the starring role in the story he’d re-titled The Mark of Zorro; it was a gigantic hit, and Fairbanks was to spend the next ten years as a movie swashbuckler, appearing in lavish productions as Zorro, d’Artagnan, and Robin Hood.

The Mark of Zorro is a genuinely great film, the movie that elevated Douglas Fairbanks from star to superstar. His athleticism and charisma are legendary, of course, but damn it, the man could act: his foppish Don Diego is as hilarious and nuanced as his heroic Zorro is rousing and romantic. The villains are also uniformly excellent: Robert McKim’s Captain Ramon is every bit as mocking and arrogant as Basil Rathbone would be later, and Noah Beery’s swaggering rodomontades as Sergeant Gonzales even steal the scenes he shares with Fairbanks.

All the elements of the Zorro legend are here, fully formed: the black mask and cape; the hidden cave under the hacienda; the mute servant, Bernardo; even the black stallion, trained to follow its master’s orders. Plus the action scenes are great — Fairbanks famously did all his own stunts — the cinematography and direction are sharp and free from the theatrical staginess that plagued a lot of the silents, and the period details are spot-on.

Not to mention that this film is indisputably the direct inspiration for the Batman. If you’re a Batman fan but haven’t seen The Mark of Zorro, you’re just not fully aware of that character’s origin.

1921

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The Three Musketeers
Rating: ****
Origin: USA
Director: Fred Niblo
Source: Kino Video DVD

Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s Three Musketeers is far and away the best of the seven versions filmed in the silent era — but more about that in a moment. First I want to gush about this production’s costumes, which are fabulous, both historically accurate and theatrically gorgeous. This film was another Fairbanks production, and after the worldwide success of The Mark of Zorro, no expense was spared in an attempt to duplicate that triumph. And boy, did they succeed. The costumes and sets show that serious attention was paid to getting the details right, and I noticed settings and tableaux inspired by 19th-century paintings of the period, as well as the engravings of Maurice Leloir, Dumas’s most celebrated illustrator.

Fairbanks was nearly forty in 1921, far too old for the part of the youth d’Artagnan, but instead of trying to look young he plays young, in his expressions and body language, and does so brilliantly. Fairbanks made his Zorro an acrobat, and he does the same for d’Artagnan, leaping and fencing with a buoyant athleticism that has been attached to the rôle of the young musketeer ever since. But beyond that, Fairbanks’s d’Artagnan exhibits the sharp wits and quick thinking on display in Dumas’s novel, crucial aspects of the character that are often overlooked in lesser adaptations.

Once again, the film covers only the first half of the novel, the affair of the diamond studs, but with 121 minutes to do it, this version has much more room for character interplay, romance, and joyous musketeer shenanigans. There is roistering, roguery, and outright piracy on the English Channel. This time around Constance is Bonacieux’s niece rather than wife, and she gets a generous amount of screen time in a movie that’s otherwise a boys’ club. But the real supporting-actor prize goes to Nigel Brulier as Cardinal Richelieu, whom he plays as a cold and calculating automaton with a genuinely ominous screen presence. In the end Richelieu reacts to his defeat with dignity and even generosity, but is rebuffed by d’Artagnan and the musketeers, who prefer their camaraderie and half-drunken revelry to the sober demands of the state. You go, frat boys!

1922

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Monte Cristo
Rating: **
Origin: USA
Director: Emmett J. Flynn
Source: Flicker Alley DVD

Another adaptation of Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, a remake of the 1913 version, shot from the same basic script (to which Fox bought the rights), but greatly expanded for a film a half hour longer than its predecessor. Lead John Gilbert was a rising star at this point, though he hadn’t yet gained the popularity he would with The Big Parade (1925) and Flesh and the Devil (1926). Once again, Edmond Dantes succumbs to a conspiracy of envy and is imprisoned in the horrific Château d’If, only to escape and achieve his revenge, out-conspiring the conspirators as the chameleonic Count of Monte Cristo. The villains, each a different flavor of sleazy, are thoroughly despicable, and the innocent Mercedes, Dantes’s lost love, is wide-eyed and appealing. Gilbert looks and moves well in the rôle of Monte Cristo, and inhabits the count’s various guises convincingly.

This version avoids the stage-play feel of its predecessor by employing frequent close-ups and switching camera distance and angle often. And it does a better job of explaining how Dantes comes by, not just his great wealth, but also the knowledge and culture that enable him to pass as the elegant and noble count. With its extra running time, there’s room to include more of the characters and twists of Dumas’s novel, adding robberies, lurid murders, duels, and impersonations. In fact, it’s somewhat over-ambitious, trying to jam in more of the novel than is comfortable in less than two hours. In the end it feels too contrived, and not even a final spate of swordplay and highway robbery can quite save it. It’s just too hokey.

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Rupert von Hentzau (Ramon Novarro)

The Prisoner of Zenda
Rating: ***
Origin: USA
Director: Rex Ingram
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

This film, the second silent movie adaptation of Anthony Hope’s best-selling 1894 novel, features craggy-faced Lewis Stone in the dual parts of Rudolf Rassendyll and King Rudolf, and Ramon Novarro, in his breakout rôle, as the villain Rupert of Hentzau. Every version of Zenda is stolen by the engaging rogue Rupert, and this is no exception — and Novarro’s raffish charm in the part made him a star. The movie starts slow, and its talky set pieces betray the production’s origins as a stage play, but the emphasis on interiors and close-ups gives plenty of scope for mugging by an array of fine silent-screen character actors. A great deal of effort was put into Ruritanian pomp and display that hasn’t aged well, and the story doesn’t really pick up until over an hour into it—but once the action starts, there’s actually more swordplay than in the better-known 1937 and 1952 versions. The last forty minutes definitely redeem the previous seventy, and the fencing in the final scenes is better than anything we’ve seen previously in the silent era. Visual Bonus: monocles and jodhpurs!

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Robin Hood
Rating: **
Origin: USA
Director: Allan Dwan
Source: Kino Video DVD

After Douglas Fairbanks’s worldwide success with The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers, no expense was spared for his next swashbuckler, 1922’s Robin Hood. The film is a spectacular saga of medieval chivalry, a lavish production on an epic scale, but is all about lords, ladies, and kings, with strangely little Robin Hood in it. It’s a weird boys’-club of a movie that’s mostly about the manly bromance between Fairbanks’s Earl of Hungtingdon and King Richard the Lion-Hearted, played with wearying brio by beefy Wallace Beery. Huntingdon is the knightliest knight when it comes to trouncing the others at tournament, but he’s strangely leery of the ladies, and when Richard tells him to take his prize from Lady Marian, he says (I am not making this up), “Exempt me, Sire. I am afeared of women.” Spoiler: he gets over it, as least as regards Marian.

There follows about an hour of royal intrigue involving King Richard, evil Prince John, and Huntingdon, as the king leaves England to lead an army to the crusades. There’s a fair amount of regrettable nonsense about militant Christianity marching off “with high purpose” to wrest the Holy Land from the infidels. However, once Richard leaves Prince John to rule as regent until he returns, John immediately becomes an oppressive tyrant who turns England into Mordor. Peasants are robbed of all they possess, women are abused, and capering torturers burn and lacerate for John’s dour amusement.

The movie’s more than half over before Huntingdon returns to England to set things aright by donning Robin Hood’s cap and tights. As a knight Huntingdon was stolid and earnest, but as Robin he’s suddenly as merry and active as Zorro and d’Artagnan. Fairbanks leaping like an acrobat was a revelation in The Mark of Zorro, but in Sherwood Forest a hundred Merrie Men imitating him and bounding about like springs is ludicrous.

In fact, I find Robin Hood the least effective of all the Fairbanks swashbucklers because it’s so overblown in every way. All the sets are colossal, every tableau is teeming with extras, the language is highfalutin and purple, and everybody over-reacts to everything. Every actor overplays his role (except Sam De Grasse as Prince John, whose relative restraint actually makes him seem more sinister). Except for Little John — played by the talentless Alan Hale, who will assume the role twice more over the next thirty years — the familiar Merrie Men barely make an appearance, and none of the famous tales are even referenced, so it barely resonates as a Robin Hood movie. And gah, the hairstyles are terrible.

The film was a big hit in its day, but I just I don’t find that it holds up particularly well 95 years later. I can’t recommend it.

1923

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Scaramouche
Rating: ****
Origin: USA
Director: Rex Ingram
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

You know a film adaptation is good when it makes you want to go back and re-read the book. Scaramouche is a real gem, and a close adaptation of Rafael Sabatini’s novel, which had been a recent (1921) best-seller. The production has the same director and cast as the previous year’s Prisoner of Zenda, but with a swap at the top, Ramon Novarro cast as the romantic lead, André-Louis Moreau, and Lewis Stone taking the part of the supporting villain, the Marquis d’Azyr. It was a good move, as the fiery young Novarro was perfect for the role of Moreau/Scaramouche — in fact, much better suited than the rather stolid Stewart Granger in the better-known 1952 version.

It’s France under Louis XVI, and we’re back in Mordor again, with the populace ground down by the oppressive nobility. Many of the bloated aristocrats are hilarious caricatures — the Minister of Justice could pass for Baron Harkonnen. The movie starts out a little slow, establishing its characters and Moreau’s reasons for revenge on the aristos, but really gets moving once he’s on the run and joins a troupe of traveling actors. As a stage performer, Novarro gets to unleash his undeniable charm, and once he dons the striped outfit of Scaramouche we’re off to the races. The film spends an hour covering the same ground as the ’52 version — the first, more personal half of the novel — and then goes beyond into the politics, glories, and horrors of the French Revolution, which are depicted convincingly.

The costumes and make-up are superb, and in a series of dueling scenes we see the first really good fencing of the silent era, swordplay both persuasive and exciting. And instead of the usual contrived happy ending, the film is true to its source and retains the rather dark finish of Sabatini’s novel. Aux armes, mes camarades! Visual bonus: snuff boxes and quizzing glasses!

1924

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The Sea Hawk
Rating: ***
Origin: USA
Director: Frank Lloyd
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

Pirates at last! The Sea Hawk features Wallace Beery as a piratical rogue a full ten years before his star turn as Long John Silver in Treasure Island. Here he also plays a loveable villain named Captain Jasper, opposite star Milton Sills as Sir Oliver Tressilian, who I’m convinced was cast mainly for his burning gaze and the fearsome way he slowly clenches his fist when contemplating revenge on his betrayers.

The story is based on Rafael Sabatini’s 1915 novel, which had been revived in the wake of the worldwide success of his Scaramouche and Captain Blood. This film hews much more closely to the novel than the later version with Errol Flynn. It tells the story with an old-fashioned melodramatic staginess that was already going out of style, especially in the movie’s first act, an Elizabethan soap opera (with dueling) that sets up why Tressilian, one of the queen’s former “sea hawks,” gets himself shanghaied onto a pirate ship. That’s when the rapscallion Beery enters the picture, and the real fun begins.

Suddenly, sea battles! And not filmed with models or miniatures, either, they built real ships for this, a barque and two galleys, and the clashes between them are pretty spectacular. Betrayed in England, made a galley slave by Spain, Tressilian renounces Christianity and joins the pirates of Algiers to take his revenge on the world. He becomes a corsair captain, and in due time he captures the rogue Beery who originally captured him. The two join forces, and rascally antics ensue. Also alarums, excursions, abductions, impersonations, leering lechers, spying eunuchs, and vengeance-turned-to-ashes-in-one’s-very-mouth. That slow and stagy start? All is forgiven.

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The Thief of Bagdad
Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA
Director: Raoul Walsh
Source: Cohen Film Collection DVD/Blu-Ray

Douglas Fairbanks gets his swashbuckling mojo back in this fabulous, dream-like fantasy that features the star at his most expressive and balletic, swaggering, leaping, and pantomiming through a fable from the Arabian Nights. The costumes are eye-popping and opulent, with towering hats — I mean, they look like actual towers — and curly-toed shoes to die for. The fanciful sets (by William Cameron Menzies) are fairy-tale tall and studded with grips so Fairbanks can clamber all over them. In its own way the film is as excessive as Robin Hood, but this time every excess is in service to the story, which moves quickly and stays focused, even with a running time of almost two and a half hours. A lot of the credit for this should probably go to the director, the great Raoul Walsh, in an early effort from a long career that would later include such classics as High Sierra and swashbucklers like Captain Horatio Hornblower.

Even after almost a century, the Thief’s visual gags in this film are outstanding, a combination of Fairbanks’s inspired gymnastics and some imaginative camera tricks. Fairbanks’s dancelike movements and broad gestures are compelling and eloquent, but he’s just as effective with his facial features in intimate close-ups. The star still had many fine films ahead of him — as we’ll see — but The Thief of Bagdad has to be regarded as his masterpiece.

The story, about wooing and winning a princess, is negligible, a flimsy pretext for infiltrations, escalades, abductions, and rescues involving such enchanted adjuncts as a fakir’s vertical trick rope, a flying carpet, and a wondrous winged horse. Also sleeping potions, mystic talismans, and a Valley of Fire. Plus secret panels, walking tree-men, giant bats, crystal balls, a cloak of invisibility, an underwater city of sirens, a spider the size of a grizzly bear, and the Old Man of the Midnight Sea. The film just keeps unrolling this rapid cavalcade of wonders, but somehow it stays fresh all the way to the end. Immortal line: “Fling him to the ape!”

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Warning: this film has long been in the public domain, and there are a lot of crappy digital transfers out there. A lot of care went into restoring the Cohen Film version, and that’s the one I recommend.

See Part II of Silent Screen Swashbucklers here.

By |2020-10-15T13:37:36-04:00October 15, 2020|Silent Screen Swashbucklers|Comments Off on Silent Screen Swashbucklers, Part 1 of 2: Zorro Makes his Mark!

Dash and Daring Never Go Out of Style

I am a connoisseur of old swashbuckling stories, the kind of historical adventure tales that were arguably the western world’s most popular form of fiction in the hundred years from the publication of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe in 1820 to Johnston McCulley’s first Zorro novel in 1919. At their height, Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island were huge worldwide bestsellers that still resonate with readers today.

Of course, many contemporary readers prefer their fiction in a more modern mode, and I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to go back to the 19th century to find a thrilling swashbuckler. A strong story boldly told never truly goes out of fashion, and there are some excellent novelists working today whose stories hearken back to the old swashbucklers, but whose writing is thoroughly modern. I’m going to tell you about a couple of terrific series currently unfolding on the shelves of your local bookstore, and then end with a look at an old favorite in a new guise.

First up is American novelist William Dietrich’s Ethan Gage series, published by HarperCollins. This series is set in the Napoleonic era, and is clearly modeled, at least in part, on the late George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels. Like Flashman, the hero is a self-described amoral rogue who gets drawn into every major fracas of his time. But Dietrich’s books are no mere homage to Fraser, as they have their own distinctive tone; Dietrich is pulpier than Fraser, and has fewer qualms about embroidering on history in the pursuit of outlandish action scenes or occult overtones.

 

Dietrich’s hero, Ethan Gage, is an American frontiersman who is first introduced to us in Napoleon’s Pyramids. He’s a gambler and opportunist who finds himself in Europe after attaching himself to Ben Franklin during his term as Ambassador to France. In classic pulp fashion, Gage wins a mysterious Egyptian amulet in a game of cards, refuses to sell it to an ominous foreigner, and is soon being pursued through the Parisian night by mysterious robed figures. And suddenly the novel is off, at a breakneck pace, and before you know it Gage is in Egypt racing to discover a mystery of the ancients before his shadowy enemies can get to it first. It’s there that he meets Astiza, a dark-eyed, cryptic beauty who first tries to assassinate Gage, and then becomes his lover. A recurring character in the series, she’s more than a match for Gage: she’s smarter than him, better educated, both wily and wise, and she actively pursues her own agenda, which adds a welcome element of unpredictability into the stories.

All the Gage books are as fast-paced as the first, as Dietrich takes his hero to fight the Barbary Pirates, explore the Louisiana Purchase (before it was purchased), get involved in Haiti’s slave revolt, and play a role in the Napoleonic battles of Marengo, Trafalgar, and Austerlitz. And the writing just gets better and better as the series goes on. Gage’s adventures are now up to their seventh entry, The Three Emperors, but you’ll want to start from the beginning with Napoleon’s Pyramids.

For those who prefer their historical adventures a few centuries further back, I offer the Outlaw Chronicles by British author Angus Donald, published in the United States by St. Martin’s Griffin. The titular outlaw in the series is none other than Robin Hood, the original swashbuckler himself, who was brought into modern tales by Walter Scott in the aforementioned Ivanhoe. The books in this series are fast-paced, the characters are memorable and well-drawn, and the dialogue is crisp and modern. But Donald’s Robin Hood isn’t Scott’s merry and chivalrous rogue, he’s a much more dangerous man: he’s a charismatic but ruthless renegade knight with a grudge against the aristocracy, and the author’s portrayal of the hard life of a band of medieval outlaws rings true.

 

After Robin is pardoned by King Richard for services to the crown, his outlaw band is retrained and reinvented into a company of hard-handed mercenaries, who follow King Richard to Palestine in the Third Crusade. The author has done his homework, and his depiction of the bloody work of combat in the 12th century is in equal parts thrilling and horrific. This is solid historical adventure that doesn’t shy away from the nasty realities of life in the Late Middle Ages: Donald tells it as it was.

Though Robin is at the center of all the novels, they are told from the point of view of his young bard and lieutenant, Alan Dale, who is the simple and good-hearted rogue Robin is not. Though he’s loyal to his master, he’s often appalled by the lengths his leader will go to to achieve his ends. Dale is the voice and the conscience of these stories, providing a solid foundation to Robin’s wild adventures.

Donald has just published his sixth book in the series, The Iron Castle, and though each book stands well on its own, I recommend once again that you start with the first one, Outlaw. That way you can see where this version of Robin and Alan Dale comes from, before Donald takes them off in a direction that’s uniquely his own.

Finally, I want to recommend to you an old friend, Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, which is now available from BBC Books in a sparkling new English translation by Will Hobson. If you first read this marvelous novel more than 10 years ago, the odds are that you read it in one of the old translations that date back to the mid-19th century. As popular as those versions have been over the years, I’m afraid they don’t even begin to capture the verve and drive of Dumas’ original writing in French. But Hobson gets it. Here’s a line from the scene where d’Artagnan declares himself on the side of the musketeers against the Cardinal’s Guard, as rendered by William Barrows in 1846:

“True,” replied d’Artagnan, “I have not the dress, but I have the heart and soul of a musketeer; I feel it, sir, and it impels me along, as it were, by force.”

And here are the same lines as translated by Will Hobson in 2014:

“It’s true I lack the uniform,” replied d’Artagnan, “but I have the soul. My heart is a musketeer’s. I feel it, sir, and it urges me on.”

 

See what I mean? If you loved reading The Three Musketeers before, you’ll love re-reading it in this new version — and if you’ve never read it, you no longer have any excuses!

Lawrence Ellsworth is an author, editor, and translator of historical adventure fiction. His new anthology, The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, compiling fifteen stories by the masters of the genre, is published by Pegasus Books.

By |2020-10-15T13:35:08-04:00October 15, 2020|The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure|Comments Off on Dash and Daring Never Go Out of Style
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