Yearly Archives: 2017

Home/2017

Man in the Iron Mask

The Man in the Iron Mask
Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1939
Director: James Whale
Source: Hen’s Tooth Video DVD

The Man in the Iron Mask

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.

The Man in the Iron Mask is the final tale in Alexandre Dumas’s long Musketeers Cycle, which tells the stories of d’Artagnan and his three friends Athos, Aramis, and Porthos from youth to old age. And no movie version of Iron Mask has ever told that tale the way Dumas wrote it. Oh, you always get a plot to switch King Louis XIV with his twin Philippe, who was spirited away at birth and raised somewhere secretly, and somebody always winds up wearing a welded-on full-helm iron mask—while of the musketeers, d’Artagnan at least puts in an appearance. Other than that, all bets are off. This adaptation is no closer to Dumas than any other version, so let’s just toss the author out a tower window like an old tin plate and look at this movie on its own merits. These are considerable: first, it was directed by James Whale, best known for his classic horror movies Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, and he does a fine job making the dungeon scenes involving the iron mask quite chilling. He also turns out to be pretty good at costume drama: this movie moves right along, and never flags until just before the end.

Other pleasures include the sharp byplay between the king’s rival advisors, Walter Kingsford as Colbert and Joseph Schildkraut as Fouquet; any number of secret passages in the Louvre and the Bastille; the genuinely touching scene in which the elderly Queen Anne finally meets her long-lost son; and a guard captain who gets to shout both “Seize them!” and “Take them away!”

In this version, as an infant Prince Philippe is given into the care of d’Artagnan, who takes him to distant Gascony to raise him with his three musketeer friends as tutors. D’Artagnan is played by Warren William, who’d been very popular earlier in the thirties, but whose star was by this time fading. He’s a curious choice for the role: he’s not very athletic, which had been a hallmark of the part since Fairbanks (and still is), and though his long, droll face looks good with a pencil ‘stache and goatee, he’s not a convincing swashbuckler, and he doesn’t always remember to act engaged and engaging, or even interested.

Hayward, on the other hand, is clearly enjoying himself, switching back and forth between the cruel and tyrannical King Louis and the bold and boisterous Philippe. Bonus: as the impostor king, he gets to romance Queen Maria Theresa (Joan Bennett), who is sadly ignored by the real Louis XIV—possibly the only touch of historical accuracy in the picture.

So there’s plenty of good stuff. On the downside, the awful Alan Hale, Sr., is inflicted upon us once again, though if he’s suited to play anybody I suppose it would be Porthos, as he does here. Also, though the costumes are good for a B-picture, everybody fences with these flimsy little foils that are no substitute for an honest rapier. Finally, this movie just has one climax too many, an unnecessary carriage chase through the too-familiar woods of southern California, before the musketeers finally save the day. Look, it’s no Adventures of Robin Hood, but it’s worth your time nonetheless. Watch for the venerable Nigel Brulier in the prologue reprising the role of Cardinal Richelieu that he played in Fairbanks’s silent versions of both The Three Musketeers and The Iron Mask.

By |2018-02-11T17:33:57-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Man in the Iron Mask
Read More

Magic Carpet

The Magic Carpet
Rating: *
Origin: USA, 1951
Director: Lew Landers
Source: Amazon Streaming Video

The Magic Carpet

This is quite terrible. In a cheesier-than-usual Arabian palace set, the Good Caliph is just naming his newborn son his sole heir when he’s assassinated by the New Evil Caliph. The nurse escapes with the child and sends him flying away on a magic carpet. (This is the only fantasy element in the film and is completely unexplained, because Mysterious East or something.) The child is taken to a doctor, who hides the carpet and decides to raise the child as his own, not telling him that he’s the Rightful Caliph. The child grows up to be legendarily-bad leading man John Agar, who has all the screen presence and charisma of an Idaho potato. There’s a guards-oppressing-the-people montage; Agar, now called Dr. Ramoth, sees some oppressing and says some lines to show he disapproves, thought that’s the only way you can tell because his face doesn’t change. To fight the Evil Caliph’s oppression Dr. Ramoth becomes the Scarlet, or maybe Crimson Falcon, and leads a band of freedom fighters in a freedom-fighting montage. He keeps raiding the wrong caravans that don’t have the weapons he needs to arm the people to overthrow the Evil Caliph, so Agar decides he needs to infiltrate the palace to get inside information. His cunning plan is to kill a bunch of palace guards so he can get his comic sidekick inside, where he can take the place of the Evil Caliph’s wine taster and dose him with a permanent-hiccups potion. Nobody pays any attention to the dead guards, because there are plenty of them, so Dr. Ramoth cures the Evil Caliph of permanent hiccups and becomes the new palace physician.

Yeah. Now that he’s inside the palace Agar meets the Evil Caliph’s Evil Sister, who is played by, I am not making this up, Lucille Ball. With her red hair and green eyes she’s about as Arabian as a leprechaun, but I suppose what matters is that she wears harem pants and a midriff-exposing top like the, I guess the word is bevy of giggling starlets prancing around the palace and its blue plastic in-ground pool. Cast as a seductive villainess, Ball’s talents are completely wasted as she never does anything the least bit funny or, for that matter, seductive or villainous. More stuff happens: Agar finds out he’s the Rightful Caliph and flies around on his carpet, the effects for which are so awful they’re almost endearing. There’s a bunch of “swordplay,” with lots of people waving around thin curved sticks that are supposed to represent scimitars, but confusingly there are always some guys waving actual sticks because I guess the props department didn’t make enough scimitars. Also, everybody knows that when you run someone through you pass the sword behind their body, but Raymond Burr didn’t get the memo and stabs people on the wrong side. Oh, right, he’s in this too, as the Evil Caliph’s Evil Grand Vizier, wearing black facial hair that must be pretty stiff because his lips barely move when he speaks. Only his eyes look alive, the eyes of trapped animal shifting this way and that, desperately seeking an escape.

By |2018-02-11T17:33:38-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Magic Carpet
Read More

Knights of the Round Table

Knights of the Round Table
Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1953
Director: Richard Thorpe
Source: Amazon streaming video

Knights of the Round Table

Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) was the first comprehensive collection of the legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and according to the opening credits of this film, Malory is the source material for the story, though considering the script, The Boy’s King Arthur by Sidney Lanier (1880) is a more likely candidate. This is producer Pandro Berman’s follow-up to the hugely successful Ivanhoe, with the same director, crew, male lead (Robert Taylor), and composer (Miklós Rózsa)—but this time the team stumbles. It’s harder to boil down a collection of tales like Malory’s into a coherent story than it is to adapt a novel, and Merlin, Guinevere, Arthur, and his knights are more archetypes than fleshed-out characters, two problems that movie doesn’t successfully solve.

Let’s just get the failings of this flick out of the way so we can focus on what’s worth watching in it. First of all, the dialogue is atrocious, stilted Ye Olde Englishe, and the actors deliver it dead on arrival, as stiff as slabs of oak. The characters are all simple and shallow, with about one note apiece (archetypes, remember?). The knights are awkward in their foolish Hollywood plate armor, and the knight-on-knight combats are reduced to painfully artless flailing that goes on way too long. And though the heart of the story is the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle, as it should be, Sir Percival’s quest for the Holy Grail is clumsily and intrusively shoe-horned into the narrative, possibly to give the film some moral cover in the staid 1950s, since otherwise it’s basically a tale of medieval adultery. Percival having divine visions is disturbingly out-of-tone, as it’s the only supernatural aspect retained from the tales: Merlin here is just a wise old advisor, not a wizard, and Morgan le Fay uses poison rather than magic.

But this movie is still worth your time, for two reasons. First, it succeeds as a visual spectacle. Based solely on looks, the casting is perfect: Taylor is proud, upright, and stern as Lancelot, Ava Gardner as Guinevere would make any knight forsake his vows, Mel Ferrer is earnest and leonine as King Arthur, Stanley Baker sneers convincingly as Modred, and Gabriel Woolf as Sir Percival looks like he stepped right out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. There are two large pitched battles that are surprisingly effective—clearly director Richard Thorpe had studied his Eisenstein. And over and over the composition and staging of scenes and individual shots is impeccable: sharp, painterly, and memorable.

Finally, as dumb as the script is—and it’s real dumb—the basic plot of the rise and fall of Camelot as embodied in the love triangle of the three principles is such a strong story that it works anyway, despite the crappy dialogue. There’s real emotion in this timeless tragedy, and Gardner and Taylor manage to wring it out by heroically underplaying their rôles while everyone around them is hamming it up. Surprising, but there it is: go figure.

By |2018-01-02T21:04:26-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Knights of the Round Table
Read More

King Richard and the Crusaders (USA) / The Talisman (UK)

King Richard and the Crusaders (USA) / The Talisman (UK)
Rating: *
Origin: USA
Director: David Butler
Source: Amazon streaming video

King Richard and the Crusaders (USA) : The Talisman (UK)

This movie has the reputation of being one of the worst Hollywood epics of all time, and I’m here to tell you its reputation is well deserved: this one’s a real stinker, folks. Oh, on paper it sounds like a good idea: adapt The Talisman (1825), Walter Scott’s classic novel of the Crusades, cast George Sanders as King Richard the Lion-Hearted and Rex Harrison as Saladin, throw in Laurence Harvey and Virginia Mayo as the romantic leads, get Max Steiner to do the music, and the rest is cake! However, as soon as we’re past the opening titles it all starts to go wrong: a faceless narrator (ugh!) explains the historical situation of the Third Crusade, but the writing is just awful—and then people start to talk, and it gets worse. The script’s pompous blowhardery (yes, that’s a word now) is just unbelievable—oh, lordy, the stuff these poor actors have to say! The romance plot goes on the rocks in record time, not just because Harvey and Mayo can barely stand to look each other in the eye, but also because they clearly can’t believe how crappy their lines are.

Top-billed Rex Harrison made a career out of playing smugly superior characters so self-satisfied you want to punch them (a lot), and his rôle here, as the too-clever Saracen who’s always the smartest guy in the room, constantly putting one over on the doofus Christians, is made for him … though to be fair the Christians, to the last man and woman, are complete doofuses. The boring villains’ plots are ham-handed and obvious, but the putative good guys are so dense they barely know which end of the sword to hold, and spend all their time wrathfully blaming each other instead of the clumsy bad guys. The villains try to help identify themselves by wearing matching black uniforms, but nope!

As for poor George Sanders, he gets poisoned in the first few minutes and then spends half the movie on his back, grumpily making snarky remarks from the horizontal. His King Richard is nominally in charge of this Crusade, but there’s hokey political conflict with his rivals Ludwig of Austria and Philip of France, both ridiculous national caricatures—Ludwig is always drunk, while Philip limp-wristedly waves a fan of lavender feathers, fer chrissake. There are brief spasms of combat in which everyone flails around with heavy weaponry as if there were no such things as skill or finesse. There’s a contrived trial by combat, an absurd abduction of Mayo, and then everyone stops pretending they’re telling a coherent story and the film is reduced to the Hollywood lowest-common-denominator of frantic galloping through the California hills. It ends in the Worst Final Duel Ever, with Harvey and the boring chief villain atop a three-quarters-closed drawbridge, hanging by their arms and kicking at each other ineffectually. Come on! Screenwriter John Twist inexplicably continued to get work after this fiasco, thought it was mostly on tripe like “Helen of Troy” (1955). But it was the end of David Butler’s career as a director of feature films—he had to flee to television, where he directed 58 episodes of “Leave It to Beaver.” So maybe there is a God after all—or even an Allah.

By |2018-01-02T21:04:26-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on King Richard and the Crusaders (USA) / The Talisman (UK)
Read More
Go to Top