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Crimson Pirate

Crimson Pirate
Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA, 1952
Director: Richard Siodmak
Source: Amazon Streaming Video

The Crimson Pirate

This isn’t the first swashbuckler farce, but it is the first great one, a hoot and a half from beginning to end. Burt Lancaster immediately sets the tone by breaking the fourth wall: high atop a ship’s mast, he does an aerial stunt, grins at the audience, and says, “Believe only what you see!” Then he does the stunt backwards by reversing the film and says, “Well, believe half of what you see!” Then it’s “Sail ho!” and we’re off to the first ship battle.

This film is set in the revolutionary 1790s, so we’re in Scarlet Pimpernel territory, and indeed the original script by the blacklisted Waldo Salt was a serious anti-aristocratic call to arms. According to the memoirs of Christopher Lee, who has a small part here as a king’s officer, director Richard Siodmak quickly rewrote it into a cartoony self-parody, full of action but high spirited and frequently hilarious. The chase scenes often bring to mind another Warner Bros. franchise, the Looney Tunes of Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng—and that’s meant as a compliment. It even has a fine antic soundtrack by William Alwyn with a catchy main theme that evokes both sailing and circuses.

The setting is a bit fantastical in that the pirates are opposed by the troops and navy of “the King,” an unnamed imperial monarch who combines elements of England and Spain. However, the exterior scenes, which are most of them, are shot on the Italian island of Ischia, with its medieval town, harbor, and port, which grounds the production in reality. And it needs that grounding, because Lancaster and sidekick Nick Cravat, his old circus partner, are in full-on bounding-acrobat mode, knocking down rows of soldiers with barrels, driving Da Vinci-inspired steampunk tank-wagons, and dive-bombing the king’s troops from a hot-air balloon. There’s a solid liberate-the-people revolution ‘n’ romance plot to support all these shenanigans, with good performances from Eva Bartok as the spunky liberator’s daughter, Leslie Bradley as the ruthless aristo villain, and best of all Torin Thatcher as Humble Bellows, the pirate crew’s scurvy by philosophical first mate. But really this is the Flying Burt and Nick Show—Lancaster even gets to act a bit as his Captain Vallo gradually falls in love with the liberator’s daughter and grows some newly uncomfortable scruples. The best scene may be when Nick and Burt, the latter impersonating the villain, crash the island governor’s fancy ball wearing outrageously foppish finery, Burt grinning like the Cheshire cat and Nick eyeing all the ladies’ jewelry through a gilded quizzing glass. It’s just so hard to choose!

By |2018-02-11T17:30:34-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Crimson Pirate
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Count of Monte Cristo (1913)

Count of Monte Cristo
Rating: **
Origin: USA, 1913
Director: Golden/Porter
Source: Grapevine Video DVD

The Count of Monte Cristo

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 Cristo adaptations go, this one’s pretty perfunctory.

By |2018-02-11T17:29:36-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Count of Monte Cristo (1913)
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Count of Monte Cristo (1934)

Count of Monte Cristo 
Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1934
Director: Rowland V. Lee
Source: Hen’s Tooth Video DVD

The Count of Monte Cristo

English stage actor Robert Donat had garnered acclaim playing opposite Charles Laughton in Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, and was brought over to Hollywood to star in the first talkie version of Monte Cristo. This is the first of director Rowland Lee’s spate of swashbucklers, and he does an able job, supported by a stirring soundtrack from Alfred Newman. The story is necessarily streamlined from that of the lengthy novel, its European politics simplified for an American audience, and the plot pared down to its essence of triple revenge. It’s pretty tight, and there’s a desperate urgency to Edmond Dantes’s escape from the Château d’If that’s missing from the earlier silent versions.

In due course Dantes finds the buried Spada treasure and utters Dumas’s immortal line, “The world is mine!” The film’s final hour is the clockwork accomplishment of his vengeance. Transformed by the Spada wealth and the Abbé Faria’s wisdom, Donat looks tremendous as the Count de Monte Cristo, silver-haired and rigid with purpose. Elissa Landi plays Dantes’s old love, Mercedes, and when she first meets the count after twenty years of believing Dantes dead, the scene is genuinely affecting. After that the count’s shocking revelations follow one upon the other, and it all ends as it should, with flashing swords and pistols at dawn. This was the definitive Count of Monte Cristo for a generation.

After this film’s success, Donat was offered the lead in Captain Blood, but he didn’t like Hollywood, and went back to Britain to work with Alfred Hitchcock. (And the part of Peter Blood, of course, went to Errol Flynn.) Monte Cristo’s producer, Edward Small, went on to make eight more swashbucklers over the next fifteen years, mostly starring Louis Hayward, including two more Monte Cristo sequels.

By |2018-02-11T17:30:10-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Count of Monte Cristo (1934)
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Corsican Brothers

Corsican Brothers
Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1941
Director: Gregory Ratoff
Source: Hen’s Tooth Video DVD

The Corsican Brothers

Producer Edward Small returns with another swashbuckler based on a story by Alexandre Dumas, as he was on an annual basis at this point (though the run was about to be interrupted by World War II). Louis Hayward, Small’s usual star, was slated for the lead, but he took a part in a prestige drama instead, so the dual rôle of the Corsican twins instead went to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who delivered one of his best performances.

In old Corsica, two aristocratic families have been feuding for generations, the noble Franchis and the cruel and coarse Colonnas. The Franchi family is gathered at their estate to await the birth of an heir to the count, an event the Colonnas take advantage of to attack and massacre the Franchis. Countess Franchi gives birth to conjoined, or Siamese, twins, but in the chaos of the Colonna attack they are spirited away by the family doctor (secret passage!). Doctor Paoli successfully separates the twins, and names them Lucien and Mario. Baron Colonna is aware that Countess Franchi gave birth to twins, so to put him off the trail, Mario is sent with noble family friends to be raised in Paris, while Lucien remains in Corsica, raised by a Franchi retainer among a gang of bandits. But the twins share a psychic connection, and what one feels, the other feels as well. When the brothers come of age, Dr. Paoli summons Mario back to Corsica, to meet Lucien and to tell them of their true parentage. The twins embrace and swear vengeance upon Count Colonna. “No one knows there are two of us,” says Lucien. “It’ll be our sharpest weapon!”

So much for the first half hour, which sets up the story. Now comes the fun: the conflict with the Colonnas, led by Akim Tamiroff as the baron, and the conflict between the brothers, who fall in love with the same woman, Lady Isabelle Gravini—who is also, of course, desired by Baron Colonna. Besides genre-convention bingo (Villain’s jealous mistress! Fop impersonation! Death-feigning potion!), the main pleasures here are in the performances of the two male leads. Fairbanks really puts it over in his double rôle as the noble Mario and the tormented and jealous Lucien. In both parts he gets in some fine active swashbuckling reminiscent of his father. And Tamiroff’s Baron Colonna is a delightful mix of wily cunning, brutal bullying, and vain preening. Menacing one moment, laughing the next, he’s a complete hoot. When the Franchi brothers raid his holdings, he’s outraged: “First my cousins, then my nephews,” he cries, “and then my sheep!”

But in the end it all works out, with Doctor Paoli’s help—because science! The final sword fight between Franchi and Colonna was Doug Fairbanks, Jr.’s favorite of his entire career.

By |2018-02-11T17:29:02-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Corsican Brothers
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