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Thief of Bagdad (1924)

The Thief of Bagdad
Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA, 1924
Director: Raoul Walsh
Source: Cohen Film Collection DVD/Blu-Ray

The Thief of Bagdad

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!”

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.

By |2018-02-11T17:43:05-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Thief of Bagdad (1924)
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Swordsman

The Swordsman
Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1948
Director: Joseph H. Lewis
Source: Columbia Pictures DVD

The Swordsman

It’s late seventeenth-century Scotland, and the clans are a-feudin’. This film has two matinee-idol lookers for stars in Larry Parks and Ellen Drew, and if you guess that means we’re in for a cross-clan Romeo and Juliet-type romance, well now but you’re good guessers, lads and lassies, aren’t you? The Glowan and MacArden clans have been stealing each other’s livestock and cutting each other’s throats for a century, but when Alexander MacArden (Parks), calling himself “Donald Fraser,” cute-meets Barbara Glowan (Drew), bonny eyes start a-twinklin’, and young Alex vows it’s time to make peace between the clans. Under his false name he attends the Glowans’ highland games, winning the javelin throw (tossing an eight-foot boar-sticker—some javelin!) and Barbara’s heart. But he’s recognized as a MacArden and the killings, fair duels and foul murders, begin.

I’ve never quite understood Parks’ appeal, and at first glance Drew doesn’t do much besides smile and look adoringly at Parks, but I admit that they both eventually show enough depth to win me over. I have no such reservations about George Macready as Barbara’s villainous cousin Robert Glowan, who’s as much for war as Alexander is for peace. He’s nasty and smart, manipulating his younger brothers into dishonor and death, and he’s always quick to go for his basket-hilt broadsword. But Alexander, though reluctant, is a dab hand with a broadsword himself, and as you might expect from a film entitled The Swordsman, blades flash with some frequency. The swordplay is good, too, and the lead Glowans and MacArdens, Parks included, are all credible fencers.

This is a handsome production that makes good use of Technicolor. Northern California stands in for the Scottish Highlands, and it’s scenic enough for the part, especially with the addition of a few herds of sheep and some judiciously-placed matte paintings. The cast’s Scottish accents are hit or miss, but at least there are only a few golf and whisky jokes. Given this tale’s series of abductions, ambuscades, betrayals, and warnings of betrayals, there’s an awful lot of riding along the shores of the “lochs,” all conducted at a gallop—I swear, there must be a full fifteen minutes of sheer galloping in this flick. Plus these haughty Scots are stiff-necked and proud, which accounts for all the misunderstandings in act two. But by act three everyone’s decided whether they’re for war or peace between the clans, which leaves Parks and Macready to sort things out in a fine rough-and-tumble climactic duel. Will peace and love prevail in the end? Geez, what do you think this is, a Shakespearean tragedy?

By |2018-02-11T17:42:23-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Swordsman
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Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men

The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men
Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1952
Director: Ken Annakin
Source: Disney DVD

After the success of Disney’s Treasure Island (1950), Walt decided to continue the studio’s live-action adventures with Robin Hood, another well-known (and public domain) property. Since 1938 every Robin Hood movie had stood in the shadow of the towering Errol Flynn film, but this was to be a restart, a resetting of the legend for the safe and conformist ‘50s. In this telling Robin (Richard Todd) is infantilized: when we meet him, he’s a lad playing juvenile archery games with Maid Marian (Joan Rice) while his father, the chief forester for the Earl of Huntington, meets with the other grown-up, bearded, manly men to prepare for what manly men do, which is go to war. The earl—Marian’s father—is eager to follow his own father-figure, King Richard, off to fight in the Crusades. Big Daddy Richard leaves behind Prince John, in this version hardly older than a lad himself, enjoining him to mind the kingdom in his absence, and the earl does the same for his domains with his forester, Fitzooth.

The kids had been warned to play nice while the daddies are gone, but John would rather be a bully, so there. Since Richard took the manly, bearded old Sheriff of Nottingham with him on Crusade, John appoints his crony Guy of Gisbourne to be the new sheriff (a convenient combining of characters), and orders him to build a force of the finest archers in the land. The sheriff hires a few ruthless goons who begin plundering the peasants to collect John’s new extortionate taxes, but he needs more, so he organizes an archery tournament to overawe the serfs and attract more bowmen. Now, in the Robin Hood legend, Robin is usually the finest archer in all England, but here it’s his own father who splits Robin’s arrow and wins the tournament. Daddy knows best! However, loyal to Big Daddy Richard, Fitzooth refuses to join John’s tax collectors, so the sheriff has him murdered, Robin kills the assassin, and then, proscribed, has to go off into the woods and play outlaw with the other bullied boys.

The wild and dangerous edge that Flynn brought to Robin Hood is gone here: Todd is a Boy Scout with a junior executive haircut and a smile from a toothpaste commercial, and Basil Rathbone would eat him for lunch and carry off Maid Marian for dessert. Such carping criticisms aside, on its own terms this movie is a pretty good retelling of the Robin Hood story, successfully establishing the tone and template that would rule the remakes for a decade or so, especially the popular Adventures of Robin Hood TV show that would run from 1955 through 1959. Shooting the film in the forests of old England rather than the California woods gives the film an authentic feel, and as he showed with Treasure Island, director Ken Annakin is equally adept with character development and action scenes. The Merrie Men are all charming and well-cast, and the clever use of the minstrel Alan-a-Dale to provide segues in song from one scene to another works well. The climactic fight between Robin and the sheriff is genuinely suspenseful, and if the violence isn’t as gritty as in Treasure Island, it’s less bland and bloodless than it will be later in the ‘50s. Marian even gets to join with the Merrie Men for a while and play in their secret clubhouse—so long as she dresses up like one of the lads and doesn’t do any icky girl stuff. Ew!

By |2018-02-11T17:42:04-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men
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Spanish Main

The Spanish Main
Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1945
Director: Frank Borzage
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

The Spanish Main

This is a fine Technicolor pirate epic, grand and satisfying, the story carried by the energy of its three marquee stars and a surprise stand-out fourth. Paul Henreid, best known as Victor Laszlo in Casablanca, is the heroic lead, a Dutch ship captain who is caught and enslaved when a storm drives his peaceful ship aground in Spanish colonial waters. He escapes and becomes a feared pirate captain known as the Barracuda, preying exclusively on Spanish shipping. You might not think the stiff and rather serious Henreid could buckle a swash like Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power, but you’d be wrong: his Captain Barracuda displays an edge of mocking arrogance that enables him to command buccaneers and defy Spaniards, he looks good in pirate garb, and he knows what to do when you put a sword in his hand.

The Barracuda captures a Spanish ship bearing our second star, the radiant Maureen O’Hara as the Condesa Francisca, on her way to marry the Viceroy of New Granada—who is the particular target of the Barracuda’s campaign of revenge. When he meets Francisca, sparks fly, and he decides to marry her just to spite the viceroy—or is there another motive? The condesa initially refuses, but then she finds a reason of her own to agree, sort of. The two maneuver around each other into marriage like a pair of tall ships tacking in to a boarding action. Here, as with her rôle in The Black Swan, O’Hara has to find a means to give herself away without giving herself up. She does, and O’Hara has the chops to make you believe it.

The viceroy, Don Juan, isn’t happy about any of this, but when Don Juan is unhappy, we’re delighted, because he’s played by Walter Slezak, and we like him when he’s angry! Slezak is basically reprising his governor’s rôle from The Princess and the Pirate, but the viceroy is much smarter, more menacing, and equipped with a wicked sense of humor. He’s quick-witted, mean, and oozes contempt for his inferiors, i.e., everyone. It takes everything the Barracuda and Francisca have to defeat him, and even so it’s a near-run thing.

But before our two romantic leads run afoul of the viceroy’s final trap, they put in to Tortuga for some roistering, revelry, and a spot of getting-betrayed-by-your-allies-because-what-do-you-expect-from-pirates? One of these allies is Binnie Barnes playing the historical female pirate Anne Bonny, and The Spanish Main is worth watching for her alone. This is, I believe, the first appearance of Anne Bonny on screen, and in Barnes’s portrayal she’s tough, jealous, but fiercely independent, and takes no guff from anyone. In this she resembled Barnes herself, who had a long career in the movies from the 1920s to the ‘70s, but always refused to play submissive rôles: anything, she said, “as long as I don’t have to be a sweet woman.” Amen to that.

By |2018-02-11T17:41:42-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Spanish Main
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