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Robin Hood

Robin Hood
Rating: **
Origin: USA, 1922
Director: Allan Dwan
Source: Kino Video DVD

Robin Hood

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.

 

By |2018-01-02T21:03:41-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Robin Hood
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Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel

The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel
Rating: ***
Origin: UK, 1937
Director: Hanns Schwartz
Source: PRS DVD

The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel

Though the celebrated 1934 version of The Scarlet Pimpernel is justly famous, few are aware that the film had a sequel less than three years later. There’s a reason for that: though produced by the same studio, almost no one who made the first movie was involved with the second, and the journeyman cast and crew of The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel were unable to recapture the magic of the original.

The story is based loosely on The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1922), one of Baroness Orczy’s dozen sequels to the first novel. Sir Percy has promised Lady Blakeney not to return to France, and spends his time in England playing cricket, but in Paris under the tyranny of Robespierre, heads continue to fall to Mam’zelle Guillotine. Though the Scarlet Pimpernel has been exposed and confined to England, Robespierre is convinced that he’s still remotely managing a network of traitors in Revolutionary France, and orders Citizen Chauvelin to find a way to induce Sir Percy to come to Paris where he can be taken and executed. Raymond Massey was busy in 1937 appearing in other costume dramas as Black Michael, King Philip II, and Cardinal Richelieu, so Chauvelin is played this time around by the baby-faced Francis Lister, who was quite good as Gaston in Cardinal Richelieu. But though Lister’s Chauvelin is smart enough for the role, he entirely lacks Massey’s menacing edge.

Before she was Lady Blakeney, Marguerite St. Juste was an actress from the theatrical demimonde of Paris, so Chauvelin hatches a plot involving another actress, Theresa Cobarrus (Margaretta Scott), and sends her to England to lure Marguerite into an abduction—and so, in Brighton under false pretexts, Theresa tests her wits against those of the Blakeneys. Sir Percy is played by Barry K. Barnes, Marguerite by Sophie Stewart, and unfortunately, Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon they ain’t. The script doesn’t give them much to work with, either—especially poor Lady Blakeney, who seems to have lost about 40 I.Q. points since the first film. Sir Percy comes off rather better, but Barry Barnes just doesn’t have Leslie Howard’s ability to convey several simultaneous levels of nuance, and his dialogue isn’t as sharp.

To save his wife, Sir Percy is drawn back into the fray of Revolutionary Paris, and the requisite impersonations, pursuits, intrigues, and daring escapes duly ensue. It’s not bad—but as Sir Percy remarked in the first film, “Really, there’s nothing quite so bad as something that’s not bad.” Watch for the young James Mason making his mark in a minor role as a revolutionary parliamentarian—radiating intensity, he stands out as the only real actor of stature in the picture. Ironically, this just diminishes the earnest but inadequate performances of the lead actors, forever eclipsed by Howard, Oberon, Massey—and Mason.

By |2018-02-11T17:39:18-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel
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Return of Monte Cristo

The Return of Monte Cristo
Rating: **
Origin: USA, 1946
Director: Henry Levin
Source: Firecake Entertainment DVD

The Return of Monte Cristo

Louis Hayward spent the war in the U.S. Marines, and was at Tarawa; afterward he returned to making swashbucklers, but with an edge he hadn’t had before. Interestingly, though produced by the same company and with the same star, The Return of Monte Cristo is not a sequel to 1940’s Son of Monte Cristo. The latter, set in 1865, featured the late count’s son (obviously), while Return, which begins in 1868, is about another heir entirely, the count’s grand-nephew. Thus Edward Small, who produced the hit 1934 Count of Monte Cristo, made two alternative and mutually-exclusive sequels to it in the ‘40s. Do their inconsistencies matter? Not at all!

The intro to Return features a bogus letter from Alexandre Dumas explaining why he decided to tell this story—which he totally didn’t, but it’s a pretty good Dumas pastiche, crafted in emulation of the original Count of Monte Cristo (1844). When the count’s grand-nephew and heir, also named Edmund Dantés, goes to court to claim his vast inheritance, he’s cheated of it by three corrupt officials, and sentenced, under a false name, to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. The French tropical penal colony is even worse than the Château d’If (which will make an appearance in act two), and there’s no Abbé Faria to help him, so this Edmund Dantés is on his own. Spoiler: he manages to escape, and returns to France to commence his campaign of revenge. With the help of a master actor, who escaped Devil’s Island with him, Dantés, to fool and entrap his prey, begins assuming various guises, such as a bank auditor, an Imperial nobleman, and a hunchbacked private investigator. To give Hayward his due, these impersonations are pretty entertaining, but they can’t quite carry the film, which is fairly pedestrian otherwise.

The Return of Monte Cristo is a darker film than Son, or even Count, almost a historical film noir in feel. In fact, it’s probably the least swashbuckling Monte Cristo film of all its many adaptations and sequels. That said, its emphasis on vengeance certainly fits more thematically than the Zenda-esque Son of Monte Cristo, though that film was a lot more fun—and it had a top-notch villain in George Sanders, something this movie lacks. In short, though Louis Hayward does his best, this isn’t a very successful film.

By |2018-02-11T17:38:33-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Return of Monte Cristo
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Rashomon

Rashomon
Rating: *****
Origin: Japan, 1950
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Source: Criterion Collection DVD

Rashomon

Although this is director Akira Kurosawa’s first samurai film, it arguably doesn’t belong in this series, as it’s not really a chambara—a swordplay movie—but rather a historical crime tale. You probably have a general idea of what it’s about even if you’ve never seen it, as its title has become the nickname of the principle of the unreliable narrator, the same story told differently from several different viewpoints. In this case it’s the history of a crime, a rape and a murder in a lonely grove on a remote wooded mountain. The tale is told from four different points of view, and the viewer is left to tease out the truth for themselves.

The film stars Kurosawa’s favorite leading man, Toshiro Mifune, as a fierce and antic bandit, a character that prefigures his unforgettable Kikuchiyo in The Seven Samurai (1954)—and several other actors familiar from that masterpiece show up as well. It’s a striking movie, gorgeously shot in a sun-dappled forest and a relentless downpour, displaying the firm grasp Kurosawa has of the movie-making art even this early in his long career. There’s even a touch of the ghost story to it, as the murdered man tells his version of events. And of course there is that one pivotal sword duel between the samurai (Masayuki Mori) and the bandit—which is one more than you’ll find in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1935), so I guess this film qualifies after all.

By |2018-01-02T21:03:41-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Rashomon
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