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If I Were King

If I Were King
Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1938
Director: Frank Lloyd
Source: Universal Vault Series DVD

If I were King

Justin Huntly McCarthy’s 1901 novel romanticizing the life of French poet and petty criminal François Villon (1432-1463) was so popular, it spawned a play, an operetta, a 1920 silent film, and was the uncredited source material for John Barrymore’s The Beloved Rogue (1927). Paramount decided to revive it as a starring vehicle for Ronald Colman following his success with The Prisoner of Zenda. It was intended to be a top-of-the-line prestige picture, no expense spared, and they hired enfant terrible Preston Sturges to write the screenplay. This was an inspired choice, and his script for the film was one of Sturges’s favorites. Much of Villon’s poetry in the film was translated from French by Sturges himself.

It’s midwinter in the mid-fifteenth century, in Paris under siege by the Burgundians. Villon (Colman) is being pursued by the city watch for thieving, and goes to ground in the rectory of the priest who raised him. The priest drags the abashed but unrepentant poet into the church to pray for his sins, but his attention is diverted by a beautiful penitent, Katherine de Vaucelles (Francis Dee). He falls in love at first sight, and writes a poem for her on the spot, an act that persuades her to be his alibi when the city watch catches up to him.

We follow Katherine back to the palace where, after a little more exposition, we’re introduced to King Louis XI, and OHMYGOD it’s Basil Rathbone, barely recognizable as he completely inhabits the role of that fearful, cunning, cackling, conniving, but ever-brilliant monarch. No wonder Rathbone was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for it.

There’s no tale about Louis XI that isn’t about plots, treachery, and betrayal, and that’s where this one goes immediately. King Louis, investigating a conspiracy while incognito, gets embroiled in a situation that Villon accidentally gets him out of—by killing the Constable (i.e., head general) of France. So Louis, for wily and devious Reasons of State, appoints Villon the new Constable.

Hilarity ensues. And it’s time to talk about Ronald Colman’s performance, as Villon and as the impostor Constable of France. At the beginning of the film, Colman’s Villon is high-strung, voluble, and twitchy, as if suffering from delirium tremens, but as soon as he falls in love with Katherine he begins to be more upright and serene, and once Louis appoints him Constable he becomes suave and urbane—Rudolf Rassendyll, basically. It’s not really a very convincing transformation, but Colman is so charming and clearly having such fun it’s better to just go along and enjoy it. Sturges updated McCarthy’s old stage play by leaving its hoary clichés intact but giving it witty, self-aware dialogue that enables Colman to mock the source material and bring the audience in on the joke. He doesn’t quite break the fourth wall and actually wink at the viewer, but it’s awfully close.

Watch for one of the best castle dungeons in a genre full of them, Francis Dee’s amazing two-and-a-half-foot tall pointed wimple, and her cool sedan chair suspended between two horses, something I’d never seen before. But really, Rathbone’s performance is reason enough to watch this film, and if you’re a fan, it’s worth seeking it out just for that.

By Lawrence2014|2018-01-02T21:04:26-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off

Henry V

Henry V
Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: UK, 1944
Director: Laurence Olivier
Source: Criterion Collection DVD

Henry V

For George MacDonald Fraser, Richard Lester’s screenwriter for The Three and The Four Musketeers, and therefore our patron saint, the Olivier version of Shakespeare’s Henry V was the finest movie ever made. It’s a wonderful film, justly celebrated, and there are plenty of sources available explaining why it’s so admirable. For the purposes of this series, we’ll confine ourselves to just two aspects of this classic. First, the armor: ever since Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) had made a mockery of knights in shining armor, it had become the received wisdom that a medieval warrior in full plate was awkward, encumbered, and a lumbering clod once off his horse. Most mid-century Hollywood historical epics paid deference to this idea, showing warriors in heavy armor clanking around ponderously. But the knights and nobles of Henry V wear their plate armor lightly, as if it was tailored for them—as of course it was—seeming completely comfortable and at home while wrapped head to toe in metal, their movements unencumbered, even elegant. More recent scholarship and reconstructions inform us that was, in fact, the way of it: battle armor, though heavy, was made to move and fight in.

Second, there’s the play’s sprawling set piece in the next-to-last act, the recreation of the Battle of Agincourt. In 1944 the Luftwaffe was causing problems in England and even Wales, so the battle was filmed in Ireland, the rolling fields of County Wicklow standing in for the Pas de Calais. A decisive battle in the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, at Agincourt a much larger army of French knights and men-at-arms accosted King Henry’s badly-fatigued force of footmen and English and Welsh longbowmen. To summarize: the French knights charged the English across muddy plowed fields and were slaughtered by the archers. The men-at-arms then closed in from both sides and the battle became a general mêlée, but the English never lost the upper hand, and the French were trounced.

Olivier’s depiction of the battle’s opening scenes was a landmark for its time, unmatched in its clarity and power. The initial charge of the French heavy cavalry draws on Eisenstein’s charge of the Teutonic Knights in Alexander Nevsky, but goes it one better: a tracking camera follows the French vanguard from the side as the knights advance, going from a walk to a trot to a full gallop that seems unstoppable—until they hit the muddy fields and a wall of English and Welsh arrows. The battle then becomes episodic, reverting to Shakespeare’s structure of jumping back and forth to encounters between various combatants, English and French, whom we’d been introduced to earlier in the play. It all ends in a final clash between King Henry and the Constable of the French Army, with Henry, of course, victorious.

Watch for Robert Newton—Long John Silver himself—hamming it up as Ancient Pistol, an English hedge-knight who’s become the leader of Prince Hal’s old band of rogues since the death of John Falstaff. He is hilarious.

By Lawrence2014|2018-01-02T21:04:26-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off

Golden Voyage of Sinbad

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
Rating: ****
Origin: UK, 1973
Director: Gordon Hessler
Source: Viavision Blu-Ray

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

Golden Voyage is beloved by fantasy film fans for its fabulous creatures animated in stop-motion by Ray Harryhausen, but its hallmark monsters aside, this is one strange movie. The story is a sort of stately parade of wonders with a plot that makes sense only in the terms of dream logic. Sinbad (John Philip Law, bland but with a nice smile) happens upon one-third of a magical golden amulet, and thereafter is led by visions and visitations on a quest for … what? Some goal that, despite a superfluity of prophecies and portents, is never really clear. Wealth? Power? Experience points?

Maybe it’s the latter, because Sinbad and company are basically a Dungeons & Dragons adventure party, his crew reminiscent of the clichéd squad members in every war movie, only with Arabian Nights names like Haroun and Omar. They’re joined by Caroline Munro as Margiana because she’s the hottest thing in harem pants, and because she has an eye tattooed on her hand that Sinbad saw in a dream, so she must come along because Fate or something. The party is rounded out by a grand vizier who conceals his features behind a golden mask because they were destroyed by a fireball from the evil wizard Koura. This vizier joins the quest because somebody has to utter portentous warnings and explain What It All Means.

Which brings us to the aforementioned evil wizard Koura, and here’s where the movie gets interesting. This sorcerer, Sinbad’s arch-rival on the amulet quest, is played by Tom Baker—the Fourth Doctor!—who’s almost unrecognizable in a black turban and face kerchief. But he does more emoting with just his eyes than the rest of the cast put together. Koura is the wizard who magically animates all the creatures that bedevil Sinbad and company, but every time he casts a spell he visibly ages, marching toward death, and soon it becomes clear that he wants the magical amulet’s prize because it will restore his lost youth and stave off his suicide-by-sorcery. This makes Koura the only character in the picture with clear and comprehensible motives, and Baker plays him with such energy and verve that about halfway through the film I found myself starting to root for the villain.

Koura won me over in the scene where, with a mandrake root, alchemy, and a dollop of his own blood, he animates a tiny, winged homunculus, and suddenly we see that the putative villain is the real heart of this fantasy: passionate, he breathes life into inanimate matter, creating wonder before our eyes. Yes, you’ve got it: Koura is really Ray Harryhausen himself, literally pouring his life into his creations. This is even more clear when Koura animates a statue of the six-armed goddess Kali, making it dance for him purely so he can revel in his artistry—or rather Harryhausen’s artistry, for whether dancing or wielding six swords against Sinbad, the slyly smiling Kali is a masterpiece, so good it’s easy to forgive the stretches where the film falls flat.

The script is by Brian Clemens, the English screenwriter behind most of the best moments of the British Avengers TV show, but this outing is weak work, recycled adventure-film tropes and Orientalist clichés. The dialogue is studded with phony wise sayings like “You cannot pick up two melons with one hand,” in which you can hear the snotty British intellectual sneering at the Wisdom of the East. It’s embarrassing. Eventually the quest leads to the long-lost island of Lemuria, which is cluttered with ruins evoking every ancient Asian culture at once: India, Tibet, Cambodia, China, and so on. It’s meant to imply that the questers have discovered the source of all the cultures of the Mysterious East, but it feels more like the message is all those bally foreign temples look alike to me, eh, what what? It doesn’t help that the Lemurians, when they find them, are a tribe of green-skinned ooga-booga cannibals with skulls on sticks. Ouch.

But those animated monsters, though! So fabulous. Plus there’s some wonderfully lush music by Miklós Rósza, who contributed one of his last great film scores, and a couple of epic dungeon crawls that I guarantee helped inspire Gary Gygax. Despite its lapses and eccentricities, as fantasy films go, Golden Voyage is still almost indispensable.

By Lawrence2014|2018-02-11T17:32:54-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off

Golden Blade

The Golden Blade
Rating: **
Origin: USA, 1953
Director: Nathan Juran
Source: Universal DVD

The Golden Blade

Every year for a while Universal popped out another of these quickie Arabian fantasies, further amortizing the costumes and sets they’d built for Arabian Nights in 1942. It’s a tribute to Piper Laurie that she managed to star in three of these things in succession and still go on to have a distinguished career in film. By this time Tony Curtis had left Bagdad for Camelot, so Universal roped in rising star Rock Hudson to play the male lead, Harun. The story is rudimentary: Harun’s father, the Sultan of Basra, is slain by mysterious assailants whom Harun tracks to Bagdad. There, in the same used-clothing shop, he encounters Khairuzan (Laurie), the incognito daughter of the caliph who likes to go slumming among the commoners, and a magical golden blade, the Sword of the Prophecy of the Destiny of Fate or something, that only exhibits its powers when wielded by Harun. This is never really explained, like at all, but that’s par for the course in this sloppy farrago. For example, Harun’s quest to avenge his father is conveniently forgotten for most of the picture, as he gets drawn by Khairuzan into improbable shenanigans at the caliph’s court. There’s a dumb palace conspiracy involving an evil vizier inevitably named Jafar (the always-reliable George Macready, looking embarrassed), his dim-witted and brutal son, a scheming noblewoman, a Greek merchant, giggling half-clad harem girls, and an endless supply of disposable palace guards.

Sounds like a total loss, right? Not quite: the bad guys wear scorpion medallions (you heard me: scorpion medallions!), Piper Laurie has got the Adorable turned up to eleven, and there’s one amazing, essential scene where Harun, at a palace party, gets totally stoned smoking whatever’s in that tall, pink hookah while watching an “Oriental” dancer undulate in front of him. In his hallucinatory state the dancer transforms into Khairuzan, and he pursues her weaving through an endless hall hung with filmy, fluttering salmon-pink curtains. Far out! I had to watch it twice. Meanwhile his magic golden blade is being stolen and replaced by an imitation, in a plot engineered by Jafar so his doofus son can win a tournament that … nah, never mind, it’s just too dumb to recount.

At least Hudson’s smarmy grin is wiped off his face for a while, as, without his magic sword, he becomes a sad-sack loser who can’t do anything right. The golden blade gets stuck in a marble pillar, and nobody can pull it out, not nohow, except for guess who? (Tony Curtis may have run off to Camelot, but he left Excalibur behind in Bagdad.) When Harun finally draws the magic blade everything wraps up double quick in a spasm of bloodless mayhem, and Harun is reunited with Khairuzan, who was only pretending to hate him. She has a nice smile.

By Lawrence2014|2018-02-11T17:32:29-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off

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