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Cyrano de Bergerac (1925)

Cyrano de Bergerac
Rating: ***
Origin: France, 1925
Director: Augusto Genina
Source: Image Entertainment DVD

Cyrano de Bergerac

Augusto Genina’s Cyrano de Bergerac, based on Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, was actually shot in 1922, but it took three years to hand-color every frame of the movie using a painstaking process called “Stencil Color.” Dubbing prints of the result proved to be very expensive, so few copies were made, and it’s a wonder the film has survived. For all that effort to give the film color, the results are strange—unconvincing, garish, and unevenly applied.

But is the movie any good? Adapting a beloved play known for its language to a silent medium was a major challenge, and you have to give Genina credit for trying. For one thing, he uses a lot of close-ups, relying on his actors’ very expressive features to convey the story. For another, he just plain slaps more words up on the screen than is typical of most silents, sometime three cue cards’ worth in immediate succession. And during Cyrano’s big duel in the theater, in place of cue cards, the words are printed right over the images as surtitles, so the action doesn’t have to cut away. Unfortunately, this is more jarring than effective. And all these expedients don’t quite add up to success—the play is still a talk-fest, and watching a silent talk-fest is a strain.

That said, shooting the film in the actual older streets of Paris gives it a richness of setting no Hollywood backlot could match, and the costumes are uniformly excellent. Pierre Magnier, who plays Cyrano, is inspired, and the film overflows with character actors who mug up a storm. The swordplay, alas, is mediocre stage-combat, but the classic story is as good as ever, the soldiers’ camp at the Siege of Arras is convincingly depicted, and Linda Moglie is one of the best Roxanes I’ve ever seen, radiating intelligence, spirit, and wit, as that character should. Unfortunately, the lugubrious last act is way too long, and the ending is sentimental sludge. All in all, a thoroughly mixed bag.

By Lawrence2014|2018-01-02T22:24:09-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off

Crusades

The Crusades
Rating: **
Origin: USA
Director: Cecil B. DeMille
Source: Universal DVD

The Crusades

If you know only two names associated with the Crusades, they’ll be King Richard of England, known as the Lion-Heart, and Saladin of the Saracens, who in 1187 completed an Islamic conquest of the Holy Land. So when Cecil B. DeMille, who made big, crowd-pleasing films, set out to make his movie about the Crusades, he knew it had to be about those two characters. To his credit, he hired the great historical fiction author Harold Lamb as writer and researcher—but DeMille, who always played fast and loose with historical fact, used only the parts that suited the telling of his melodramatic story.

After Jerusalem falls to the Muslims, the Holy Hermit (played by C. Aubrey Smith and his whiskers) rouses the kings of Christendom to join in a Third Crusade to liberate the city. All the monarchs of Christian Europe, including Philip of France, sign up for the picnic. Philip’s sister, Princess Alice, is promised by treaty to marry King Richard, who is played by DeMille’s go-to leading man, Henry Wilcoxon, as a brave but thought-free manly lout who cares little for politics, women, or religion, but loves a good fight. In order to avoid wedding the surly Alice, Richard joins in with the Crusade and marches his army across France. But by the time he reaches the Mediterranean coast his men are starving, and he ends up marrying regardless to get his troops enough food and fodder to get them to Palestine. His new wife is Berengaria (Loretta Young), daughter of the King of Navarre, and gentle and well-meaning soul ill-matched to King Dudebro. Richard humiliates her, but she puts up with everything he does—“for the Crusade.”

This was a tremendously expensive film to make, and you can see every dollar on the screen: it looks great. Lamb did his research well, and this is the finest depiction of the pageantry and slaughter of the Crusades the first half of the twentieth century could offer. The battle scenes are spectacular and convincingly horrific. Unfortunately, what they’re surrounded with is sheer tripe, a lot of tiresome religious chest-beating, along with a ridiculous romantic soap opera that contrives a love triangle between Richard, Berengaria, and … Saladin. (Yes!) Surprisingly, Ian Keith’s portrayal of Saladin is the picture’s best performance, restrained yet powerful. But can it outweigh the wretched Alan Hale, Sr., as Richard’s “funny” minstrel, Blondel? Perhaps not.

By Lawrence2014|2018-02-11T17:31:01-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off

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 Lawrence2014|2018-02-11T17:30:34-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off

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 Lawrence2014|2018-02-11T17:29:36-05:00December 16, 2017|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off

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