Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords

The Hidden Fortress
Rating: *****
Origin: Japan, 1958
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Source: Amazon streaming video

The sound bite on The Hidden Fortress is that it’s the Kurosawa film that inspired Star Wars, but if you go into it expecting to see some kind of samurai cognate to the Skywalker saga, you’re going to be disappointed, and worse, you may overlook the very real pleasures this film has to offer. Yes, Hidden Fortress did inspire some aspects of George Lucas’s approach to Star Wars, but just put that aside and let this movie win you over on its own terms.

This is the director working firmly within the tropes of the “Chambara,” or historical swordplay film, but he can’t resist subverting those tropes even as he displays his mastery of them. Kurosawa does this from the very beginning: a bombastic march plays over the opening credits, dissolving onto a shot of a country road. But instead of a masterless samurai striding into a new adventure, staggering down the road are a couple of losers, two would-be warriors fleeing the aftermath of a battle. These peasants, Matashichi (Kamatari Fujiwara) and Tahei (Minoru Chiaki), are clown characters, greedy but feckless cowards who bicker constantly. But this pair provides the picture’s point of view, and we watch the actions of the samurai-class characters, heroic and not-so-heroic, through the eyes of these ordinary folk.

The two losers, lamenting their fate, are on the run after the Akizuki clan was defeated and nearly destroyed by the Yamana. Though they’d intended to fight for the Yamana, the pair are soon swept up with the fugitive Akizuki and pressed into forced-labor gangs digging through the ruins of the losing clan’s castle, seeking its hoard of gold. The Yamana samurai treat the workers like animals, and they rise up (with no help from Matashichi and Tahei) in a brilliantly-depicted night revolt in the ruins. (This is Kurosawa’s first widescreen film, and he uses the format’s scope and depth-of-field to great effect.) The clowns take the opportunity to escape, and soon revert to the status of fugitives starving in the countryside. They try to return to their province of Hayakawa, but the Yamana are guarding the border, and they are foiled. Desperate, they make their way into the mountains, and make a campfire to cook some stolen rice. But in the firewood, hidden in a thick branch, they unexpectedly discover a slim gold bar stamped with the Akizuki crest. Have they discovered a clue to the lost Akizuki hoard?

Indeed they have, and more than that, they discover its guardian, the Akizuki general Rokurota Makabe (Toshiro Mifune), and the clan’s sole surviving leader, Princess Yuki (Misa Uehara), who’ve temporarily taken refuge in a mountaintop “hidden fortress.” Rokurota presses the clowns into service by exploiting their greed for the gold, but the Yamana are closing in, so the four, with the two samurai disguised as commoners, set out to try to get across the border to Hayakawa.

Now we are firmly in Chambara adventure territory, and Kurosawa alternates scenes of exciting samurai action with poignant interludes among the peasantry, where the disguised princess, who’s been raised in a castle, learns what life is like outside the samurai’s rigid duty-bound society. These scenes are wonderful, moving and sharply-drawn, plus we’re treated to the greatest samurai spear fight ever filmed, as Rokurota duels and defeats Hyoe Tadakoro (Susumu Fujita), a Yamana champion. Tension grows as the Yamana hunt the fugitives, and the movie picks up pace as it rushes toward its climax, which I won’t reveal, but it’s both exciting and satisfying. The film ends as it started, with the two peasants walking away from the deadly honor-driven world of Japan’s warrior class, headed home to their village at last.

Hercules
Rating: ***
Origin: Italy, 1958
Director: Pietro Francisci
Source: GAIAM DVD

In the 1950s Hollywood was churning out big-budget biblical epics, widescreen extravaganzas that did quite well when exported to Europe. Italian producer Federico Teti wondered why these sword-and-sandal flicks should all be made in California when he could shoot them in actual Rome, so he hired director Pietro Francisci and American bodybuilder Steve Reeves to make Hercules.

And thus the Italian genre of “Peplum” movies (named after the brief tunics worn by the ancients) was born. It would dominate Italian film production until the mid-sixties, when the industry switched overnight to making so-called “Spaghetti Westerns.” Peplum films quickly fell into a formula, mostly cheesy low-budget wrestle-fests in which shirtless muscle men in ancient Rome, Greece, or Babylonia battle the minions of bosomy tyrannical queens wearing gauzy gowns, backed up by dungeons full of torturers and arenas full of beasts. Though Hercules established the pattern for these films, it didn’t set out to be cheesy; it aspired to compete with the Hollywood epics, had a substantial budget, a good cast, and decent production values. Its cheesiness was just an incidental result of the decision to lose the inward-looking finding-faith aspect of the biblical flicks and replace it with sheer, gaudy spectacle. And it worked: the film was a big hit on both sides of the pond, begetting the dozens of ever-cheesier imitations that immediately followed.

It helps that Steve Reeves can genuinely act, sort of. (He’s also handsome and big—really, really big. If any actor ever looked like he was born to play a demigod, it’s Steve Reeves.) And he’s surrounded by a cast of top-notch Italian actors overseen by a competent director. The story is a loose interpretation of the familiar tale of Jason and the Argonauts questing for the Golden Fleece, with a couple of the twelve labors of Hercules tacked on in front to get things moving. In this version Hercules gets to be the protagonist, and Jason, though heroic, is demoted to second fiddle. Herc also gets most of the romance when Princess Iole (Sylva Koscina, drop-dead gorgeous) of Iolcus falls for him, though her father is inconveniently the king who stole the throne from Jason’s father.

This Hercules is a straight-up demigod with superhuman strength, but though there’s a lot of talk about the gods none of the divines show their faces, and things stay pretty down-to-earth: when Herc fights a lion, or the Cretan bull, he’s pitted against an actual beast, and you can see Reeves working hard to defeat it. Occasionally there are minor magical shenanigans, which are always announced by a theremin sting that sounds like it came from Forbidden Planet. Hercules has come to the kingdom of Iolcus supposedly just to train their youths (Ulysses, Castor and Pollux, et al.) in the martial arts, but soon gets involved in dynastic politics and comes out in favor of Jason as the true heir. King Pelias decrees that Jason can prove he’s the heir only by recovering the Golden Fleece, and soon all the heroes are off to sea in the Argo, represented by a lovely full-sized sailing galley. Treachery, of course, sails with them.

After they lose all their cargo in a sudden storm, the Argo puts in to an island to re-provision, and everybody gets captured by the Amazons, a tribe of warrior women. Queen Antea tells Jason the Amazons suffer no men to live on their island, because they know all about male brutality and their unchecked desires, but Jason just tells her, “Not all men are alike!” He follows this with, “A woman is incomplete without a man,” and I guess that’s persuasive because soon all the Argonauts have Amazon girlfriends. But clever Ulysses learns that their sibyls have decreed that on a certain dawn all the men must be murdered, so he puts poppy seeds in the Amazons’ wine, and the men escape with a ship full of loot while the women are sleeping it off. Good thing not all men are alike!

From there it’s a short hop to Colchis, where they find the Golden Fleece, Jason defeats the one fantasy creature in the film, a really disappointing dino-dragon that looks like it’s made of chicken wire, dowels, and old carpeting, and then it’s back to Iolcus to install Jason on the throne. But the king’s traitor steals the fleece, Jason is declared an imposter, Hercules is dropped through a trap door into a dungeon, and Pelias orders his soldiers to attack the Argonauts. (This film, by the way, establishes the Peplum visual shorthand where the good guys who are fighting for justice and freedom are always shirtless, while the goons of the evil tyrant wear armor and helmets.) Things look bad until, with Princess Iole’s help, Hercules escapes and tears into the king’s helmeted goons, swinging a fifteen-foot iron chain from each hand. The final fight, an impressive finale, includes some thrilling feats of strength from the demigod: it wowed ‘em in 1958, and still looks pretty good sixty years later. Sneer at the Peplum genre if you must, but this film, which started the craze, is worth a look even today.

The Adventures of Robin Hood: Season One
Rating: ****
Origin: UK, 1955
Director: Ralph Smart, et al.
Source: Mill Creek DVD

This series, which premiered in 1955 in both the USA and UK, heralded a brief vogue for swashbuckling TV shows, most of them produced in Britain—but of them this is the only one that mattered, because it was smart and dependably entertaining, found a devoted audience, ran for four seasons in the fifties, and then for decades in syndication. (Its only significant rival was Disney’s Zorro.) Though shot in the UK with a British cast and crew, its producers were Americans whose politics leaned left, and most of its scripters were American screenwriters such as Howard Koch and Waldo Salt who’d been blacklisted in the U.S. They gave the stories an anti-authoritarian edge that accorded well with Robin Hood’s outlaw legend.

Much of the series’ success rested on the matinee-idol charisma of star Richard Greene, who invested the role of Robin with a charm and wry wit unmatched since Errol Flynn. With a foil in the equally charming Bernadette O’Farrell as Lady Marian Fitzwalter, and a determined and intelligent adversary in Alan Wheatley as the Sheriff of Nottingham, each episode’s brief (25 minute) morality play delivered solid entertainment week after week, for 143 episodes over the life of the series.

The first season (39 episodes) established the situation: Saxon noble Robin of Locksley, loyal to King Richard, returns to England during the corrupt reign of Prince John, and is outlawed. In resistance, Robin leads a band of Merrie Men from Sherwood Forest, fighting oppression with the aid of romantic interest Lady Marian and advisor Friar Tuck, both of whom are somewhat protected by their positions in society. This becomes the standard pop culture version of Robin Hood for a good twenty years, until the first of the revisionist Robin Hoods, Robin and Marian, in 1975.

The opening episodes that set the stage are among the best. In “The Coming of Robin Hood,” written by Ring Lardner, Jr., Locksley, “back from the Holy Wars,” finds that a Norman, Roger de Lille (a young Leo McKern) has usurped his domain; when Robin tries to reclaim them, an attempt to assassinate him kills de Lille instead, but Robin gets the blame and is outlawed. In “The Moneylender,” Robin joins a band of outlaws in Sherwood, converts them to robbing from the rich to give to the poor, and inherits their leadership when their chief, Will Scathlock, dies in an ambush that Robin had warned them was likely. “Dead or Alive” introduces Little John (Archie Duncan), with the traditional quarterstaff fight on the log bridge, while “Friar Tuck,” of course, brings that mettlesome priest (well played by Alexander Gauge) into the band—and thereafter the outlaws have two schemers in their number. Finally, episode five, “Maid Marian,” introduces Robin’s lady-love in her first full appearance, already adopting male guise and outshooting most of the outlaws.

Unlike most British shows of the period, Robin Hood wasn’t shot all on soundstages, with some exteriors set in the English greenwood in nearly every episode. The scripts are mostly sharp, with an edge lacking in most conformist 1950s teleplays, though most of the overtly comic episodes haven’t aged very well. The swordplay choreography is largely quite good, and archery is often central to the plot, which is gratifying—with the outlaws actually stopping to string their bows before going into action! And for a fifties TV show Lady Marian is quite assertive, capable with a bow, and shown to keep a French maître d’armes who trains her in handling a sword. Later episodes well worth your time include number 18, “The Jongleur;” 22, “The Sheriff’s Boots;” 36, “The Thorkil Ghost;” and what is essentially the season closer, episode 38, “Richard the Lion-Heart.” Note that DVD collections tend to jumble the episode order, which actually matters with this show, considering the way characters are introduced and developed; look online for a reference so you’re sure to watch them in proper succession

Long John Silver
aka Long John Silver’s Return to Treasure Island
Rating: ***
Origin: USA/Australia, 1954
Director: Byron Haskin
Source: American Home Treasures DVD

Sure, it’s cheap, and it’s cheesy, but this film’s just chock-full of pirate-y goodness, and pirate-movie fans owe it to themselves to dig up a copy.

How did this thing even happen? Well, back in 1950, Disney made a new version of Treasure Island, which Walt thought was pretty clever because it was a beloved property that was in the public domain, so he didn’t have to pay for it. Jump forward three years and Byron Haskin, who’d directed Island for Disney, realizes that because the source was public domain, Disney can’t stop him from shooting a sequel. (This is a lesson Disney never forgot.) Haskin contacts Robert Newton, who’d made such an impression as Silver in the Disney Version; Newton, who hadn’t handled Hollywood success very well, had fled back to England to escape his debts, so he’s happy to do it. Haskin proposes shooting in inexpensive Australia, where he’d made His Majesty O’Keefe the year before, Newton agrees, and Bob’s-your-uncle.

The winning formula for this production is to recycle elements from Treasure Island, but add more pirates and lots more Long John Silver (Newton, in high form, is in almost every scene). The first third of the movie is set in and around Porto Bello, which is inexplicably under British rule. (They sacked it four times, but never governed it.) Silver hangs out there in a low dive with a crew of sea dogs, and it’s immediately established that, though glib and plausible, he’s just as big a scoundrel as ever. (Huzzah!) All he needs is an opportunity, and it comes when another pirate crew, led by a Captain Mendoza, kidnaps the Governor’s daughter. (It is a genre rule that if the Governor has a daughter, pirates will kidnap her.)

Silver knows Mendoza, and persuades the Governor to let him handle the ransom transfer. He then performs a double double-cross, retrieving both daughter and ransom money, meanwhile pillaging the Governor’s warehouse and blaming it on Mendoza. Not-so-incidentally, he also liberates young Jim Hawkins (Treasure Island’s protagonist, played adequately by Kit Taylor), who should have been enjoying his newfound wealth back in England, but for some unexplained reason was serving as Mendoza’s enslaved cabin boy.

McGuffin time! Jim, who’s still “smart as paint” (requotes from Island are common), has a medallion that holds the key to the location of a second hoard hidden on Treasure Island. The movie veers briefly into farce as Silver tries to trick Jim into giving him the medallion, while avoiding being maneuvered into wedlock by the proprietess of the low dive, but soon Jim, Silver, Mendoza, and two scurvy pirate crews are off across the Caribbean to plunder Cap’n Flint’s second treasure. The last half of the film shamelessly pillages and recombines elements of Treasure Island, unburdened by any tiresome good guys this time except for Jim. It’s a real scoundrel-fest, sudden reversals are the order of the day, and “those who died are the lucky ones.” I won’t reveal how it ends except to say the finale hinges on two words: doubloon grenades!

One caveat: it seems there’s no good restored version of this film available digitally: all the prints floating around are pan-and-scan, and most of them are in terrible shape. Ye be warned!