Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords

The Court Jester
Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA, 1956
Directors: Norman Panama and Melvin Frank
Source: Paramount DVD

There were swashbuckler parodies before this film, and others followed later, but The Court Jester is the one and only crown jewel, the chalice from the palace, the brew that is true.

The film was produced, written, and directed by the team of Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, Hollywood journeymen who’d first made their mark with Hope and Crosby comedies in the forties. By the mid-fifties they’d been working together for years, and knew exactly what they were doing. Star Danny Kaye had made an impression with 1947’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but followed that with a series of mediocre comedies that he felt didn’t show off his real strengths. Panama and Frank agreed, and formed a production company with Kaye to create for him a vehicle worthy of his array of talents.

The big studios had been churning out loud and hokey knights-in-shining-armor movies since about 1950, most of them bloated groaners ripe for parody. Panama, Frank, and Kaye decided some medieval mockery was in order, especially of the many knight-in-training films, but then had the inspired idea of borrowing most of their tropes from an actual good movie, the beloved 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn. As icing on the cake they even hired Flynn’s antagonist, Basil Rathbone, to play their leading villain.

And then they wrote a script that is a work of goddamn genius, an action musical that never lets up except to pause for the next comic song, with stock characters all spouting perfect parodies of Hollywood medieval bombast, interspersed with tongue-twisting vaudeville fast-talk routines and punctuated by hilarious physical comedy, all driving an intricate plot that has seventeen moving parts that somehow all interweave and mesh perfectly.

And at the center of this controlled chaos, the focus and fulcrum of almost every scene, is Danny Kaye’s Giacomo the Jester, mugging, swaggering, cowering, singing, japing, pratfalling, and blustering in the performance of a lifetime, somehow simultaneously evoking Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (Whew!)

Moreover, as if Kaye and Rathbone aren’t enough, we also get the spirited and gorgeous (and slyly funny) Glynis Johns as Kaye’s romantic and comedic foil, a glowing Angela Lansbury as a spoiled and self-centered princess, and the under-rated Mildred Natwick nailing the whammy as the princess’s sorcerous servant. Plus there’s a Robin Hood-style masked outlaw, a secret passage, a baby in a basket, a troupe of midget acrobats, and a vessel with a pestle. If you haven’t seen it, you must. Get it? (Got it!) Good.

The Buccaneer
Rating: **
Origin: USA, 1958
Director: Anthony Quinn
Source: Olive Films DVD

This is Cecil B. DeMille’s 1958 widescreen Technicolor remake of his 1938 film about pirate Jean Lafitte and the Battle of New Orleans. It stars Yul Brynner (as Lafitte) and Charlton Heston (as Andrew Jackson), both of whom had been breakout stars for DeMille in The Ten Commandments two years before, and for that reason I expected to like it even more than the earlier version. And for a fact, Brynner and Heston do not disappoint. Brynner’s brooding screen presence is even more imposing than that of predecessor Fredric March, though he lacks the glimpses of touching vulnerability that March gave the character: Brynner is bulletproof. And Heston’s towering charisma eclipses even Brynner’s formidable magnetism. To take advantage of it, Jackson here gets triple the screen time he got in the ’38 version, and it was a wise move.

It comes at a cost, however: the expansion of Jackson’s role is at the expense of Lafitte’s, meaning we get a lot less piratical scoundrelry and Gallic swagger, and a lot more self-congratulatory American myth-making. And unfortunately, the story’s told with an old-school staginess that’s even hokier than it was twenty years earlier. DeMille was ailing—this was his final picture—so his son-in-law, Anthony Quinn, is the nominal director, but this film has ol’ Cecil’s showy fingerprints on every frame. The entire production is bloated with self-importance, and the Technicolor is so damn bright it often looks cartoonish.

The script is substantially rewritten from the original, and the dialogue somehow got even more clichéd and wooden in the process, so stiff that it’s more than most of the supporting cast can comfortably handle. Inger Stevens as Lafitte’s love interest, the governor’s daughter (historical interruption: LaFitte actually romanced the governor’s wife), is a blonde mannequin, and the aging Charles Boyer as Napoleonic cannoneer Dominique You can’t compete with the energetic performance of his predecessor, Akim Tamiroff. E.G. Marshall and Lorne Greene are similarly wasted. The only actors who can mouth these awful lines with conviction are Brynner, Heston, and Clare Bloom in an early standout role, who shines as a hard-bitten pirate wench.

The piratical antics of the original are sadly diminished, because this time around the emphasis is on building up to the set piece of the Battle of New Orleans, expanded from ten minutes in the ’38 version to a full half hour here. This does not improve it: all the extra fussing about supply shortages and scouting the British lines just drains the urgency out of the fray, and by the time of the battle’s inevitable end in windrows of fallen redcoats, we’re glad it’s over. At least this version retains LaFitte’s post-battle humiliation, repudiation, and escape to the freedom of the high seas, an ending that comes across as a strange refutation of all the nationalistic breast-beating that precedes it. All in all, The Buccaneer is an interesting failure almost redeemed by the sheer star power of its two leads.

The Adventures of Long John Silver (Sole Season)
Rating: *
Origin: USA / Australia, 1956
Director: Lee Sholem, Byron Haskin
Source: Echo Bridge DVD

After the completion of 1954’s Long John Silver feature, though the film had a lukewarm reception at the box office, director Byron Haskin formed Treasure Island Productions and the cast and crew stayed in Australia to film twenty-six half-hour episodes of this TV show. Unusually, it was filmed in color, though color broadcasting was still a rare thing in the 1950s. By the time the series debuted in the U.S.A. in 1956, its star, Robert Newton, had died at the age of fifty from alcoholism, after returning to Hollywood for his final role in Around the World in 80 Days.

Newton’s undeniable charisma notwithstanding, the show just isn’t very good. It’s unable to settle on a tone, veering from serious pirate drama one week to broad situation comedy the next, as Purity Pinker, the proprietress of the Cask and Anchor, tries to dry-dock Long John into matrimony. Half the time Silver is the rapacious scoundrel he is in the films, and half the time he’s semi-reformed and just sort of a con man, no worse or more ill-intentioned than Sgt. Bilko. Color film or no, the production values are low, the acting is weak, the dialogue is worse, and not even having a pint-size pirate with a hook in Silver’s crew is enough to save it. These be shoal waters, mates—steer clear.