Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords

Home/Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords

Court Jester

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.

 

 

By |2018-02-11T18:28:17-05:00February 11, 2018|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Court Jester

Buccaneer (1958)

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.

 

 

By |2018-02-11T18:28:17-05:00February 11, 2018|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Buccaneer (1958)

Adventures of Quentin Durward (aka Quentin Durward)

The Adventures of Quentin Durward (aka Quentin Durward)
Rating: ***
Origin: USA / UK, 1955
Director: Richard Thorpe
Source: Warner Archive DVD

 

After Robert Taylor’s smash hit as a knight in Ivanhoe, and a follow-up in Knights of the Round Table, MGM dug up another Walter Scott potboiler in Quentin Durward to try for three. The result is mixed at best: the novel doesn’t adapt well to the Hollywood treatment, being slow to start and taking too long to explain the politics of 15th-century France; the romance is obvious and perfunctory, with the talented comedienne Kay Kendall miscast as an over-serious countess who never gets a funny line; the villain is a cartoon caricature, the depiction of the funny Gypsy sidekick is an ethnic abomination, the costumes, gear, and settings are rife with anachronism, and the dialogue is one sad cliché after another. But there are two important reasons to watch it anyway, especially the scene where … but wait. We’ll get to it.

Scottish knight Quentin Durward (Taylor) is summoned by his elderly uncle, who’s contemplating matrimony, and after a few unfunny Scots-are-stingy jokes Durward is sent to France to inspect the prospective bride, Countess Isabelle (Kendall)—and her dowry. She’s a ward of Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, who’s marrying her off against her will to Durward’s uncle for a Scottish alliance. There follows an hour of court politics with brief interludes in which Durward displays his manly courage. The knight is represented as a romantic but obsolete relic of chivalry, and in fact throughout the film all his plans rely solely on reckless bravery. How can Isabelle fail to fall for him?

Durward follows Isabelle from the court of Duke Charles to that of his rival and nominal monarch of France, King Louis XI. And finally we get to a place where the movie is worth watching, because the wily and shameless King Louis is played to perfection by Robert Morley, at the height of his wry, eyebrow-waggling powers. He’s just so good. Naturally the king co-opts the honest and simple Durward and employs him as a tool in a rather unlikely scheme, a plot that will result in Isabelle being forcibly married to La Marck, “the Beast of the Ardennes,” that cartoon villain mentioned earlier—after Durward’s inevitable heroic death exculpates Louis, who assigns him as her bodyguard.

Away from courts and kings, the last third of the movie kicks into gear at last, as La Marck’s black-clad goons come out of hiding to menace our knight and his countess. Taylor gets to do some very credible swashbuckling in a running fight at a country inn, and then successfully gets the countess to the forest-girt castle of her uncle the archbishop, where she will presumably be safe. But La Marck uses Louis’s gold to buy cannon, the walls are breached, and the foxes are in the henhouse. Which brings us to the other compelling reason to watch this flick, the absolutely crazy final duel between Durward and La Marck, both of them desperately swinging back and forth on bell-ropes high in the top of a burning cathedral belfry as the bells toll out above them. It’s glorious madness, and not to be missed.

 

By |2018-02-11T18:28:17-05:00February 11, 2018|Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Adventures of Quentin Durward (aka Quentin Durward)

Adventures of Long John Silver (Sole Season)

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.

 

By |2018-02-11T18:28:17-05:00February 11, 2018|Cinema of Swords, Ellsworth's Cinema of Swords|Comments Off on Adventures of Long John Silver (Sole Season)
Go to Top