Black Gate

The Viking Queen (UK, 1967)

Though by 1967 the Hammer Films brand was thoroughly associated with Dracula and similar horrors, the studio stubbornly continued to turn out films in other genres, including historical swashbucklers. Our first film, The Viking Queen, definitely has that sensational Hammer touch, but A Challenge for Robin Hood could almost be a Disney film, which shows late-Sixties Hammer productions could still have a considerable tonal range.

Admittedly, our third movie, Alfred the Great, isn’t from Hammer Films, but hey, it’s British and from the same period, and it’s worth a look, so give me a break, okay?

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The Three Musketeers miniseries (UK, 1966)

At last! Because you demanded it. (I’m pretty sure that happened,) Finally, the subject everyone wants an article about, French Swashbuckler Tales Adapted for British Television! I know, right?

In the Sixties, one of the BBC’s stocks in trade was popular literature adapted into mini-series of six to sixteen half-hour episodes, usually shown on Sunday afternoons. In this context, Alexandre Dumas worked well for them: they’d had such success with The Count of Monte Cristo that they went back to the Dumas well twice more with his musketeers, and then picked up and dubbed a French serial called Le Chevalier Tempête set in the same period. En garde, old boy!

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Atomic Submarine, The (1959: 7+)

Lots of stock footage, as usual for this era, but also decent miniature work and excellent alien design. It seems that this alien hanging around the North Pole in a magnetic-powered UFO is a scout looking for worlds to colonize, and the Earth really fits the bill. The submarine pursues him as he preys on shipping. It takes awhile to really get going, so stick with it, but the atomic sub finally gets their alien.

Though a number of name actors appear in this film, the acting is rather wooden. Arthur Franz, a second-string leading man, leads the way in a cast that includes a tired-looking Dick Foran, the old cowboy movie star Bob Steele, and Tom Conway (see below for another Conway appearance) as a Nobel Prize winning oceanographer, though I’m pretty sure they actually don’t give Nobel Prizes for oceanography. The only one who lights up the screen is the beautiful but ill-fated Joi Lansing in a brief appearance. She and the alien are the film’s highlights.

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Sword of the Beast (Japan, 1965)

As outlined in Part One, in the Fifties postwar Japan’s film industry gradually returned to making chambara movies that glorified the samurai warrior code of bushido, but in the counter-cultural Sixties some filmmakers took an opposite tack, blaming bushido for supporting a culture of rigid oppression and cruelty. Some remarkable films came out of this movement, pictures of high art that depict the samurai’s wonderfully skilled swordplay while skewering the society that relied on the sword as a tool of domination. Let’s look at three films that exemplify this movement from three brilliant directors: Hideo Gosha, Kihachi Okamoto, and Masaki Kobayashi.

Sword of the Beast (or Samurai Gold Seekers)

Rating: ****
Origin: Japan, 1965
Director: Hideo Gosha
Source: Criterion DVD

Co-writer and director Hideo Gosha’s follow-up to Three Outlaw Samurai takes an even less forgiving view of society than its predecessor: individuals may be good, bad, or both, but hierarchical authority cares only for power and does only ill.

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The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (USA, 1963)

1963: Lerner and Loewe’s Broadway musical Camelot finally closed after almost 900 performances, Disney’s The Sword and the Stone was preparing for release at the end of the year, and President John F. Kennedy’s administration was being compared to King Arthur’s. This didn’t go unnoticed in Arthur’s Great Britain, and the British movie industry obliged with two Camelot movies, one of them quite ambitious, that have now been largely forgotten. Indeed, Olde England was still the favorite screen setting for historical adventure, as Walt Disney, looking for a follow-up to Zorro, was well aware. And so Disney’s last great swashbuckler, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, was shot on location on England’s south coast, one classic that hasn’t been forgotten.

Sword of Lancelot (or Lancelot and Guinevere)

Rating: ****
Origin: UK, 1963
Director: Cornel Wilde
Source: Alpha Video DVD

This is a worthy attempt to film the tragedy of the doomed love triangle of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot, and if it falls short of greatness, it isn’t because writer, director, and star Cornel Wilde didn’t give it his all, it’s just that he wasn’t David Lean or Sergei Eisenstein.

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