Black Gate

Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie in The Prince Who Was a Thief (1951)

In the early Fifties, Tony Curtis was still honing his skills as an actor, but he was good-looking, athletic, and gosh, people liked him, so Universal decided to make him a star. Fortunately for us, for his first two swashbucklers Universal paired him with Piper Laurie, who was even more good-looking, athletic, and likeable than Curtis. And knowing that by the late Fifties Curtis would become a pretty decent actor, it’s interesting to watch him develop over his first few features.

The Prince Who was a Thief

Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1951
Director: Rudolph Maté
Source: ATI Entertainment DVD

This is the first of many sword-swinging starring roles for Tony Curtis, whom you really can’t avoid if you’re watching historical adventures made in the Fifties. Everybody mocks Curtis, and it’s somewhat deserved, since he didn’t have the smarts of a Burt Lancaster or even a Louis Hayward, but he wasn’t terrible so much as mediocre. Somebody was persuaded that he was movie star material, but it took Hollywood about ten years to figure out that he was best employed as a reliable second banana. Fortunately, he’s offset in this film by engaging performances from Everett Sloane and Piper Laurie, who even this early in her career knew exactly what she was doing.

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Laurence Olivier is justly renowned, even revered, as one of the finest actors of the 20th century, and was arguably the greatest English thespian of his generation — which is saying something, since his generation included John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Acclaimed as a stage actor, he also appeared in over fifty movies, and happily for us three of them fit under the umbrella of the Cinema of Swords.

Fire Over England

Rating: ****
Origin: UK, 1937
Director: William K. Howard
Source: Nobility Studios DVD

This film was adapted from the 1936 novel of the same name by A.E.W. Mason, the English historical fiction author best known for The Four Feathers (1902). Producer Alexander Korda was looking for a suitably inspiring and cautionary tale that would evoke the rising threat of Hitler’s Germany, and he found it in this story of England’s resistance to Spain’s warmongering King Philip and his invading Armada. Korda was also looking for a vehicle with a romantic subplot to show off his drop-dead gorgeous new stars, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who were already lovers off-screen. However, as undeniably attractive as Olivier and Leigh were, this picture really belongs to the actors in the roles of the opposing monarchs: Raymond Massey as King Philip II, and the unforgettable Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth I.

It’s 1588, mighty Spain threatens tiny England, and at the English Court, Spanish spies are everywhere and their assassination plots threaten the life of the queen. In her audience hall, Elizabeth receives the Spanish Ambassador, come to complain of the raid on Cadiz by Francis Drake, where he burned a Spanish fleet. Robson’s Elizabeth immediately establishes herself as a commanding presence, adroitly alternating between defiance and conciliation; she refuses to reign in Drake and the sea rovers, but gives Spain leave to punish them… “If they can.”

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Hang on to your hauberks! This week we’re taking a gander at veteran director Richard Thorpe’s quasi-trilogy about knights in shining armor, three films all starring Robert Taylor that set the look and feel of screen stories about medieval knights for more than a decade.

Ivanhoe

Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1952
Director: Richard Thorpe
Source: Amazon streaming video

In 1814 the poet Walter Scott began publishing his popular Waverly novels of recent Scottish history, and then switched, with Ivanhoe in 1820, to the medieval era and the history of England, in the process co-inventing (along with Jane Porter) the modern genre of the historical adventure novel. Ivanhoe was a landmark in other ways as well, for its sympathetic treatment of Jews in Western societies, for establishing the character and tone of our modern version of Robin Hood, and for promoting the medieval background as a setting for adventure tales, still as popular today in the 21^st century as Scott made them in the 19^th. (That’s right: no Ivanhoe, no Game of Thrones.)

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The Man in the Iron Mask (1939)

Independent Hollywood producer Edward Small had his biggest hit in 1934 with a version of The Count of Monte Cristo and was determined to follow it up with more swashbucklers. But he needed a leading man, and after several years’ delay finally found him in Louis Hayward, an actor trained on the British stage who’d come to America in the early Thirties, where he mainly played romantic leads in light comedies and the occasional prestige drama. Hayward was charming, well-spoken, looked good in period costume, and had a deft hand with sword, so Small signed him to a three-film contract. Small’s new star ending up making half a dozen swashbucklers for him and several more for other producers. Some of these are forgettable, but most of them are pretty good or better and are nowadays unfairly overlooked. Let’s start with the earliest and most successful.

The Man in the Iron Mask

Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1939
Director: James Whale
Source: Hen’s Tooth Video DVD

This is the first sound version of Iron Mask and stars Louis Hayward in the dual role of King Louis XIV/Prince Philippe. Hayward was a leading man who appeared in a variety of parts, heroic and romantic, from the late 1930s to the early ‘50s, but if he’s remembered today, it’s as the star of eight or nine small to medium-budget swashbucklers made mainly for independent producer Edward Small (of which this is the first). The genial Hayward didn’t have the compelling screen presence of Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power, but he was likeable and determined, with enough handsome charm to carry off the romances.

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The Three Musketeers (1948)

When you say “French swashbuckler,” two names leap instantly to mind: d’Artagnan and Cyrano. Both were actual historical figures, but it’s through their fictional incarnations that they’re known around the world. Both d’Artagnan and Cyrano de Bergerac have been fictionalized repeatedly dating back to the 17^th century — zut alors, Cyrano even fictionalized himself! — but they’re overwhelmingly best known from two sources, d’Artagnan from Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and it sequels, and Cyrano de Bergerac from Edmond Rostand’s play of the same name. There have been several memorable screen versions of Rostand’s Cyrano, but none more so than the version reviewed below. The Three Musketeers, of course, is one of the greatest adventure novels ever written, and has been filmed for movies and TV dozens of times, with varying degrees of quality and fidelity to the source material. This week we’re looking at one of the best, and throwing in an oft-overlooked sequel as a bonus.

The Three Musketeers

Rating: *****
Origin: USA, 1948
Director: George Sidney
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

There were a lot of movie and TV adaptations of The Three Musketeers in the 20^th century, but three of them tower above all the others: the Fairbanks film from 1921, Richard Lester’s 1973 version, and, falling almost exactly in between them, MGM’s star-studded entry from 1948.

This is an interesting adaptation: it starts out as a typical Hollywood vehicle for star Gene Kelly, bright, colorful, charming, and light-hearted, a musical without songs, as d’Artagnan (Kelly) finds camaraderie with the musketeers and romance with Constance (June Allyson). But the top-billed actor at the time was actually Lana Turner, then at the height of her fame, and based on her roles as a femme fatale in films noir, she was cast as the wicked Milady de Winter. Now Milady appears mostly in the second half of Dumas’s novel, so to give Turner enough screen time, the movie races through the Affair of the Diamond Studs in its first hour, enabling it to spend its second hour on the schemes of Milady.

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I have a new obsession. I seem to be switching obsessions a lot, but the truth is I’m not switching anything at all. I’m simply adding. This time around, I’m absolutely infatuated with a show on Netflix that I’m a little mad took me so long to check out. That show is The Untamed, a 2017 live-action adaptation of the Chinese fantasy novel Mo Dao Zu Shi (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation is the English title) by author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. The novel is not yet officially translated into English, but I’m desperate for it to be. I want this thing on my shelf. Like, yesterday. Granted, since it’s a web novel, it’s not likely to be on anyone’s actual shelf, but lordy do I want this book as a real thing in my hands.

Anyway, the show is wonderful. I understand that, from my very basic research from this post, that the live-action adaptation is quite divergent from the novel, so I’m content to watch the show while waiting for that official English translation (there are unofficial online translations, but I would like to put money into the hands of the author, you know?), knowing that the two are different enough that my enjoyment of the novel won’t be impacted by having watched the adaptation first. Also, apparently this adaptation is only one of many, and so I might have to go and find other adaptations.

The story itself is a multi-layered fantasy epic drama with grand themes of belonging, family, clan rivalry, justice and love. Centering around Wei Wuxian, also known as Wei Ying or the Yiling Patriarch, an orphaned child who was adopted by his father’s master’s family and is considered a sibling of the master’s two children Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli, the story is often funny, and terribly sweet, and also very, very dark.

It doesn’t pull punches, killing many folks, straining and breaking relationships, and turning heroes into villains. Everything is difficult, and you can understand why people act the way they do, calling into question what you might do if you were caught in these positions. Essentially, it’s my favorite kind of story. Give me the darkness. Give me unsure characters and well-meaning people who unwittingly make bad choices. Give me consequence and heartache and despair. Those alone, however, do not make this one of my recent favorites. What really makes it for me is the thread of a deep abiding love that moves like gossamer throughout the whole piece; a glittering filament of hope that grabs a hold of the heart and doesn’t let go.

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