Swordsmen of the Screen

From Douglas Fairbanks to Michael York

Jeffrey Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317928638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

This fascinating study of the genre of swashbuckling films received wide critical acclaim when it was first published in 1977. Jeffrey Richards assesses the contributions to the genre of directors, designers and fencing masters, as well as of the stars themselves, and devotes several chapters to the principal subjects if the swashbucklers – pirates, highwaymen, cavaliers and knights. The result is to recall, however fleetingly, the golden days of the silver screen.

Reviews of the original edition:

'An intelligent, scholarly, well-written account of adventure films, this work is sensitive both to cinema history and to the literary origins of the "swashbuckler"….Essential for any library with books on film, it may very well be the definitive book on its subject.' – Library Journal

1 Swashbuckling: a Profile of the Genre

Swashbuckler. 1560. (f.prec.+BUCKLER sb.²; hence lit. one who makes a noise by striking his own or his opponent's shield with a sword). A swaggering bravo or ruffian ; a noisy braggadocio attrib. The s. manners of the youth of fashion in the reign of Elizabeth 1816. Hence swashbuckling a.

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

Never to have sailed the Spanish Main with Errol Flynn, never to have ridden the King's Highway with Louis Hayward, never to have fought the Cardinal's Guard with Douglas Fairbanks is never to have dreamed, never to have lived, never to have been young. For at their best, the swashbuckling films brought to life the heroic dreams and romantic fancies that are the heart of the folk tradition of the English-speaking world. To see them today, their power undimmed by the years, is to recapture not just the golden, carefree days of childhood but also lost ideals and vanished virtues, swamped by the cynical rat-race reality of the modern, white-hot, technological world – chivalry, gallantry, patriotism, duty and honour.

Characteristics

Perhaps one of the main reasons why so little has been written about the swashbuckling film is that while everyone knows what constitutes a swashbuckler, no one has been able to define precisely what it is. If we turn to the dictionary, we find a definition which in cinematic terms is imprecise. A swashbuckler may, in Elizabethan times, have been a ruffian. But in the cinema, he is unquestionably a gentleman. The word, as so often in the English language, has been the subject of upward revaluation.

Certain basic characteristics can be deduced from the films themselves. The swashbuckler is set in the past. It has a European or Europeanized (e.g. Spanish California) setting. It involves swordplay. Its heroes are invariably gentlemen. But these are not automatic indicators of a swashbuckling film. Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet have historical settings, gentlemen heroes and swordfights – but they are hardly swashbucklers.

The swashbuckler shares a historical setting with other distinct genres (the epic, the historical biography, the romantic melodrama, the costume drama). Some films have swashbuckling elements but are not true swashbucklers: horror films (Tower of London and The Black Castle), musicals (The Pirate and The Firefly), classic novels (The Prince and the Pauper and Kidnapped), period adventure films (Anthony Adverse and Son of Fury), maritime dramas (Captain Horatio Hornblower and Captain Caution), early American adventures (Mississippi Gambler and Foxes of Harrow). Some films are poised so delicately on the borderline of genres that it is almost impossible to classify them with any certainty.

But it is basically in form and ethos that the swashbuckler is to be distinguished from other genres. Stylization rather than realism, fictional adventure and not historical fact are the keynotes. Settings, costumes, stories, action, all are stylized. Content is ritualized, emotions stereotyped, the characters are archetypes rather than individuals. To this extent the genre is peculiarly rigid and unyielding. It makes no concessions to a change in audience interests and outlook. It never gives way to the psychological complexity of the latter-day western, the social significance of the problem drama, the violence and cynicism of the policier. But at its best, it is an exhilarating excursion into pure style, a heady blend of male beauty and agility, the grace and colour of historical costume, the opulence and splendour of period sets and the spellbinding legerdemain of horseback chases, chandelier-swinging and dazzling swordplay.

The swashbuckler as we know it originated very largely with one man – Douglas Fairbanks Sr.
1 Doug in The Three Musketeers (1921)

The pattern was decisively established under his successor, Errol Flynn.
2 Errol in Adventures of Don Juan

The swashbuckler has been unfashionable with the critical establishment, largely, I suspect, because it does not fit any of the currently fashionable schools of criticism. No director has worked consistently in the genre, as directors have, say, in the western or the musical, though it has over the years attracted some of the cinema's great visual stylists, men who can respond to the grace of movement and the pictorial potential of period settings and who have utilized the trappings and atmosphere to create stunningly good-looking works – men like Frank Borzage, James Whale, Rouben Mamoulian, Michael Curtiz, Max Ophuls, Jacques Tourneur, George Sidney, John Cromwell, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Rowland V. Lee. But the swashbuckler is pre-eminently a collaborative effort-of art director, costume designer, fencing master, stunt arranger, cinematographer, writer, cast and director. Sometimes the true ‘creator’ of a swashbuckler is the producer, the man who assembles the talents and masterminds the production: David O. Selznick on The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Alexander Korda on The Scarlet Pimpernel (1935), Douglas Fairbanks Sr on all his swashbucklers.

Equally important are the stars. When films glorify heroes, the actors need to look like heroes, to combine male beauty and acrobatic skill. They need to be able to wear period costume with ease, to handle a sword deftly, to project charm, spirit and a joyous love of adventure. Without such figures the films would fail. The cinema has been fortunate to have produced a succession of actors able to fulfil these requirements: the Fairbanks, father and son, Errol Flynn, Louis Hayward, Cornel Wilde, John Derek, Stewart Granger, Burt Lancaster, etc. Ironically, many of the actors involved in the films, being actors, resented being typed as costume heroes. Some, like Burt Lancaster, strictly limited their swashbucklers to a handful and moved on rapidly to other things. Errol Flynn only made four swashbucklers in his heyday, but they have eclipsed all his other films in the folk memory. Typical of these actors’ attitudes is that of Basil Rathbone, finest of all swashbuckling villains, who, in his autobiography, says almost nothing about his work in swashbucklers, preferring to concentrate on his classical film roles (A Tale of Two Cities, Anna Karenina, David Copperfield) and theatre work. Cornel Wilde was even more outspoken, saying, in 1970: ‘I found a great deal of pleasure and fulfilment in acting – in certain roles. In others, not at all. I did the best I could with what there was. I love horseback riding, and fencing and archery, and in a case like Bandit of Sherwood Forest, that's all there was to it. I was prime material for all that crap in the general opinion. I looked too right for it.’ Only Douglas Fairbanks Sr devoted himself wholeheartedly and unreservedly to swashbuckling, and in so doing, created a succession of classics. It is perhaps understandable that the actors should have sought to avoid typecasting. But we can be grateful for the fact that when doing the films, they showed no signs of disgruntlement and performed their heroics with a verve which has etched them indelibly into cinema history.

The ethos of the films may be a simple one but it is infrangibly strong and provides the bedrock upon which the structure of the action is reared. The values are the values of the knightly class, as embodied in the chivalric code, and this therefore dates the historical scope of the films from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries, when this code prevailed. It rules out the Vikings, the Romans and the Greeks, who were not gentlemen. The typical swashbuckling hero is the gentleman hero, well born, comfortably off, a man of breeding and polish, daring and humour, gallantry and charm. He maintains a decent standard of behaviour, fights for King and Country, believes in truth and justice, defends the honour of a lady. Even if our hero is an outlaw, as he very often is, he continues to incarnate these virtues.

The swashbuckling villain is the reverse side of the coin, the dark side of the mirror. The villains are often gentlemen themselves and embody some of the same qualities as the hero: courage, resourcefulness, swordsmanship. But they are fatally flawed by ambition, greed or simply hubris. This leads them to flout the finer points of the chivalric code, often with an engaging sense of audacity and boldly sardonic humour, which enables them to dominate a film, if teamed with a colourless hero. But they always meet their come-uppance in the end. Their plans come to nought, they pay with their lives for their presumption, and their deaths triumphantly affirm the validity of the Code.

The Code is, of course, the Code of the ruling class and its prominence strongly implies an Establishment mentality behind the films. The metaphor for the Establishment is most frequently the monarchy. As director Rowland V. Lee put it, in a letter to this author: ‘Kings and Queens have fascinated audiences and peoples everywhere. From early fairy tales through present fiction, fighting for the throne has been an interesting subject always.’

The Crown functions as an object of devotion, the sanction of the action, the symbol of all that is true and good and worth fighting for. The King is a personification of the State, the Establishment, Authority. Therefore, by association, the Establishment is true and good and worth fighting for. To stress the links of the Crown and the ordinary people (i.e. the cinema audience), an extra dimension is added. The plot-lines of swashbucklers often involve unscrupulous individual members of the aristocracy, who plot to gain power for themselves and who, during the course of the film, perpetrate all kinds of outrages against the people. The monarchy, on the other hand, is seen as embodying fair-minded and disinterested central government, opposed to the anarchic, centrifugal tendencies of these individual power groups. The interests of the monarchy are thus identical with the interests of the people. The monarch by being monarch is ipso facto defender and protector of the people's rights. He embodies the soul and the traditions of the nation. As Sir Edward Hyde tells Charles II in The Exile: ‘You are their past, future, memory, emblem, flag.’ The true gentleman is one who supports the monarchy and endorses its role as the even-handed dispenser of justice.

When it needs to be spelled out, monarchy is of the constitutional rather than the absolute variety. But the King is the King. The restoration of the King is the subject of countless Robin Hood films. Even if the King is bad (King John in Rogues of Sherwood Forest), he is not killed, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Swashbuckling — a Profile of the Genre
• 2 The Swordsmen of the Screen
• 3 ‘All for one — and one for all’
• 4 When Knighthood was in Flower
• 5 Cavaliers and Conquistadores
• 6 Blades and Brocades
• 7 The Masked Avengers
• 8 Under the Greenwood Tree
• 9 Ho, for the Open Road!
• 10 ’Neath the Skull and Bones
• 11 On the Spanish Main
• 12 The Sheikhs of Araby
• Select Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Film Titles