By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Linder’s comedy was seen by Fairbanks, who, far from being affronted, asked Cavens to work with him on his next batch of films. Of all the actors who have fought with swords the best actual athlete remains the five-foot, five-inch Douglas Elton Ulman—Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Yet he made all his swashbuckling movies after the age of thirty-five. As Jeffrey Richards says in his authoritative Swordsmen of the Screen, “After Doug the swashbuckler took off as a cinematic genre, in which physical movement and visual style predominated. But for sheer verve and vitality there was never anyone to equal Doug.”6

  Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., in practice for his role of d’Artagnan in his 1921 version of The Three Musketeers. Note the expression on the stuntman’s face, and also Fairbanks’s casual attire. To the right stands their swordmaster, Henri J. Uyttenhove. (illustration credit 10.1)

  The appeal of the athletic Fairbanks may seem obvious today, but in 1920, when he launched The Mark of Zorro, he did so with trepidation, having been advised not to abandon his previous comedy-adventures; after all, four years earlier D. W. Griffith’s historical epic Intolerance had failed at the box office. But The Mark of Zorro (“zorro” is Spanish for “fox”) was an enormous success, and suddenly swashbucklers were all the rage. Seeing Fairbanks’s films over a three-day period, in the Museum of Modern Art’s new viewing rooms in Queens, I could understand why: they have an infectious exuberance, a disarming confidence, and rich humor to go with their impressive gymnastics. “Why do you wear a mask?” Zorro is asked. “Perhaps to hide the features of a Bergerac,” he replies with a boyish grin. As d’Artagnan, he is twice brought up before Richelieu, his life in the Cardinal’s hands. “If you were about to die, what would you do?” Richelieu asks him each time, and each time he replies, “Your Eminence, I should write the history of France.” On the second occasion, having just been bested by d’Artagnan over the queen’s jewels, the prelate “whose genius had re-created France” says, “Then set down in your book, M. d’Artagnan, that Richelieu was a generous foe”—handing him back to his fellow musketeers and into the arms of Constance.

  The scene as it appears on film. Fairbanks did all his own fencing stunts, even though his swashbuckling films started only after he was thirty-five. (illustration credit 10.2)

  Following the First World War, disillusionment and a widespread thirst for escapism led to a longing for romance, heroism, and adventure. Fairbanks caught these aspirations brilliantly. He created “the Fairbanks picture,” showing that people could be effective as individuals. In his wake, other stars from the silent film era donned cape and sword: among them Ramon Novarro (Scaramouche, 1923; The Prisoner of Zenda, 1922); Rudolph Valentino (Monsieur Beaucaire, 1924), fencing left-handed; and John Barrymore (Don Juan, 1926, with one of the screen’s great duels—although he had the experience of a hundred and one Broadway Hamlets to help him, he got overexcited before the camera, swinging about wildly and dangerously, and Fred Cavens had to double for him).

  Cavens, a graduate of the Belgian Military Institute, worked with Fairbanks on three of his films: Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), The Black Pirate (1926), and The Iron Mask (1929). He had long considered how screen fights should be staged. “All movements—instead of being as small as possible, as in competitive fencing—must be large,” he declared, “but nevertheless correct. Magnified is the word. The routine should contain the most spectacular attacks and parries it is possible to execute while remaining logical to the situation. In other words, the duel should be a fight and not a fencing exhibition, and should disregard at times classically correct guards and lunges. The attitudes arising naturally out of fighting instinct should predominate. When this occurs the whole performance will leave an impression of strength, skill and manly grace.”7

  Cavens was not only an inspired fight arranger, he was lucky in his timing. Over the next twenty years he worked with all the great swashbuckling stars of the period, in some of the best films featuring swordfights: Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Jr. (the latter in The Corsican Brothers and The Exile), Errol Flynn (Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, The Adventures of Don Juan), Louis Hayward (The Man in the Iron Mask, The Fortunes of Captain Blood), Cornel Wilde (Sons of the Musketeers), and Tyrone Power (The Mark of Zorro). Of these only Power never looked the part. Errol Flynn was a natural sportsman who had narrowly failed to make the Australian Olympic team in 1932 as a boxer; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., learned to fence when he was twelve, and usually did his own fights; and Wilde, the 1934 American intercollegiate foil champion, trained with the 1936 Olympic squad. Born in Budapest, in several of his films he would change hands midfight, to show his dexterity.

  Throughout his career at Paramount, Cavens received only a single screen credit—for The Vagabond King, in 1956. He not only taught the films’ heroes how to fight, he also taught the villains. The most memorably dastardly of these was Basil Rathbone, otherwise known as Levasseur in Captain Blood, Guy of Guisborne in The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Captain Esteban Pasquale in The Mark of Zorro. Rathbone was a good club fencer who prided himself on his expertise—“a skilled swordsman,” as he described himself—and in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) he and Flynn crossed swords with a minimum of doubling. Nick Evangelista, in his Encyclopedia of the Sword, rates Rathbone’s duel with Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro as “the finest example of movie swordplay Hollywood has ever produced.” Rathbone himself considered Power “the most agile man with a sword I’ve ever faced before a camera”; but the truth is that Power had to be doubled by Fred Cavens’s son, yet was still so unathletic he managed to undermine the fight scenes. By contrast, Rathbone did all his own swordplay, wearing high, stiff boots to accentuate the dramatic line of his lunge. The powers that be at Twentieth Century Fox expressed alarm that the forty-eight-year-old Rathbone, at that time the highest-paid character actor in Hollywood, should be performing his own fights, but Cavens declared, “I doubt that he would do well in competition, but for picture purposes he is better than the best fencer in the world.” For The Mark of Zorro he and Rathbone rehearsed for six weeks before their fight was filmed.‡

  Basil Rathbone (Guy of Guisborne) battling Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1937). Flynn never really learned swordplay, but he looked the part. (illustration credit 10.3)

  The first cycle of swashbucklers ended with the coming of sound. As the studios concentrated on talk-laden scripts, action films were momentarily forgotten: in his last silent film, The Iron Mask (1929), Fairbanks symbolically dies. The swashbuckler owed its resurgence to unlikely advocates. During the early 1930s pressure groups such as the Catholic Legion of Decency remonstrated against the content of new releases—their eroticism, their glorification of crime, the general immoralities halfway glorified. Hollywood’s response was an increase in “safe” subjects, such as adaptations of classic novels and historical dramas. The swashbuckler, with its enthusiasm for the chivalric code, was an obvious candidate. In 1934 MGM produced Treasure Island and United Artists The Count of Monte Cristo; the following year Warner Bros. made Captain Blood, and a full revival was under way. The success of Captain Blood was helped by the defection of the original choice for the main part, Robert Donat, who was replaced by a twenty-six-year-old Tasmanian, the son of a professor of marine biology: Errol Flynn.

  Flynn made eight swashbuckling films in his heyday, a further three by 1959, and it doesn’t matter that he did few of his fight scenes himself (in The Warriors—released in the United Kingdom as The Dark Avenger, 1955—his double was R. R. V. [Raymond Rudolph Valentino] Paul, the British foilist who would reach the Olympic finals the following year). Flynn was athletic, looked the part. His sincerity and impudent charm do the rest. In The New Adventures of Don Juan (1948) he even gets the job of running the Royal Fencing Academy of the court of Spain, and with it some choice dialogue. When told by the king, “We consider Don Lorca the greatest living duelist in Spain,” he shoots back, “That’s certainly the mark of a good duelist, your Majesty: to
be living.” But as ever with Flynn, one forgives him a good deal. And who would not envy his reply to Olivia de Havilland in The Adventures of Robin Hood? “Why, you speak treason!” “Fluently.”

  Not to be outdone, Fred Astaire, of all unlikely swordsmen, intones in Top Hat (1935): “We Bondini have the motto ‘For the women, ze kiss. For the men, ze sword.’ ” But amid the many terrible lines to which the genre gave birth, there is one glorious exception. It comes during one of the finest of all film duels, between Ronald Colman as Rudolf Rassendyll and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as Rupert of Hentzau in the 1937 version of The Prisoner of Zenda. As the two men fight in one continuous take, around murky dungeons, up and down winding staircases, and through the shadowy main hall of the castle, they spar verbally with equal expertise:

  Rathbone during practice. On the left is the Belgian swordmaster Fred Cavens. Hollywood took on a succession of Belgian masters, considering them more amenable than their French counterparts. (illustration credit 10.4)

  RUPERT: Touché, Rassendyll. I cannot get used to fighting with furniture; where did you learn it?

  RUDOLF: That all goes with the old school tie.

  RUPERT: Well, then, here’s your last fencing lesson. Look out for your head. Why don’t you stand your ground and fight?

  RUDOLF: “He who fights and runs away”—remember?

  RUPERT: I see. You want to let the drawbridge down. I’ve just killed a man for trying that.

  RUDOLF: An unarmed man, of course.

  RUPERT: Of course.… You English are a stubborn lot.

  RUDOLF: Well, “England expects that every man …”—you know.

  RUPERT: Your golden-haired goddess will look well in black, Rassendyll. I’ll console her for you … kiss away her tears. What, no quotation?

  RUDOLF: Yes, a barking dog never bites.

  RUPERT: Aargh! You’d be a sensation in a circus. I can’t understand it. Where did you learn such roller skating?

  RUDOLF: Coldstream Guards, my boy. Come on, now, when does the fencing lesson begin?

  RUPERT: Stand still and fight, you coward.

  RUDOLF: Bad-tempered fellow, aren’t you, underneath the charm?

  RUPERT: Why don’t you let me kill you quietly?

  RUDOLF: Oh, a little noise adds a touch of cheer. You notice I’m getting you closer to the drawbridge rope?

  RUPERT: You’re so fond of rope, it’s a pity to have to finish you off with steel. What did they teach you on the playing fields of Eton? Puss in the corner?

  RUDOLF: Oh, chiefly not throwing knives at other people’s backs.

  This was the third in a run of five Zendas—to date. There have been four film versions of Zorro and as many of Captain Blood, with a Son of Captain Blood thrown in. The Count of Monte Cristo has had twenty-one incarnations, plus two Countesses of Monte Cristo and a TV serial; Robin Hood has had ten films, as well as a long-running TV series; and there have been so many Three Musketeers (by my count, more than thirty) that it is almost easier to tot up the years when a new version has not appeared. In 1931 St. Louis even hosted an open-air opera of the tale, starring, of all people, Cary Grant as d’Artagnan.

  THE SECOND CYCLE OF SWASHBUCKLERS ENDED DRAMATICALLY WITH America’s entry into the Second World War in 1941. Cinemagoers wanted to see films that reaffirmed the fundamental values of American life, and this led to a major revival of Westerns. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., joined the U.S. Navy, Power and Hayward the Marines. Flynn, to his dismay rejected on health grounds, made war movies such as Desperate Journey and Objective Burma. When hostilities ended, swashbucklers returned, with the old senior players joined by a new group—Cornel Wilde, John Derek, and Richard Greene—all challenging for stardom.

  By 1949 Hollywood had been hit by strikes and other labor problems, and the bitter days of the Red Scare had arrived. Most threatening of all, television was burgeoning. There were cutbacks in production, together with a flood of “bread-and-butter” swashbucklers, produced at speed with standardized fight scenes and with Western directors in charge.

  By the mid-1950s television had overtaken the cinema. In Britain, the small screen was filled with swashbuckling series, rapidly exported to America. There were some notable successes—Robin Hood with Richard Greene; Ivanhoe with Roger Moore, a nascent Bond in armor—enough to turn Hollywood away from the swashbuckler and toward the epic. As Jeffrey Richards concluded, “So d’Artagnan, Scaramouche and Captain Blood gave way to Alexander the Great, Cleopatra and Ben-Hur.”9 He notes that since the 1950s there have been sporadic revivals of swashbucklers—a wave of Italian-made imitations during the early 1960s, for instance—and in the 1970s Richard Lester’s contributions, The Three Musketeers (1973), Royal Flash (1975), and Robin and Marian (1976). But he saw this revival as illusory; swashbucklers were more likely to be parodies than truly felt adventures: “The keynote is requiem rather than renaissance. The swashbuckler in fact shows little sign of real revival because while the style may be imitated, the underlying ethic has been irreparably undermined.”

  This pessimism has been disproved by events. In the twenty-five years since Richards made these observations there has been a steady stream of swashbucklers, and of films in which swordplay has played a key part. From the fights in Star Wars to those in Gladiator, from First Knight to The Mask of Zorro, from Rob Roy to The Mists of Avalon, from The Princess Bride to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, from Lord of the Rings to The Count of Monte Cristo, filmmakers have found that for the sheer excitement of pitting hero against villain in one-to-one combat there is still a place for the swordfight, whatever new costumes the combatants may be wearing.

  THE ROLL OF ACTORS WHO HAVE FENCED IN FILMS IS EXTENSIVE, and on occasion surprising. It includes George Sanders (who hated every minute and even lost the part of villain in The Mark of Zorro because he shirked the duel scene), Bob Hope, Tony Curtis, John Wayne, Kirk and Michael Douglas, Robin Williams fencing Dustin Hoffman in Hook, Michael Caine, Gérard Depardieu as Cyrano, and Anthony Hopkins as Zorro.

  Then there are Stewart Granger (leaden in The Prisoner of Zenda, acrobatic in Scaramouche, where he became so involved in the fencing scenes he needed twelve stitches in his leg and sustained a shoulder injury that plagued him the rest of his life), Kevin Costner, Charlton Heston, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gregory Peck as Horatio Hornblower (“That was wonderful swordsmanship, sir.” “Mr. Langley, when I was a midshipman I was bottom of the class in swordsmanship”—a becoming modesty given his wooden swordplay, although both he and his opponent, Christopher Lee, were both well over six feet tall and the restrictions of the fo’c’sle left little room for footwork), Orson Welles (who fenced at school, and always wanted to play Cyrano), Peter Ustinov, Peter O’Toole, even Robert De Niro.

  One should not forget that over the years several actresses have also wielded swords: Maureen O’Hara, most notably in Lady in the Iron Mask and At Sword’s Point, with “a helter-skelter climax that resembles a fencers’ convention” (The New York Times); Jean Peters—most convincing of all—in Anne of the Indies; Lana Turner coaching Roger Moore in Diane; Lucille Ball of I Love Lucy fame; Grace Kelly in The Swan; Natalie Wood in The Great Race; Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Mask of Zorro; and Sophie Marceau in The Revenge of the Musketeers. Not always happily: The New York Times described Jean Peters, unfairly, as having “the swashbuckling airs of a lass in Miss Twitt’s Finishing School,” and when Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst’s longtime companion, was forced to play Mary Tudor in the costume drama When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922), she complained, “I had to learn fencing for that picture. Every day for four hours, for four months. I had a mask for the first month and buttons on the ends of the swords. Then they took the mask away and then they took the buttons off. I was frightened stiff. And my legs were stiff, too, from lunging.… I couldn’t walk, but the director thought I walked just like a princess.”10

  Throughout the history of the cinema, however, staging swordfights has been the responsibility of very few individuals
. Before the 1950s there were just four fight arrangers of note: Cavens, maybe the best of them all; Henri J. Uyttenhove, another graduate of the Belgian Military Institute; Ralph Faulkner, the one native-born American; and Jean L. Heremans. Uyttenhove was the first to bring expert staging to screen duels, coaching Fairbanks Senior in The Three Musketeers and Robin Hood and choreographing the early versions of Scaramouche and The Prisoner of Zenda; but he worked exclusively during the silent era and with the advent of talkies moved into formal instruction. Even so, his contribution should not be overlooked: Variety commented on The Three Musketeers, his first film with Fairbanks, “Fairbanks … must have toned up his fencing considerably for he displays work with the sword that has not been approached.”11

  Of the four, Ralph Faulkner was the best fencer. Born in Abilene, Kansas, in 1891, he moved to Hollywood in 1922. Good-looking, athletic, and debonair, he entered silent films, appearing opposite Mary Astor, Marion Davies, and Ronald Colman. During the making of The Man from Glengarry he tripped over a log and injured his left leg. After a cartilage operation he took up fencing to strengthen his knee and was soon practicing three hours a day. In 1928 he won the Pacific Coast saber title and that same year became the first Californian fencer ever selected for the Olympics. Although he made no impression at the Games in Amsterdam (where, the modest but unmistakably attractive Faulkner later told friends, he became involved with the German gold-medal winner, Helene Mayer), he came in second that summer at an international épée competition.

  Grace Kelly in The Swan (1956). Her tutor is Louis Jourdan, who tells her: “A fencer is always in danger of revealing his intentions to his adversary—and that he must never do.” (illustration credit 10.5)