In short: Swordsman of Siena (1962)

Original title: La congiura dei dieci

Italy, in the second half of the 16th Century. British mercenary and charming rogue Thomas Stanswood (Stewart Granger) is moving (with quite a few horsemen trying to catch him in tow) from his former employ to work for the Spanish governor Don Carlos (Riccardo Garrone) of occupied Siena. As it turns out, Don Carlos is quite the fiend, as is his torture-loving (note to my American readers: in civilized countries, torturing people makes you the bad guy) cousin Hugo (Fausto Tozzi), chief of the guard aka main thug.

Don Carlos needs Stanswood as bodyguard for his fiancée, Orietta Arconti (Sylva Koscina), member of a renowned family of the city. Surprisingly enough, Orietta actually wants to marry Don Carlos, despite his responsibility for the death of her father, and the heavy patriotic misgivings of her younger sister Serenella (Christine Kaufmann). What Orietta doesn't want is a bodyguard, particularly not a charming and roguish bodyguard her sister falls for head over heels.

Soon, Stanswood finds himself entangled in the conflict between the Spaniards and Siena's very own band of terrorists/freedom fighters known as the Ten, and, having a chivalrous heart and a soft spot for Serenella, rather doubts his Spanish employers are the right side to work for in this conflict. Why, he might even end up joining the rebels, and winning a brutal horse race for them to incite a more large-scale rebellion.

Etienne Périer's (the IMDB lists one Baccio Bandini as co-director, but the film doesn't, and you know how notoriously trustworthy the site is in these things) Swordsman of Siena is a fine piece of swashbuckling adventure, the sort of film tailor-made to let Stewart Granger do the charming rogue bit he does so effortlessly and convincingly.

All too often, supposed charming rogues in movies really rather come over as smarmy, self-centred bastards, something Granger usually manages to avoid with natural charisma, unless he's in a film where him being a self-centred bastard is exactly the point. In Swordsman's case, Granger also has help by a script that knows the difference between being a rogue and being an asshole (there's a particularly great scene in which Stanswood refuses Serenella's teenage crush because he's "ten years too old or ten years too young"), a fact that makes Stanswood a particularly enjoyable hero.

As is more often than you'd expect the case in swashbucklers, the female characters have a bit more to do than just stare adoringly at Granger or do that bit where their particularly heavy dislike is meant to hide their attraction (something which actually makes logical sense for one of the female characters in this particular film), though they do get to do these things too, of course. It's as if the swashbuckler as a genre, unlike other genres working in the historical past, could actually accept that women, despite being constrained by the mores of their times, still were actual human beings and certainly were doing more with their time than just standing whimpering on the side-lines. Or I'm just particularly lucky with the swashbucklers I watch in this regard.

Everything else about Swordsman of Siena is very much like you'd expect of a good example of its form: it's fast paced, full of colourful costumes, rather exciting fencing, a smidgen of romance and some melodrama to properly prepare the finale. That's a good thing, mind you, particularly since Périer really does know how to keep things moving (and exciting) throughout, and how to transition from the film's light-hearted core to the more dramatic bits.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,french movies,in short,etienne périer,stewart granger,sylva koscina,christine kaufmann,riccardo garrone,alberto lupo,adventure

In short: Scaramouche (1952)

France, a few years before the Revolution. Actor and charming rogue Andre Moreau (Stewart Granger doing what he does best) has to confront the more serious sides of life when the Queen's (Nina Foch) cousin, the Marquis de Maynes (Mel Ferrer), slaughters his best friend and foster brother in a duel for having written a pamphlet in praise of certain soon to be revolutionary principles. The poor boy never stood a chance against de Maynes, who isn't just the best duelist in France but also a man quite willing to use his abilities to get rid of any political enemy he can provoke into a fight.

Not being a swordsman himself Andre barely escapes with his life when he attempts to avenge his brother right on the spot. From this point onward, Andre dedicates his life to taking revenge on de Maynes, learning the art of fencing from the man's own fencing teacher and getting in trouble. On the way, our hero stumbles into the commedia dell'arte role of Scaramouche.

Further complications ensue because of love, for Andre has fallen for de Maynes's ward Aline de Gavrillac (Janet Leigh), as does de Maynes himself soon enough. Aline actually reciprocates Andre's feelings, alas, Andre thinks she is his half-sister (it's complicated), so the romance is rather a no-go for him, and he spends most of his time on a rather complicated (obviously) relationship with the actress Lenore (Eleanor Parker). It's a wonder all these - and more - plot lines will get tied up in less than two hours of running time.

As every fool knows, the swashbuckling genre was one of the things 40s and 50s Hollywood was particularly good at, which comes as no surprise when one keeps in mind how exactly the mixture of a colourful view of the past, grand emotions, and light consequences many swashbucklers prefer also is what the studio movies at the time were particularly good at; in that sense, one can see the swashbuckling adventure as the slightly more violent sister to the musical. With that sentence, I've done my duty of giving film historians apoplexy.

George Sidney's Scaramouche (of course based on Rafael Sabatini's novel) is a particularly fine example of the form with a particularly deft hand at gliding from high melodrama to silliness to fine quipping in front of eye-poppingly colourful backgrounds and back again in a most organic way that does remind me of dancing; again, I think there's an obvious parallel to musicals and the wuxia film here, though that may just be me. Be that as it may, I don't think it's any question its flow creates large parts of Scaramouche's impressive charms as a film in a genre that is all about the flow.

Apart from this, there are of course also some fine moments of old-style Hollywood acting by Granger, Leigh, Parker and Ferrer to praise, fanciful art direction to admire, swashbuckling deeds to thrill at, and so on, and so forth, until the sympathetic viewer will be left with the happiest of grins on her face; or so I, and quite obviously the film itself also, hope. As a bonus, Scaramouche is one of those swashbucklers where the female characters - even though they don't buckle any swashes - have a certain degree of personality and agency. It's even one where the "bad" (not that the film moralizes at her) girl may let the hero go into the arms of the "good" girl but where she doesn't have to run into a sword for him, instead finding better prospects of a kind.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,adventure,in short,george sidney,stewart granger,eleanor parker,janet leigh,mel ferrer

In short: Moonfleet (1955)

During his time in Hollywood, especially his final years there, when his energy for fights with producers as well as the studio system were on the vane, the great director Fritz Lang took on some rather unexpected projects.

Case in point is Moonfleet, a film that may include all most elements fit for a swashbuckling adventure movie, but is filmed as a gothic melodrama, with all the darkly lit sets, gloomy weather, dark double lives and even darker pasts that genre necessitates. All these elements are of course the sort of thing Lang felt especially at home with, as evidenced by many a silent movie thriller, western and film noir.

So, unsurprisingly, as long as Moonfleet tells the story of charming rogue and smuggling ring leader Stewart Granger being reminded of his better nature by the trust of a child (Jon Whiteley), getting in trouble with the law (that has been hounding him for quite some time) and stumbling onto the trace of a hidden diamond supposedly protected by a ghost, via a mood of slight dread and as the story of people living under the shadow of their pasts, Moonfleet may not be a masterpiece but a quite effective, if somewhat slow-paced, part of the gothic adventure genre, with the expected flashes of visual genius. Ironically, the film becomes at its least exciting (and interesting) whenever it actually turns into a swashbuckling movie.

Lang seems to have neither interest in, nor real talent for, the scenes of fencing and daring tricks Moonfleet's script from time to time asks of him to realize, so whenever his film takes on the outward signs of things that should be straightforwardly exciting, it becomes rather drab, never even making much use of Stewart Granger's talent for and experience at exactly that sort of thing. It's not a catastrophe, though, for the script (at least as it shows on screen) does not put too much emphasis on these aspects, preferring the gothic as much to the swashbuckling as Lang seems to do.

One of the positive surprises of the film is how comparatively unsentimental it treats Granger's change by contact with little John Mohune, even - very Lang and very un-Hollywood, that - more than just suggesting it's not the boy's innocence that wins the smuggling dandy over, but more the shared past with the boy's mother (this being a Hollywood film from 1955, there's no hint at the boy possibly being Granger's son, even though it would fit the film's backstory quite well), and mere chance.

As a whole, Moonfleet is a film I find easier to respect than to love. I absolutely adore Lang's visual treatment of the gothic, and do appreciate the film's slightly cynical undertone but I find the treatment of human emotions here a little too abstracted to completely convince me; I never can shake the feeling Lang sees human psychology as a much more mechanical thing then is helpful to create breathing characters. Admittedly, that's a problem I have quite often with the man's films, so this might not be so much a failing of Moonfleet, but a philosophical difference between Lang and me.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,gothic,melodrama,adventure,fritz lang,stewart granger

In short: The Secret Invasion (1964)

1943. The British Major Richard Mace (Stewart Granger) is tasked with freeing the former commander of the Italian troops in the Balkans, General Quadri (Enzo Fiermonte) from German captivity in Dubrovnik, in the hopes that the general will be able to rouse his loyal troops into changing allegiances and fighting the Germans.

To achieve this goal, Mace is provided with various prisoners of dubious talents as a commando troop. They are Roberto Rocca (Raf Vallone), an Italian with excellent talent for operational planning who would in peace times probably be the wise middle-aged boss in a caper movie; Terence Scanlon (Mickey Rooney, as dreadful as is to be expected), an "Irish" terrorist/freedom fighter and demolitions expert; Simon Fell (Edd Byrnes, even more dreadful than Rooney), forger and whiner; John Durrell (Henry Silva), a silent and reserved professional killer; and Jean Saval (William Campbell), the guy they took on because Tony Curtis wasn't available professional thief and man-with-a-thousand-faces-and-badly-plucked-eyebrows.

The group only has to get to Yugoslavia, meet up with the local partisans, and break into the German headquarters in Dubrovnik to get their man. Whatever could go wrong?

The Secret Invasion is one of Roger Corman's higher budgeted (different sources talk about $500,000 to $750,000) efforts, and Corman seems to have made the most out of it by shooting the film in Yugoslavia. For the sort of movie I'm usually talking about here, it's sensational to have a film mostly taking place in Dubrovnik that was actually shot there instead of a random studio backlot. Corman seems to have relished this opportunity. At least, he's using the attractive landscape and the city as much as possible, to quite satisfying effect.

On the negative side, Corman with a high-ish budget isn't Corman at his most daring, and so much of the film plays out exactly as one would expect from a war movie of this type, if a very competently done one featuring equally competent actors (except for Rooney and Byrnes, obviously) - or in the case of Silva and Vallone, competent actors being casually much better than anyone else on screen.

There are, however, two moments in The Secret Invasion that don't fit into the "war as a nice adventure for boys mould" it slavishly follows at all. First, there's the scene in which Silva accidentally smothers a baby to death while hiding out from German soldiers, breaks down into a crying fit and is comforted by the dead child's (partisan) mother. This sort of existential grimness isn't something you can expect to find, well, anywhere apart from 70s horror films, and feels like a secret invasion of actual human pain and suffering of a film that just doesn't deal with that sort of thing.

The other moment of equal import is The Secret Invasion's incredibly cynical ending, in which the good guys win, but achieve their victory in such a way that only the most thoughtless audience member will be able to cheer for it. Like the baby sequence, it doesn't fit the rest of the film's tone too well, but it's these two little shocks of a less easily digestible idea of what a war movie might be that make this movie worth watching, and not the routine and the competence.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,war,roger corman,stewart granger,raf vallone,henry silva,in short