At Sword’s Point (1952)

Twenty years (supposedly, for the ages of most of our heroes suggest thirty-five or so) after the original adventures of the Three Musketeers, France is in turmoil. Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu are both dead, and the kid who will become Louis XIV still has some years to go to come of age. Queen Anne (Gladys Cooper) does her best to keep the country together as best as she can, but she’s old and ill, and fighting the ruthless Duc de Lavalle (Robert Douglas) for the fate of the kingdom.

Lavalle uses his increasing power and barely hidden violence to push for a marriage with Anne’s daughter Henriette (Nancy Gates), clearly planning to do away with Louis once he is nicely positioned as the only throne candidate standing. By now, the Queen has become quite desperate, hiding Louis away at a secret spot somewhere in the country, and repeatedly attempting to ask the King of Spain for help in keeping the situation stable. All of her couriers to Spain, however, have found themselves on the pointy ends of Lavalle’s men.

In desperation, the Queen remembers the men who served their country so well twenty years past, and sends for the former Musketeers.

Because time works a bit strangely in this France, all four are now either dead or too old for action (damn that gout!). Fortunately, they have children at just the right age who all happen to share their fathers’ character traits and abilities perfectly. Who’d have thunk!

So now it is up to D’Artagnan Jr. (Cornel Wilde), Aramis Jr. (Dan O’Herlihy), Porthos Jr. (Alan Hale Jr,), and Athos Jr. to save the day. Did I say Athos Jr.? In fact, it’s his daughter Claire (Maureen O’Hara) taking up her old man’s banner!

Swashbucklers often tended to have somewhat meatier roles for actresses even outside of the villainess roles and the melodramas where they were allowed to have personalities at the time when this was made. So it’s not a complete surprise that Lewis Allen’s very free (so free the original novel isn’t “Three Musketeers: The Next Generation” at all) adaptation of Dumas’s Musketeer Sequel “Twenty Years Later”, provides O’Hara with so prominent a role even when it comes to the fights, but it’s still a joy to watch.

Interestingly, the film does so while still using some of the standard tropes a woman goes through in adventure fiction, so she still is the romantic objective of the main character, and there’s a lot of flirting; it’s just that Allen, or the handful of scriptwriters, never uses this to diminish Claire. She’s just your standard adventure movie heroine who also happens to have the courage and conviction usually left to the male heroes, and the fencing skills to back it up.

This does of course also practically automatically turn her into the most complex and rounded character on screen. Of course, it does help that the script doesn’t go the route where the badass woman is suddenly turned incompetent once she’s fallen for the hero; nor do the other three, once Claire has demonstrated her fighting prowess, try to keep her away from the action or ever doubt her capabilities. The film and its characters simply accept that being deeply romanceable and being deeply capable aren’t mutually exclusive.

O’Hara seems to relish this role, too, providing Claire with the same kind of swagger and humour the other musketeers are supposed to have. She’s really throwing herself into the fencing sequences, too.

The other musketeers aren’t quite as awesome. Wilde is certainly fine in the fights, but he’s not quite as youthful and charming as the script pretends he is, ending up a bit too stolid, O’Herlihy doesn’t get a lot to do, and Hale Jr. seems to have difficulty enough with the little he is supposed to do already. The thing is, O’Hara’s good enough to make that a matter of little to no import.

The film’s plot, while certainly not brilliant, does help there also. Things never stand still for too long, the plot is always providing opportunities for scenes of men doing hearty belly-laughs while fighting, desperate acrobatic feats, a bit of pathos and romance, and a lot of intrigue. All of it is presented in an expertly timed manner, and really never lets a boring minute come to pass, using RKO’s not titanic purse strings to their technicoloured fullest.

Speaking of intrigue, even though Douglas’s performance is more solid than truly memorable, the script does provide him with a series of somewhat sensible plots, turning him memorable and interesting as a villain simply by virtue of his plans actually making logical sense in a swashbuckling world, therefor providing the heroes with actual odds and stakes to fight against and for, respectively.

All of which only improves At Sword’s Point, a film that could have gotten away with being the Maureen O’Hara show, even more.

Past Misdeeds: The Flame and the Arrow (1950)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

It's the 12th Century and the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations under Emperor Friedrich I. (aka Barbarossa) controls large parts of Europe, among them the Lombardy in what we now know as Italy. The Lombards are less than enthused about their new masters, and a resistance movement that seems to concentrate on throwing grim glances and urging people to join their cause without ever acting for said cause has come into existence.

Lombard and hunter Dardo (Burt Lancaster) is not into that whole revolution thing, though. The man prefers rugged individualism and sexual promiscuity as long as no feelings are involved (I'm being a bit more straightforward about the latter element of his character than the film can be, but it's as unsubtle about things as a film made in 1950 can be) to social responsibility, though he does take good care of his son Rudi (the atrocious Gordon Gebert) and is the sort of rugged individualist who still has friends like his childhood friend, the mute smith Piccolo (Nick Cravat who was Lancaster's real life partner as a circus acrobat as well as in the movies, and has pretty wonderful chemistry with him). Ironically, Dardo has more reason to hate the Germans than most, for the local potentate, Count Ulrich aka "The Hawk" (Frank Allenby) took Dardo's (consenting) wife as his concubine five years ago, leaving Dardo alone with his son and certain trust issues when it comes to women that do explain his sexual and emotional habits.

Things between Ulrich and Dardo finally come to a head when the hunter quite purposefully shoots one of Ulrich's hunting hawks. In retribution, Ulrich decides that it's best to take Rudi away from his father into his castle to live with his mother. Dardo disapproves of the idea quite violently, but all that gets him is a crossbow bolt in the back and a new status as an outlaw; at least he also learns that he has quite a few friends willing to become outlaws themselves to help him.

The rest of the movie does of course consist of various Robin Hood-like deeds, the difficult romance between Dardo and Ulrich's niece, the much more agreeable Anne de Hesse (Virginia Mayo). Important lessons are learned by the rugged individualist (the social sphere exists and can't and shouldn't be ignored unless you are a total jerk or a hermit) as well as by the lazy revolutionaries (you actually need to get off your ass when you want to get rid of Evil) alike.

Everyone reading this surely knows Jacques Tourneur as a master of subtle horror as well as the film noir, what with little, totally unknown movies like Cat People and Out of the Past on his résumé. As someone working inside the studio system for most of his career, Tourneur did of course direct films in various other genres too. With The Flame and the Arrow, the director created a fine (and pleasantly Technicolor) adventure movie/trapezoidal swashbuckler that isn't quite as deep in the Robin Hood mold as one would expect. Sure, many of the expected elements are there and accounted for, but blacklist victim Waldo Salt's script and Tourneur's sense of style give most of these standard tropes small twists and turns that keep the film more lively and surprising than expected. My description of the movie's "rugged individualism versus social responsibility" theme may sound rather sarcastic, but the film actually does interesting things with it, never forgetting that its characters are supposed to be people and not walking metaphors, which leads to more complexity in the characterisation of especially Dardo and Anne than you'd need in an adventure movie or a film arguing philosophy. As an additional bonus, Salt's script also shows a degree of class consciousness that is more than just a little useful when you want to talk about the Middle Ages yet always comes as a surprise in a US movie. One could even read the whole film as one about class struggle, if one had the intention to do so.

Because Tourneur knows what he's doing, he also never steps into the trap of forgetting The Flame's identity as an adventure movie above its various subtexts. This may be a film that wants to talk about the problems and attractions of rugged individualism but it's also one that wants to show off particularly acrobatic (at this point in his career, certainly still more of a reason why a studio would hire the former acrobat Burt Lancaster than not, as you will know) swashbuckling (historically speaking, it's of course not swashbuckling, but you know what I mean) fights, bad guys acting dastardly, good guys being clever and charming, and women having a mind of their own, in a good-natured and brilliant manner. In Tourneur's hands, this still leaves room for the philosophizing as well as for sudden bouts of directorial brilliance like a certain swordfight taking place in a very Tourneur darkness. Even better, it's a film that knows perfectly well how to do this, how to let its subtext sing and its surface action shine, probably leaving every thinkable audience with as big a smile on its face as it did with me.


My Bollywood-loving friends will perhaps be interested and surely just as delighted as I was to learn The Flame and the Arrow also contains a scene where Lancaster and Cravat disguise themselves as members of a circus troupe to enter Ulrich's castle, with all the non-existing subtlety of disguise you'd see in a Manmohan Desai film. It's a glorious thing even without a musical number. Good taste in plot tropes is obviously as timeless as it is international.

On Exploder Button: The Flame And The Arrow (1950)

Things wise people like in their movies: colour, Jacques Tourneur, Burt Lancaster in an acrobatic mood, class consciousness, derring-do, philosophical subtexts, bad guys hiring a circus troupe.

Things The Flame and the Arrow includes: all of the above.

Ergo, wise people may want to click on through to this week's column on Exploder Button.

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