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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Since the days of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn, swashbuckling heroes have brought much-needed joie de vivre to a cynical Hollywood. Can "Pirates of the Caribbean" revive that glorious tradition?
Jul 8, 2003 | "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."
The first line from Rafael Sabatini's novel "Scaramouche" is as good a definition of the spirit of swashbucklers as we're ever likely to get. Encompassing irony, sophistication, judgment that is both detached and passionate and, most important of all, the capacity for enjoyment, Sabatini's line, a transcendent piece of purple prose, could be the code of ethics for every great swashbuckling hero.
In novels, those heroes were the creation of Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson and the entertaining imitators who followed -- Sabatini, Baroness Orczy and H. Rider Haggard. On-screen, the swashbuckler was embodied by Douglas Fairbanks and then Errol Flynn. And at one time or another, Stewart Granger, Burt Lancaster, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Peter O'Toole (parodying Errol Flynn in "My Favorite Year"), Mandy Patinkin (parodying the genre itself in "The Princess Bride") and Antonio Banderas have all done themselves honor.
Though their descendants, from James Bond to Jackie Chan, have never gone away, swashbucklers themselves have all but disappeared from movie screens (which is why this week's big-budget would-be blockbuster, "Pirates of the Caribbean," is an anomaly). Perhaps the 1970s made them impossible. For all the great work done in that era by directors updating classic movie genres for contemporary adult audiences (as Francis Ford Coppola did with "The Godfather" and Sam Peckinpah did with "The Wild Bunch"), the very notion of movie heroism became almost impossible.
Nearly every western of the time felt duty-bound to link the American conquest of the West to our misadventure in Vietnam. It was logical all right, but also idiotic. Adventure stories cannot and should not have to bear the weight of becoming historico-political treatises, and you have to be more than a little naive -- and a total killjoy -- to go to them looking for that. (Besides, next to the "adult" westerns made in the '50s by Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, the '70s westerns look petulant and childish.)
Movie heroes were suddenly divided into two camps. For liberal audiences, there were the adventurers whose innocence was a form of brutal ignorance, stand-ins for American soldiers in Vietnam. For conservative audiences, there were rotten bastards like Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" who knew no limits and recognized no codes of conduct -- not even the law -- in getting the job done. (The thirst for heroes to whom audiences could respond had a lot to do with the popularity of martial arts and blaxploitation movies in those years.)
In swashbucklers, this revisionism seemed even more sour than it did elsewhere. Three of the four swashbucklers Richard Lester made in those years -- "The Three Musketeers," its sequel, "The Four Musketeers," and the appalling "Robin and Marian" -- could be said to represent the Vietnamization of the genre. In the Musketeers movies, Lester, diminishing everything he touched, linked each opportunity for gallantry or heroism to what was rotten and corrupt in society. (He didn't capture the real spirit of swashbucklers until he made "Superman II" in 1981.) His Robin Hood was worse, a fool because he believed in the old codes of heroism --- and, it was implied, because he supported a leader, Richard the Lionheart, who had gone out on the Crusades. This was Robin Hood as foot soldier for a medieval version of Gen. William Westmoreland, the notorious U.S. commander in Vietnam. Scratch a hero, Lester seemed to be saying, and you'll find a blank-faced and empty-headed killer underneath.
The cynicism that Vietnam and Watergate fostered in American movies gave way to the even more cynical willed naiveté of the Reagan years. But with a few exceptions, movie heroes like Rambo were often doing battle against some enemy of the republic. American movie heroes never recovered their innocence.
It's too easy to say that the swashbuckler genre, with its foppish costumes and antiquated codes of nobility and honor, seems dated and quaint to contemporary audiences. (Though it could be that audiences used to the spectacle of CGI and the quick cutting it entails may have a hard time being thrilled by the pleasure of swordplay and acrobatics. But how then to explain the popularity of Jackie Chan?) The very appeal of swashbucklers has always been that they are idealized visions of some earlier age ("The Three Musketeers" was published in 1844, and the story began in 1625) where the perfidy of the rulers is easily overcome by the true hearts of those with heroism in their souls.
Swashbucklers are the most innocent of genres -- devoid of cynicism and populated by heroes who represented codes of loyalty and justice in an endearing way other heroes did not. Raymond Chandler may have described Philip Marlowe as a knight transplanted to the sleaze of Los Angeles, but the cynical, embittered hard-boiled hero (for all the sentimentality inherent in crime fiction and film noir) is light years away from the joie de vivre of the swashbuckling hero.
The thing that has always saved swashbuckling heroes from seeming like Boy Scouts in tights has been the self-mockery inherent in swashbucklers. The good-hearted pirates and musketeers, the lords and dons who looked out for the weak, were always motivated as much by a passion for fun as by a passion for justice. Swashbuckling heroes know that scaling walls, dueling with swords in both hands, leaping from sails and rooftops, is slightly preposterous behavior. The frequent laughter that split the faces of Fairbanks and Flynn as they were doing battle with some scoundrel was a sign of how lightly they wore their heroism, and a way of acknowledging and overcoming the audience's disbelief.
When you laugh in pleasure at some feat of derring-do, it can seem more wondrous than ever. Fairbanks and Flynn defied gravity -- and the odds -- as easily as Fred Astaire danced up a wall. When rescuing some damsel in distress, a swashbuckler was liable to be grimmer, more concentrated. When only their own hides were at stake, battle was play.
Lest anyone think that kind of comedy is a Hollywood invention, it's right there in Dumas' "Three Musketeers," which is a very funny book. Aramis, Porthos, Athos and later d'Artagnan fight with the crack timing of a comedy team, each member fulfilling a role as defined as those of the Marx Brothers (or, for that matter, those of the Beatles in "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!").
You can draw a line straight from the comedy in Dumas to the comedy in the earliest Hollywood swashbucklers. In "The Mark of Zorro" (the first movie version of the material was made in 1920, only a year after the masked hero made his debut in the Johnston McCulley pulp serial), Douglas Fairbanks treats swordplay so much like play that he even stops in the midst of being pursued by what looks like an entire platoon to eat breakfast. "Never do anything on an empty stomach," he advises the old woman who serves him.
If you didn't know who you were looking at, you might not connect the photos of Fairbanks off-screen -- round-faced and, with his receding hairline, looking like nothing so much as a friendly Rotarian -- with the figure he cut in movies. In "The Mask of Zorro," "Robin Hood" (1922) and "The Black Pirate" (1926), Fairbanks was transformed with curly black hair and the pencil mustache that topped his million-watt smile. His costumes, whether tights or shorts or billowing pants, kerchiefs or gaucho hats, capes or sleeveless pirate blouses, were all cut to show off his strapping build.
Fairbanks had started in the movies as the popular star of a series of light comedies. He might not have become as popular in swashbucklers if he hadn't found a way to carry a sense of humor into them. As Don Diego, the dull, perpetually sleepy young nobleman who is in fact Zorro, Fairbanks has the same relation to his secret identity as Christopher Reeve's Clark Kent has to his Superman. As Reeve did, Fairbanks plays a hero who delights in playacting the dolt in his everyday life. The young woman he courts as Don Diego finds him supremely dull. You can't blame her. Don Diego is forever stifling a yawn; worse, he does tricks with his silk hanky. But wooing her as Zorro, he leaves her in a perpetual swoon.
Comedy is the basis of the stunt work that Fairbanks did. More than 80 years later, his stunts can still leave you laughing and open-mouthed at the same time. His movies usually tease us with a little derring-do, only to unleash a panoply of feats in the finale. In "The Mask of Zorro" Fairbanks uses a hitching post to swing feet first through an open window. While battling a fat, lumbering emissary of the evil Governor, he fights as if he's everywhere at once, making the digital trickery of the multiplying-bad-guys scene in "The Matrix Reloaded" look like nonsense.
