Leaping onto tabletops and mantels, swinging up to plunk down on a railing and laugh at his furious foe, even keeping up a flurry of sword work while he's lying flat on his back, Fairbanks is a perpetual motion machine. In "The Black Pirate," boasting to his hearties that he can take a ship all by himself, he swims from a fishing boat onto the front of the ship he intends to plunder and shinnies up the prow before swinging himself onto the deck. There he cuts a rope and flies up in the air to land on the topmost mast. What follows is Fairbanks' single most visually beautiful stunt: sliding down the sail of the ship on the blade of his knife. (If you're lucky enough to see the picture in its original two-strip Technicolor process, as it appears on the Kino laserdisc, the movie itself is one long visual delight, the color both soft and glowing.) It's the sort of physical display to make both dancers and athletes sigh with envy.

It was Fairbanks' "Robin Hood" (now available from Kino in a DVD that restores all the film's delicate tinting), though, a mammoth production with sets that covered five acres and reached 90 feet into the air, that gave his physical exuberance full reign. The director, Allan Dwan, never lets the sets overwhelm the actors or the story. He uses their sheer size to allow Fairbanks to slide down tapestries, scale castle walls, jump from turret to turret. The sets seem to exist to allow Fairbanks the chance to become the stuff of Isaac Newton's nightmares -- a walking, leaping, jumping rejoinder to the laws of gravity. At one point, Fairbanks jumps onto a closing drawbridge as casually as if he were stepping onto an escalator. Even safe in Sherwood among his Merry Men, this Robin Hood can barely contain himself, leaping instead of walking.

Robin Hood is the ne plus ultra of swashbuckler roles. No other part offers an actor quite the combination of heroism and romance, along with the chance to act as avenger and protector of the weak. It's no wonder that Fairbanks' successor, Errol Flynn, would in 1938 (the year before Fairbanks died), have a go at the role in the big, handsome Warner Bros. color version directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley. Even without the tales of Flynn's off-screen whoring and boozing in your head, he cuts a lascivious figure.

Fairbanks' Robin Hood professed himself "afeared of women" before Maid Marian won his heart. When Flynn looks at Olivia de Havilland's Marian, his little mustache sliding into a diagonal smirk, you know that no such fear has ever crossed his heart. (It works wonders for de Havilland; this is one of her most likable performances, where the smile she returns to Flynn contains a hint that she'd enjoy the attentions of this manly man.) This isn't to make Flynn's Robin Hood sound like a green-tighted lecher. Flynn, like the young Clark Gable, had the ability to make a joke of his hypermasculinity. Here, his offhand machismo plays right into the lust (for adventure as well as women) at the heart of swashbucklers.

In the movie's most famous scene, Robin Hood interrupts a feast at the hall of the evil Prince John, striding into the proceedings with a dead stag around his shoulders, which he proceeds to dump on the royal table right in front of the prince (who, lest we forget, has made hunting in the king's forests punishable by death). In the tradition of Fairbanks, Flynn's effrontery is both funny and bracing. Flynn plays the sylvan socialist as entertainer -- and he's at his most amusing when, as in this scene, he's working a room that doesn't appreciate the joke.

There is one more "Robin Hood" worth mentioning, though it's nearly unknown to American audiences. That's the 1991 version produced by Twentieth Century Fox, directed in typically solid fashion by John Irvin, and starring Patrick Bergin in the title role and Uma Thurman as Maid Marian. The movie went into production at the same time as Paramount was preparing the horrendous Kevin Costner version. Not wanting to compete, the studio released it theatrically in Europe and showed it here on the Fox network in a version that (like the video that followed) was cut by more than half an hour. Even in this sliced-down version (which is the only way I've ever been able to see it), it's dandy.

At first this "Robin Hood" can seem off-putting because Irvin conceived of it as a dark version of the familiar tale. It's the Robin Hood story as it might have been told on an early Fairport Convention LP, as a mythic battle between the unmovable forces of authority and the irresistible spirit of paganism. The picture is shot (by Jason Lehel) almost totally in mist-covered earth tones, which is a neat visual metaphor for the pall that falls over the land during the absence of King Richard. There's a startling blasphemous moment toward the end when the fleeing Sheriff of Nottingham runs straight into Friar Tuck and the rest of the Merry Men, dressed as profane-looking satyrs and spirits. "Hello, Devil! Welcome to Hell!" Friar Tuck greets him, before sending the evil bastard there. And the pagan spirit blooms fully in the lovely ending as Robin and Marian marry and, magically, the very earth around them blooms into lush, green springtime.

Swashbucklers continued to be made after the heydays of Fairbanks and Flynn, with stars like Ronald Colman, but no single major actor was ever again associated with the genre as they were. By the time MGM produced its lavish "Scaramouche" in 1952 ("The BIG word in entertainment is 'SCARAMOUCHE,' pronounced adventure!" the ads read, helpfully), as Dick Dinman points out in his liner notes to the Criterion laserdisc version, studios were nervous about the costs associated with historical epics.

"Scaramouche" cost MGM $3.5 million, a significant sum at the time, more than the studio spent on the musicals it made at the time. It got its money back and a terrific picture besides. The highlights are Stewart Granger, ludicrously handsome and witty to boot, in the title role, a range of beauties -- Janet Leigh, Nina Foch and the luscious Eleanor Parker -- in the supporting cast, and the famous climax, a six-and-a-half-minute sword duel between Granger and Mel Ferrer conducted along the edges of private boxes in a lavish theater. It's a doozy.

The same year also brought perhaps the most sheerly pleasurable of all swashbucklers, "The Crimson Pirate," directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Burt Lancaster, whose strapping physicality makes his entry in the genre seem inevitable. The movie had a good script (by Roland Kibbee), with Lancaster as a pirate lured into helping a band of rebels overthrow the oppressive British reign over a Caribbean island. But the real subject of the movie was a celebration of the physical exuberance of the genre. Lancaster had started out as an acrobat. Here he teams with his former partner Nick Cravat (delightful as his mute sidekick -- try to imagine Harpo Marx as a pirate), and his physical prowess damn near leaves even Fairbanks in its shadow.

In the movie's first shot, we see Lancaster swing from one mast of a pirate ship to the other and then, in close-up, turn that dazzling smile right into the camera. In one scene, the gorgeous and bored companion of a baron moans, "I wish there was something to break up the monotony of this voyage." On cue Lancaster drops in from an overhead hatch to steal the ship and, to the lady's obvious liking, a kiss. The movie is essentially one long pursuit, allowing Lancaster one stunt after another (which he only got to do once more, in Carol Reed's 1956 circus drama "Trapeze"). He's the most dashing of clowns as he leaps and runs and tumbles. If you're looking to introduce kids to the pleasures of swashbucklers, or just to older movies, "The Crimson Pirate," which has just been released on DVD, is your ticket. I can't imagine any kid -- or any adult -- not loving it.

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