Hollywood pretty much abandoned swashbucklers as the '50s drew to a close. Which is what made the appearance of the 1998 "The Mask of Zorro," starring Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, so surprising. The movie is one of the most glorious and stirring adventures Hollywood has ever produced, a more than worthy successor to Flynn and Fairbanks. When Zorro rides astride two steeds and leaps over a low-hanging branch in his way only to land upright back on the galloping horses, the whole spirit of swashbucklers was, for those few moments, alive again on the screen. (As were the marvels of stunt work, which have been increasingly overshadowed by CGI.)

For the last 40 years, the best friend swashbucklers have had has been the French director Philippe de Broca. It's a pity that he's best known for the icky antiwar fable "King of Hearts," because the film has overshadowed his better work. He's frankly commercial, which has always kept his name from being mentioned alongside his contemporaries in the French nouvelle vague. But at his best, he's the kind of director you pray for in commercial movies, a born entertainer. Last year, American audiences finally got to see his 1998 "On Guard!" with Daniel Auteuil and a hilarious Vincent Perez. De Broca didn't fuss about how it wasn't possible to make a swashbuckler in this day and age. He simply made it and trusted audiences to respond. (Its commercial life here was brief but it was one of the few movies I've ever seen at a critic's screening that was applauded at the end. You could feel the audience's gratitude for being given such a marvelous entertainment.)

"On Guard!" was de Broca's second foray into the genre. His first, the 1964 "Cartouche," has just been beautifully restored on an Anchor Bay DVD. It's a tricky movie, starting out with all the brio and good spirits of swashbucklers and making a tone shift that ends in tragedy. "Cartouche" doesn't leave you buoyant in the way that the best swashbucklers do, but it may be the single most romantic entry in the genre. And it features the pleasure of seeing Jean-Paul Belmondo, playing a street thief who becomes a Robin Hood figure, getting to try on the role of swashbuckler. It also features the ravishing young Claudia Cardinale and her ripe, frankly carnal beauty as his gypsy mistress. What's distinctive about both "Cartouche" and "On Guard!" is de Broca's instinctive talent for pageantry and color and his ability to indulge us in Gilded Age luxury without sacrificing pace. He's that great rare combination of master craftsman and fan. You get the feeling he's making these movies because he'd like to see them, and his love for the genre is palpable. To watch "Cartouche" and "On Guard!" is to feel flattered by a director who is out to indulge you.

I said earlier that while swashbucklers have disappeared, their descendants have always been with us -- not in the obvious imitators, like the Indiana Jones movies, but in others. Their spirit is present in all heroes who go about their duty with a feeling of joy, a taste for sensual indulgence. The six Johnny Weismuller-Maureen O'Sullivan "Tarzan" movies, maybe the sweetest adventure movies of them all, are jungle variations on the swashbuckling formula of daring hero and adoring damsel in distress. One of the places contemporary swashbucklers have most frequently surfaced is in pop espionage thrillers. John Steed and Emma Peel in TV's "The Avengers" have the spirit of swashbucklers, as do Modesty Blaise and her sidekick/soul mate Willie Garvin in Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise novels.

The swashbuckling spirit is surely present in James Bond, at least in Bond the rogue libertine as played by Sean Connery (rather than the repressed puritan sadist of Ian Fleming's terrible novels). You couldn't call the blaxploitation movies of the '70s in any way innocent, though at her best Pam Grier is probably the closest the movies have ever come to a great female swashbuckler. In Hong Kong, Michelle Yeoh and Brigitte Lin have come close to claiming that mantle for themselves. (The marvelous comic-book action film "Heroic Trio," starring Yeoh, Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung, is a descendant of the swashbuckler.) But then Hong Kong cinema has long had the corner on the physical astonishment Fairbanks and Flynn specialized in. Were they alive to see him, both men would bow in respect to Jackie Chan. And even in the bloodiest John Woo pictures, Chow-Yun Fat has been one of the movie's great romantic action heroes.

Heartening as that list is, it leaves plenty of contemporary actors who could make their mark in swashbucklers. It may be too late for Patrick Swayze, whose physical gifts have largely been ignored in the movies (what a Tarzan he'd have made!). But George Clooney or Ewan McGregor probably could pull off such roles, and Jeremy Northam definitely could. Other than the great Hong Kong female stars like Yeoh and Lin, women are a tougher question, though Catherine MacCormack displayed a nice way with a sword in the yummy Renaissance bodice ripper "Dangerous Beauty."

But whoever plays the roles, and whatever form swashbucklers take, the movies need their spirit. We feel close to swashbuckling heroes in a way we never could to the traditional stern, lantern-jawed male authority figure. There's always distance between us and the men on-screen acting more bravely than we could. And while nobody fools themselves that they could do what Fairbanks or Flynn or Lancaster do, the swashbuckling hero, in his physical abandon and capacity for sensual pleasure, has the common touch that endears actors to us. John Barrymore had it, so did Jean Harlow, and Michael Caine has had it in spades for years. You don't go to swashbucklers for moral complexity. You have to look elsewhere for the darkness that some actors have explored in the characters we have been taught to think of as heroes. But saving audiences from cynicism is no small task. Allowing us to believe in heroes, and allowing us to laugh with them, is as noble a feat as any a swashbuckler has ever accomplished.

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