MY LATE FRIEND Owen Weingott was best known as an actor, director, teacher, fencing master and fight choreographer. But as his former students will attest, he was an acute observer of film and stage acting and could have been a fine critic. This was why in 1977 I asked him to collaborate with me on a review for the Australian of Jeffrey Richards’s book Swordsmen of the Screen, a pioneering study of the Hollywood swashbuckler. The idea was that I would write the film history and Owenwould discuss the swordplay. He had after all choreographed the first mass duel in…