Scaramouche and the Swashbuckler

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 cinema scope for Byron Haskin’s Long John Silver. And Haskin had photographed the famous swordfight between John Barrymore and Montague Love in the 1926 Adventures of Don Juan, a film Richards discussed at length. Still I did not expect Owen to come up with the major critical insight of the article, but that is what he did.

He argued that the ideal swashbuckling hero needed a certain playfulness to make the highly artificial form with its melodramatic plots and hectic action work believably. We both admired the way Swordsmen of the Screen related the films to their literary origins in the novels of Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini and the knightly epics. But Owen insisted that in Richards’s discussion of a whole range of films that extended fromRobin Hood to masked avengers, the musketeers to the Spanish Main, not to mention the Sheiks of Araby, he had not distinguished between excellent period actors such as Tyrone Power, Charlton Heston and Stewart Granger, and performers like Douglas Fairbanks father and son, Errol Flynn, and Louis Haywood, who had the lightness of touch that slightly distanced them from the delightfully preposterous action.

Of course, good period actors had made some excellent swashbucklers, Owen conceded, but then they acted the playfulness or were helped by the writers and directors. In The Mark of Zorro (1940) Tyrone Power is splendid as Don Diego, the resolute hero who pretends to be a pop in jay so he can become the caped and masked Zorroand terrify the corrupt governor into resigning. ButZorro’s swashbuckling—a sword coming from behind a curtain to snuff a candle, spectacular rides across darkened landscapes—was created by director RoubenMamoulian and writers John Taintor Foote, Garrett Fortand Bess Meredyth.

Owen and I also believed that many of the films described in the book were period melodramas rather than swashbucklers and that Jeffrey Richards was treating quite different films as though it was indeed “all for one and one for all”. Not that we intended any reflection on Richards’s scholarship. Clearly he had researched a mass of reviews and commentary to reconstruct “lost” films and had tracked down many rare works that we both could only dimly remember from Saturday afternoon matinees. And how could you dislike a book that begins like this:

Never to have sailed the Spanish Main with Errol Flynn, never to have ridden the king’s highway with Louis Haywood, never to have fought the Cardinal’s guard with Douglas Fairbanks is never to have dreamed, never to have lived, never to have been young. For at their best, the swashbuckling films brought to life the heroic dreams and romantic fancies that are at the heart of the folk tradition ofthe English-speaking world. To see them today, their power undimmed by the years, is not just to recapture the golden carefree days of childhood but also lost ideals and vanished virtues … of chivalry, gallantry, patriotism, duty and honour.

Nevertheless, Richards’s own research indicated that the swashbuckling movies were richer and more complex than even he thought, and we hoped our review would begin a debate that would encourage our colleagues to examine the genre more closely. It was not to be. Richards participated in an excellent BBC radio documentary that expanded on material in the book. Owen and I lectured about swashbucklers at Mitchell CAE, and that was as far as it went. Discourse theory was beginning to contaminate media studies in universities, and not even the new Film and History conferences were interested in papers on the swashbuckler.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, getting access toeven the key films of the genre was difficult even for the likes of Jeffrey Richards. He seems not to have been able to see the first Scaramouche (1923), at least not in a good print, and could not have seen the 1926 Bardelys the Magnificent (lost until 2006—see “Silent Magic” in last month’s Quadrant) and may not have seen the 1924 SeaHawk. (As I heard it, the only complete print in the late 1970s was held by a collector in Los Angeles after some idiot at Warner Brothers damaged the sea fighting scenes while looking for material to cut into the 1940 version.)But now with many of the key films currently screening on Turner Classic Movies and with both the first Scaramouche and Sea Hawk released on DVD, in a small way Jeffrey Richards’s work can be taken further.

FOR ME the real discovery in researching this article has been Rex Ingram’s Scaramouche. In Swordsmen of the Screen Richards summarises the plot, then moves on to a detailed discussion of the 1953 remake, persuasively arguing that the second version is one of the great swashbucklers. However, the first Scaramouche is not really a swashbuckler at all. Rather, it is a reasonably faithful adaptation of Rafael Sabatini’s novel. My battered copy of the book—the twentieth edition—is illustrated by stills from the movie that almost exactly correspond to the narrative.

The Turner Classic Movies DVD looks as if it comes from an original print, so for the first time I was able to see what the contemporary reviewers meant when they talked about the pictorial richness of director Rex Ingram’s visual style. The National Board of Review’s writer stressed the “stillness” of the individual images and the “meticulous care” lavished on “each scene”. Even after eighty years it is easy to see what he meant. Although influenced by D.W. Griffith, except for the climax Ingram did not adopt the master’s cross-cutting between different locales—the famous parallel editing derived from Dickens’s novels. Ingram emphasised the individual images, creating detailed foreground and background action even for quite intimate scenes. Often there will be parallel action in the same locale representing different plot strands that are then interwoven. Cinematographer John Seitz seems to have used the older very slow orthochromatic film stock that had great depth of field for the exteriors, and the new softer panchromatic film for the delicately lit interiors. Sometimes the foreground action is brightly lit against softer, almost painterly, backgrounds. In other sequences set in rooms and corridors, foreground and background are in pin-sharp focus. It is a style that would work superbly in the new high-definition process, and makes most modern cinematography seem the work of visual illiterates.

Opening in France just before the Revolution and concluding just after the attack on the Tuileries, Sabatini’s novel deftly combines historical romance, picaresque novel and revenge tragedy. The hero, Andre Moreau, described in one of the best opening sentences in romantic fiction as “born with the gift of laughter and a sense that all the world is mad”, swears revenge on master swordsman, the Marquis de la Tour, who had killed Andre’s friend Philippe de Vilmorin in a duel because “he had a dangerous gift of eloquence”and was thus a threat to the established order. In the best traditions of romantic melodrama, Andre takes on a number of different roles in his pursuit ofthe Marquis—lawyer, agitator, actor and finally, swordsman and representative to the National Assembly with our hero finally confronting his adversary sword in hand.

There are the usual Sabatini misunderstandings with the tiresome heroine—done much better in the movie adaptations—and an excellent portrayal of the beginning of the Revolution viewed from the sidelines with Danton and Marat as minor characters. In addition, Andre, when he is not mooning after the boring childhood sweetheart the author saddled him with, makes an enjoyably ruthless avenger who in his guise as an actor does not scruple to denounce his enemy from the stage, provoking a riot in which the Marquis is almost lynched. De la Tour is equally interesting. He turns out to be Andre’s father, but Sabatini does a good job of portraying in him the kind of limited but sincere noble whose inflexibility helped provoke the revolutionary extremists. Best of all, revenge is replaced by a tentative reconciliation, with Andre saving his father’s life.

Ingram and his writer Willis Goldbeck slightly simplified Sabatini’s narrative but the structure remains pleasingly episodic and the action is realistic. Ramon Novarro as Andre and Lewis Stone playing de la Tour fence well but their confrontations are choreographed like real duels with small deft moves almost exactly as described in the novel. (One of Sabatini’s great strengths as a historical novelist is that he understood that fencing bouts, and duels, are really chess at high speed, and he described them as such using the correct technical terms.) Ingram makes the climactic duel more dangerous by confining the contest to an archway, a frame within the frame.

The crowd scenes too are splendidly staged, with a truly scarifying recreation of the mob’s attack on the Tuileries that captures all Sabatini’s horror at the mindless violence. Perhaps the film’s most powerful single image is of the battered de la Tour dragging himself from beneath the bodies on the palace stairs. The moment has no counterpart in the book and is the creation of Ingram and his collaborators.

Performances are by any standards extraordinary. Tous they may seem stylised but they are always truthful and ultimately very moving. Ramon Novarro’s Andre is Sabatini’s hero to the life: ironic, deadly and, in an improvement on the original, finally compassionate. Lewis Stone as the Marquis gives one of the greatest performances in silent film I have ever seen—a superbly crafted emotional journey from repellent villain to tragichero that transcends Sabatini’s creation. Alice Terry as Aline, Andre’s beloved, makes her a far more believable character than she is in the book.

Scaramouche is one of the silent era’s greatest achievements—a powerful fable of revenge and redemption. However, it is not a swashbuckler.

FILMGOERS HAD to wait until 1952 to see a swashbuckling Scaramouche. Comparing the two versions tells us much about the genre. Both films’ themes are the same: revenge, honour, redemption.The main characters are also the same, except that the Marquis, surnamed “de Mayne” in this MGM version, turns out to be Andre’s brother. It is the tone that iscompletely different.

Andre, as played by Stewart Granger, is at first adashing womaniser making violent love to Eleanor Parker’s delectably fiery Lenore. Writers Ronald Millar, George Froeschel and an uncredited Talbot Jennings provide him with lines such as “The oceans are full of fishand the heavens with stars. To contemplate one woman to the exclusion of all others may be for some men but not for me” and “I fall in love constantly, indiscriminately, it is the same as not falling in love at all”. With dialogue like that, Granger can act the playfulness splendidly. He was also a fan of Ramon Novarro and would have known exactly what the great silent star had achieved portraying Sabatini’s dark avenger in the previous version. (Lewis Stone too was playing a small part in the film, and Granger used his star power to ensure the old man was treated with proper respect on the set.) So in the dramatic scenes Granger plays it straight, with none of the ironic distance to be found in some of Errol Flynn’s work. Not a “natural” swashbuckler but a superb period actor, Granger creates perhaps the most remarkable swashbuckling performance of them all.

One of the writers’ most pleasing inventions was to treat the triangle love story as comedy. Instead of mother and sweetheart pleading with Andre not to fight the Marquis, his two girlfriends, Lenore and Janet Leigh’s Aline, contrive a series of delightfully exasperating stratagems to keep them apart. Aline’s motivation is better here than in the original, as earlier she has seen Andre nearly killed by de Mayne. In another twist, Andre and Aline are kept apart by a device straight out of eighteenth-century comedy; he mistakenly believes she is his sister. When Andre becomes Scaramouche while hiding out in a Commedia Dell’Arte troupe, Granger and Parker play with gusto in a series of very funny slapstick routines.

Director George Sidney and the writers discarded the original’s picaresque structure in which Andre pursues his revenge through the law and as an agitator. Instead the story becomes Andre’s quest for the fencing skills to defeat de Mayne. The villain is played with great panache by Mel Ferrer as a smiling sadist who delights in humiliating his opponents before dispatching them. Naturally we can’t wait for our hero to do the same to him. Appropriately, their final confrontation takes place in the theatre, with Granger upstaging everyone in his Scaramouche costume and the duel moving from the staircase to the boxes and finally the stage itself.

As with the great Warner Brothers swashbucklers, this is studio film-making at its best, and this sequence is one of the finest examples of the duel as cinematic spectacle. As Jeffrey Richards was the first to point out, in the MGM Scaramouche the French Revolution has been relegated to the background, and the focus is on the clash between the two main protagonists. And while there is some very good fencing in all of the duels, soon chandeliers are falling (nearly killing Granger during filming) and the fencing becomes more theatrical—as Owen pointed out, if anyone tried any of the moves in a real fight they would be dead in seconds—and it all turns into a hugely enjoyable fantasy.

SO WHAT does comparing these films tell us about the swashbuckler itself?

The films may be fantasy but the form is never trivial. Particularly when played by actors of the calibre of Granger and Ferrer, the conflicts over honour and vengeance are only too real. This is also true of the great Warners swashbucklers. Screenwriter Casey Robinson told me that in his adaptation of Sabatini’s Captain Blood (1935) for Michael Curtiz he deliberately emphasised the original’s theme of resistance to tyranny; a theme that became even more important in Robin Hood(1938); while The Sea Hawk (1940) is a deliberate anti-Nazi allegory.

In addition, the genre as it evolved in the 1930s and 1940s became formally very complex. The action, although actually very dangerous—a stuntman was killed on Robin Hood—was always perceived as symbolic. There is little or nothing of the realities of maritime warfare in the magnificently staged sea fight that opens the 1940 Sea Hawk. But the Spanish galleon is a powerful symbol of Spain’s might (standing in for Nazi Germany’s) and English privateers represent the British Navy. The film acquired further resonances from the Battle of the River Plate, the running fight between Commodore Harwood’s squadron and the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, as well as from the rescue by HMS Cossack of British sailors from the Graf Spee’s supply ship the Altmark—“the Navy is here”. It did not take much for audiences to equate the slaves rescued by Errol Flynn in the movie with the Altmark’s captives, especially when the parallels were emphasised by the film’s advertising.

All of this was enhanced by Erich Korngold’s scores for the Warners swashbucklers, which influenced composers like Alfred Newman (The Mark of Zorro), and Victor Young (Scaramouche). Korngold especially turned the swashbuckler into a kind of grand opera complete with leitmotifs for the themes and characters. It is hardly surprising that Curtiz, Sidney and Mamoulian were all excellent directors of musicals.

Comparing the two versions of Scaramouche demonstrates that from the beginning there has been an interaction between the straight period drama and the more formally complex swashbuckler. With the release on DVD of more of the silents and, with luck, some of the rarer swashbucklers and historical dramas from the sound era, we will be able to learn more about this shamefully neglected film history and take Owen Weingott’s and Jeffrey Richards’s insights even further.

Neil McDonald writes: As regular readers of this column may recall, Owen Weingott died in 2002. We had one last swashbuckle together in 1997 when in collaboration with fencing master Angelo Sant’Angelo and Debra Holland we devised a presentation for the Shakespeare Festival at Bowral that reconstructed the duel between Mercutio and Tybalt from Romeo and Juliet. Owen read out Benvolio’s description of the encounter in his plea to the Prince, then Angelo as Tybalt employed the fencing moves derided by Mercutio—“the passado, the ponto reverso”—only to have them “easily” parried by Debra as Mercutio. This justified the moment when Owen, now playing Romeo, made his fatal intervention.