Old swashbucklers?

[Patrick]

Not very well known or mentioned, but worth mentioning is actor Louis Hayward. He made a bunch of swashbucklers during the 1940's:

The Man in the Iron Mask
The Son of Monte Cristo
The return of Monte Cristo
The Black Arrow
The Pirates of Capri
The Fortunes of Captain Blood
The Lady and the Bandit
Lady in the Iron Mask

The 1948 version of The Three Musketeers with Gene Kelly and Lana Turner is also worth seeing.

P.

 

[Green Falcon]

For example, Rathbone talks about how impressed he was with Danny Kaye when they did The Court Jester: Apparently, Kaye learned fencing from scratch for the role, but was better than Rathbone (and not just because he was much younger) by the time that they shot the duel, after only a few weeks of training.

Actually -- interesting behind the scenes story on that:

I do stage combat from time to time (I'm a regular theater and Rennaissance Festival performer), and recently, I attended a fight choreography workshop. The gentleman running the workshop had worked with Bob Anderson (famous swordmaster -- worked with everybody from Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone to the cast of Lord of the Rings).

Anderson tells an anecdote about that famous story...he says that the truth of the matter is that Kaye had a photographic memory, and so he looked over the fight choreography (for his fight with Rathbone in The Court Jester), ran through it with Rathbone once, and then said "OK, I'm fine"....and refused to rehearse it any further!

So, the problem that Basil Rathbone had with him wasn't so much because of superior fencing skills, but rather than they ended up having to film the fight with only a single rehearsal!

Stage fighting and true fencing are, obviously, very different things...and stage fighting is all about working together with your partner. So I'm not surprised that Rathbone had problems with that fight!