By the Sword
Page 32
Faulkner competed again at the Olympics in 1932 and was a member of the six-man squad that took fourth place in the saber; but by now he was heavily engaged in film work. He played various roles in the 1935 remake of The Three Musketeers (“I was killed five times”) and portrayed fencing masters in at least two other films: prophetic roles, because he later became a full-fledged master and coached several national champions at his Hollywood salle, Falcon Studios. He learned to stage fight scenes under Fred Cavens, whom he met during the shooting of The Three Musketeers, but the friendship foundered once they became competitors. Faulkner applied to work on the 1937 Prisoner of Zenda and was sitting in an anteroom at the Selznick Studios following his interview when Cavens walked in. “What are you doing here?” asked his surprised mentor. Faulkner had nothing to say. Cavens mused aloud, “Bien, I guess we’re rivals now.”
Faulkner got the job and proceeded to do his best work, doubling for the two principals and playing the role of a henchman. The climactic saber duel required four weeks of rehearsal. Three years later he would work with Cavens and Errol Flynn on The Sea Hawk, a propagandistic piece that equated sixteenth-century Spain with Nazi Germany. Somewhat humiliatingly for Faulkner, Cavens was in charge, while he played a palace guardsman. Faulkner received no official credit either for doubling the main villain in the set-piece palace duel or for coaching Flynn, presumably because after only two days’ work on the climactic duel he was replaced, as director Michael Curtiz considered his footwork not “in period.”
For the next four decades Faulkner coached and doubled Hollywood’s leading players (The Court Jester was his personal favorite). During his varied career he was a real-estate agent, shipyard worker, and dancer, even appearing in a couple of New York ballets in 1931–32. He retained his good looks and lithe figure well into his seventies, doing crowd scenes when no longer doubling. “Those big melees aboard pirate ships were the worst,” he recalled. “There were so many fellows in those battles who knew nothing about fencing or swords. They’d wave their blades around like there was no one within a mile of them, and all the time everyone would be so packed together you couldn’t step a foot in any direction.”
Faulkner’s fencing sequences are criticized now, as are Cavens’s, as “tit for tat”—too repetitive to be convincing; but in his best work, as in Prisoner of Zenda, Faulkner produced some of the most exciting swordfights on screen. He in turn hated what he saw of the early 1980s—what he called the “kick ’em in the crotch” school of fighting. He died at the grand age of ninety-five, in 1986. One pupil recalled joining Faulkner’s salle at the age of nine: “The Pirates Club! You had to sign your name in blood—your own blood.” Another fondly called him “a swashbuckling Mr. Chips.”12
In the 1940s and ’50s the leading fight arranger was Jean Heremans, another Belgian fencing champion, first hired in 1948 for the MGM remake of The Three Musketeers. For this he created one of the longest screen duels ever recorded, lasting five minutes. The job was to have gone to Fred Cavens and his son, but they were working on The New Adventures of Don Juan, which because of industrial unrest (the Mafia was said to be trying to muscle in on Hollywood) took more than eighteen months to complete. It cost them their footing at MGM, where Heremans would reign for the next fifteen years.
The Three Musketeers was given a budget of nearly $3 million, almost a record for a nonmusical. It starred Gene Kelly, who threw himself into the role of d’Artagnan so completely that when Lana Turner, playing Milady de Winter, broke a rib after an overvigorous bedroom tussle, he happily used the period of her recovery to take extra lessons with Heremans.
Kelly at one point argued that The Three Musketeers should be made as a musical so he could use his singing and dancing skills. His ballet training, he reflected later, had special value when it came to the swordfights. “In both,” he said, “the feet are always placed outward, making it possible to move quickly from side to side and use your body to the full. Unless your toes are turned outward, period costumes made it very difficult to move easily in a duel. So when I first started fencing I had no problem in moving around but the difficulty was to train my reflexes to deflect with speed and then come back at my opponent.”13 (He failed to mention that he was extensively doubled in the film in both the fencing and riding sequences.) Of all his nonmusical films, The Three Musketeers was Kelly’s favorite. His enthusiasm for swordfighting made him keen to play the hero in Cyrano de Bergerac, which had never been filmed in English. Louis B. Mayer, the studio head whom he approached, told him outright that just one false nose would ruin his career. It was left to José Ferrer, a fencer from the age of ten, to make the picture two years later.
In just one year, 1952, Heremans was involved in remakes of both The Prisoner of Zenda and Scaramouche—for many regarded as the classic film of swordplay, which climaxes with absolutely the longest swordfight in screen history, six and a half minutes. At the beginning of the story, its villain, Gervais, Marquis de La Tour d’Azyr, kills Philippe de Vilmorin in a duel he forces on the younger man. Philippe’s friend André-Louis Moreau—the part played by Stewart Granger—vows revenge. At the book’s climax, with hero and villain in love with the same lady, Thérèse de Plougastel, they duel; André-Louis’s bloodlust is frustrated when he badly wounds the marquis and the fight is stopped before he can finish his enemy off. At the book’s end, however, André-Louis realizes that the countess loves La Tour d’Azyr. “My God!” he cries aloud. “What she must have suffered, then, if I had killed him as I intended!” He lets out a sigh and turns to his companion. “It is perhaps as well that my lunge went wide.”14
This was too subtle for Hollywood tastes, and in the film version the final duel receives the works. The marquis still survives, but this time because André cannot bring himself to deliver the final blow—which he later realizes is because La Tour d’Azyr is his long-lost brother. (A bowdlerization of the original Ramon Novarro version, where the marquis turns out to be André-Louis’s father.)
The Granger-Ferrer fight in Scaramouche is far from being the best ever, as has been claimed, but it caught the public interest. It also caught the attention of the great Italian champion Aldo Nadi, who was by this time living in America, where he hoped to make a career in films. In his memoirs he sets out to make an example of Scaramouche, employing all the self-righteous scorn he could muster. Of the main duel, he says, “not twenty seconds, when coldly viewed, could be called, even by the wildest stretch of any Hollywood press agent’s imagination, genuine swordsmanship.… The time has come to try—merely try, of course—to call a halt to such utterly ridiculous spectacles which crudely offend one of the noblest arts and sciences of the world.… Scaramouche had everything that typifies Hollywood swordsmanship—with a vengeance.”§ Reviewing the main locale of the fight—theater stalls, the grand stairway, the foyer, the stage itself—Nadi declares:
No duelist in his right mind would ever even consider fighting on such a terrain.… Not only did we see the fighters more than precariously balanced in the air, leaning out of the theater boxes or dangling from ropes also suspended from said boxes, and fighting all the time; we also saw, after the foolish interlude of the staircase, the duelists walk, that is, balance themselves, on the tops of the orchestra seats from the back of the theater straight on down to the stage, and fighting all the time—or at least whenever they could, poor fellows.15
This is using a sledgehammer to kill a fly and in many ways wrongheaded; but it reminds us how far swordplay had been taken by Hollywood in the search for entertainment. Scaramouche was a popular success, and, although Ferrer is a mediocre fencer and Granger handicapped by a heavy frame and general lack of deftness, they go at it enthusiastically enough. Granger—who had a double for The Prisoner of Zenda but did the fencing himself in Scaramouche—took lessons from a top British coach whenever he was in London. “Mel Ferrer did some of his own fencing, but he wouldn’t concentrate,” Granger revealed in a 1980s interview. “If a pretty girl came on to
the set, his eyes would wander.” Ferrer’s “fencing acting,” however, is excellent: as the climactic fight wears on he convincingly tires, visibly running out of moves.
Granger’s double was meant to be Paul Stakker, who also doubled for Johnny Weissmuller (a.k.a. Tarzan). “He was a wonderful fighter and swimmer,” Granger recalled, “but he fenced as if he were boxing. He didn’t have the style. The first time I saw him being photographed for me as a double, I said, ‘Wait a minute, Paul, you must watch me and see the way I fence. I have a certain style. You’ve got to copy the style, because if the style’s no good it won’t look right.’ He looked at me puzzled, and I said, ‘What the hell, sit down, I’ll do it.’ And ended up doing the whole darned film.”
Stewart Granger (right) takes on Mel Ferrer in the 1952 version of Scaramouche. The acerbic Aldo Nadi wrote—as an intended insult—that the film “had everything that typifies Hollywood swordsmanship—with a vengeance.” (illustration credit 10.6)
At one point during the duel, Granger fell, actually knocking himself out. As he came to, he became aware of voices. “One said, ‘Darn, George, he’s bad.’ George was the director, and the man talking was the assistant director.… I could see his face peering down at me, so I kept my eyes closed, pretending to be out, and he said, ‘George, my God, I think he’s dead.’ Then George says in this loud voice, ‘Oh no, what are we going to do? We haven’t finished the film.’ ” At that point Granger opened his eyes and grinned.
Scaramouche has some interesting technical innovations. The director cut the music for the fight scenes, so all we hear is the clash of steel, the grunts of the swordsmen, and the vocal reactions of the audience in the Ambigu Théâtre. Kinetic scenery was used for the first time, that is, special microphones hidden in the scenery picked up the sound of the blades as they landed on curtain or balustrade. The audience also sees part of the fight through the eyes of the fencing master who has taught both men.
Despite Nadi’s strictures, Stewart Granger was praised for his fencing. A typical review described him as “a high-handed Bourbon who is 120 proof with the sword.” Granger and Errol Flynn kept up a friendly rivalry over who was the better swordsman: “Basil was a tremendous fencer, but Errol was not very good,” recalled Granger. “You watch him. He’s got a wonderful figure, and he’s so beautifully coordinated he gives the impression that he’s a good fencer, but he rather slaps the swords together up in the air. I knew him well, and we used to kid each other. I would say, ‘I’m a better fencer than you, for crying out loud; have you seen me at it?’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah, I know. You’re pretty good; but I have slimmer hips.’ ”16
WHAT IS THE RELATION OF COMPETITIVE FENCING TO THE WORLD of film dueling? Often swashbucklers offer a nod to fencing technique—but not more than that. In The Swan (1956), Louis Jourdan plays fencing instructor to Grace Kelly, in her last film role. During a couple of lessons, naturally conducted without masks, we see Kelly performing very proficiently—a long lunge, a beat attack, then parries in prime, seconde, quarte, and octave, finishing with a doublé. “We must practice the art of making a feint,” Jourdan tells her, “it’s a sham attack followed by a genuine one in another quarter. A fencer is always in danger of revealing his intentions to his adversary—and that he must never do. His opponent must never know from one moment to the next what he is thinking. Like everything else, it’s a question of practice.” Then there is the master in Scaramouche: “Fight with the head. Forget the heart.… You have a demon in you this fine day. Lose it, or you’ll not live to see another.”
Scriptwriters were generally willing to turn a blind eye to anachronisms (most versions of Robin Hood use techniques—the lunge, various parries—not developed till centuries later), but they seemed to have caught on to the way in which thrusting weapons overtook the broadsword. In The Mark of Zorro (1940) Tyrone Power declares, “Dashing about with a cutlass is quite out of fashion.… It hasn’t been done since the Middle Ages,” while Errol Flynn in The Master of Ballantrae (1953) is exhorted by the French pirate captain, in mid-duel, “Keep the arm supple at all times—it’s one of the elementary rules.” But then verisimilitude was rarely the point: Fred Cavens had Flynn performing counterparries and lightning feints that would have been impossible with the long, heavy weapons of the time; and Dumas himself described duels in The Three Musketeers in terms of nineteenth-century fencing. On the other hand, in The Mississippi Gambler (1953), when Tyrone Power triumphs in a takeoff of a nineteenth-century French duel, his victim sneers admiringly, “That same low-line hit again.” His next opponent adds, “My compliments.… You have courage to let the point come so close before parrying.” Both moves were typical of the fencer who claims to have choreographed the fights—none other than Aldo Nadi.
WHEN STEWART GRANGER TOOK LESSONS FOR SCARAMOUCHE IT was from the British national coach, Bob Anderson—and in Anderson we meet Cavens’s true successor. Born in 1923, Anderson began fencing while a Royal Marine, breaking into the English team in 1950 in both foil and saber—although he was a fine épéeist, too, and later British professional champion in all three weapons. At the 1950 world championships he retired with a damaged thumb just before the final eight and never again had such a good opportunity to enter the top flight. He reached the quarterfinals at the Helsinki Olympics but had already begun coaching, and on his return from the Games he resumed his work as assistant to the then national coach, Roger Crosnier.
The following year, Crosnier returned to France and Anderson was his obvious replacement. He proceeded to rack up another six Olympics as a coach, won a top European saber competition in 1962, and oversaw Britain’s rise to third place in the fencing pantheon after France and Italy. But the public-school ethos remained dominant, and Anderson, who never had his own salle, was treated largely as a packhorse, traveling around the country running courses, often for beginners. He kept going for fifteen years before emigrating to Canada.
There were no such problems with his Hollywood career. A friend introduced him to Errol Flynn, who liked his athletic, ultraromantic style of fencing. The two worked together on Ballantrae, with Anderson as stunt double, but during filming in Sicily he pierced Flynn in the thigh. Flynn said immediately that it was his own fault—he had been distracted by a boat passing by—and soon the two men were off drinking together. For years afterward, film crews would tell new cast members, “Watch out for Anderson—he’s the one who skewered Flynn!”
The Master of Ballantrae was followed by two further films together, Crossed Swords and The Dark Avenger, and thereafter Anderson was rarely out of film work, coaching Roger Moore in Moonraker, Ryan O’Neal in Barry Lyndon, Michael Caine in Kidnapped, Sean Connery in Highlander, Eric Roberts in By the Sword, and Richard Gere in First Knight, among others. He even appeared in front of the camera as Darth Vader for the fight scenes with Mark Hamill in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. “Since Mark played Luke Skywalker without any protection at all, it was realized that due to the restrictions on Darth Vader’s costume, especially when it came to the field of vision from behind the mask, Mark could easily be injured. So they needed an expert swordsman.” During the fight in the Freezing Chamber Han Solo is carbonized. “They had to keep the stage at a very high temperature so that the steam did not disperse. This meant that I was swordfighting with Luke Skywalker all day in this temperature for about five days. I lost fourteen pounds.” The swords had a carbon-fiber blade, painted with reflective paint, so that they could simulate laser light.
Anderson was swordmaster for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford for several years and held the same position with Walt Disney Films from 1972 to 1980. I first met him in 1966, when I signed up for a course he was teaching in west London, and ended up taking lessons from him as part of the British team from 1970 on. In the summer of 2000 I drove down to his house on the south coast of England, near Bognor Regis, and we talked about his career over seaside fish and chips. “What I usu
ally do,” he says, “is put together a basic routine as it comes into my head, with a high amount of concentration on getting the rhythm right. The most important thing concerning the final choreographed fight is the changing of the rhythm of the blades. If it all goes along at the same tempo it gets boring, so you have to do moves that are broad and slow, then change to fast and fluid.” One thinks back to the vision of Fred Cavens eighty years before.
Darth Vader, as played by Bob Anderson, crosses beams with Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back. If anything, as the Star Wars series goes on, swordplay has become an even more important element. (illustration credit 10.7)
During the 1970s styles changed. In Aldo Nadi’s opinion, “the difference between competitive fencing and stage or screen dueling is as vast as the difference between life itself and the tenuous illusion of it offered on the screen,” a view that, however tendentiously put, has haunted directors for decades: they want duels to look as if they were being fought by experts. Then, some time in the 1970s, there was a spate of swashbuckler parodies, and when the “straight” version returned it did so in earnest—swordfights didn’t have to look authentic from a purist’s point of view, they had to look as if the combatants’ lives were truly at stake. Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977) had its principals, David Carradine and Harvey Keitel, flailing about exhausted, stopping to care for even minor wounds, getting covered in blood, needing time for recovery. For the first time in a film a duelist desperately clutches his opponent’s blade with his nonfencing hand, with predictable results. Suddenly, wounds hurt.
In 1988 Anderson was invited to organize the fight scenes for The Princess Bride, adapted from William Goldman’s tongue-in-cheek novel, alongside the stunt coordinator Peter Diamond: “It was a turning point in my career. I was beginning to think that my style, built on the Flynn model, was out of date. ‘Reality’ was what everybody wanted. But the film showed that the romantic kind of swordplay hadn’t been displaced.”17 The male leads in The Princess Bride, Mandy Patinkin and Cary Elwes, besides discussing the finer points of swordplay, got so involved that they would wander off fighting hammer and tongs just for the hell of it and had to be brought to order by Anderson so filming could continue. One sound recordist typified the film’s cult status by memorizing its entire dialogue, and one can see why it was so popular: “What in the world have you been learning?” “The sword.” “Madness. You have spent ten entire years just learning to fence?” “No, not just learning to fence … I squeezed rocks.” This was parody and romance at the same time.