By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Anderson’s work on this film led directly to his being asked to arrange the fights for the 1993 remake of The Three Musketeers, this time with Chris O’Donnell as d’Artagnan. “The odd thing about all this is that a lot of modern swordmasters think that the old fights of the Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks era are passé. Fortunately, Rob Reiner, who directed The Princess Bride, wanted exactly that type of fight. I remember thinking that maybe it wouldn’t go down well, but everyone raved about it. It’s nice to know that people still like the romantic sort of swordfight, where there’s no hacking, with blood all over the place and gimmick stunts.”

  The blades used were once steel, but more recently have been made of wood, Duralumin, aluminum, plastic, or carbon fiber. Since these replicas sound dull, the actual clash of steel against steel has to be added later. Under Anderson’s instruction, actors begin with slow-motion choreography, then build up to movements in real time. For the 1993 Three Musketeers this process took a month. But the care is necessary. Errol Flynn, recalls Anderson, nearly cut off Christopher Lee’s thumb during the filming of The Warriors (1955), while Fred Graham, the stuntman who fenced Flynn in Basil Rathbone’s place in The Adventures of Robin Hood, first injured his foot during the duel on the staircase at Nottingham Castle, then later plunged several feet from the balcony to the studio floor while filming Guisborne’s death fall and ended up in hospital. In a duel during The Sword of the Avenger (1948), Ralph Faulkner caught his foot on a wire and pitched forward directly onto his opponent’s sword, whose point just missed his eye. David Niven (with whom Bob also worked) tells of the time when he tripped during a fight sequence while playing Bonnie Prince Charlie, his blade going straight into the leg of a nearby extra. To his relief, the limb proved to be made of wood. Or so Niven would have us believe.‖

  OFFICIALLY ANDERSON RETIRED IN 1991, BUT IN 1993 CAME THE Dumas remake, then in 1996 he was lured back with another Mask of Zorro, in which all three principals, Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Antonio Banderas, were keen to do their own fencing. “Catherine was an ex-dancer, which helped. Hopkins thought he was Flynn. He’d say, ‘That’s pretty good; I like that,’ and when I told him that was enough, he’d counter with ‘Just five more times.’ ” Anderson rates Banderas as the best natural talent with whom he has ever worked. “You need four elements to make a champion: anticipation; a superb sense of rhythm; timing; and physical ability, particularly leg strength. Banderas had them all.” Despite a recent brush with cancer, Anderson had just returned from four months in New Zealand for The Lord of the Rings, a $360 million project encompassing three separate films, and was busy plotting his next assignments, the new James Bond adventure at Pinewood Studios (in which Pierce Brosnan is doubled in the swordfighting sequences by the British international épéeist Steven Paul—whose father Raymond doubled for Flynn back in the 1950s), Pirates of the Caribbean, with Johnny Depp, and a sequel to Zorro. He was laughing at the fate of Liv Tyler in The Lord of the Rings. Cast as the young heroine, Arwen, she had bridled at the notion of rehearsing for a fencing scene. An angry Anderson told her he was going away for a while, leaving her with his assistant. He told her he’d give her one chance to shoot the scene on his return before giving it to the director for his approval. “When I came back I could see a gleam in my assistant’s eye: she did the best fight sequence I’ve seen a girl do.”

  ANDERSON, WHO DIED ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, 2012, HAD ONE FORMIDABLE rival as the world’s leading fight director: a British Australian now in his seventies, William Hobbs. Born in North London in 1939, Hobbs was brought up by his actress mother after his father, a Royal Air Force pilot, was killed in the last months of the Second World War. It was a bohemian upbringing: his aunt was a dancer with the renowned Windmill Theatre and once won a prize for “the second best legs in England”; his elder half brother went into the circus. The family lived in Australia for several years, and it was there that “Bill,” as he had become, began fencing in 1954. He narrowly failed to make the Australian team for the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 and in 1957 moved back to London to enroll at the Central School for Speech and Drama; Judi Dench was a contemporary, as was Vanessa Redgrave.a “Most actors say that they are good fencers,” Hobbs says. “That’s a lie: they’re not.” While a student, he asked the Central’s registrar why fencing had always been taught there. “For grace and deportment,” she replied. Hobbs recalls being shown four fight positions in all his time as a student—that was it. In his book on stage fighting he quotes with obvious scorn Simon Callow’s comment in Being an Actor. “There were no classes at the Drama Centre in fencing, dialects, or clog-dancing. They reckoned that if you needed them, you could pick them up in ten minutes. They were right.” Hobbs spent hours training actors for their roles.

  He spent 1959–60 doing weekly repertory and describes both his experience and his acting as “awful.” “Give it up, baby,” was Olivier’s advice. Instead—inspired, he says, by the scenes in Scaramouche—he began to direct fights: Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic, then to London’s Old Vic with Franco Zeffirelli and Romeo and Juliet, with Dench as Juliet. His duels won rave reviews, almost unheard-of for theater notices. Hobbs spent nine years as fight director at Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company, then was fencing master at the Central for fifteen years.

  By the time he was invited to move into film, Hobbs was well prepared. In 1972 Ridley Scott approached him to orchestrate the fights for The Duellists—where the duels take up at least half the movie. “I don’t want any of that old tosh—I want it real,” Scott told him. Hobbs was in complete agreement: “From the beginning I wanted to break away from all the Hollywood stuff I’d seen. What interested me was the story, the drama. I was excited by the people. The pauses we put into the fights in that film were phenomenal, but we wanted to get across the awful feeling that you believe you’ll be dead on the floor. In the end, the realism is in the fear.” A fencing phrase, he says, should have the same feeling as two serpents recovering their balance before resuming their attacks on each other. “The best such scenes—Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, or Seven Samurai—are good precisely because they don’t show you everything. Men running through fields, a body falling in mud, a momentary clash of blades: the audience supplies the rest.”

  Since The Duellists, Hobbs has worked on Cyrano de Bergerac with Gérard Depardieu, Hamlet with Mel Gibson, Dangerous Liaisons, Richard Lester’s Musketeer films (in the first of which he plays an assassin, intent on murdering Porthos), Polanski’s Macbeth, Rob Roy,b Shakespeare in Love, and many others—most recently the highly enjoyable remake of The Count of Monte Cristo. He will turn down projects that do not interest him—even such high-profile films as The Mark of Zorro and Gladiator he let go. Over the years, he has worked on twenty-one Hamlets (one prince, Laurence Payne, who was not coached by Hobbs, actually lost an eye in the duel scene). He was fight arranger on Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers around the same time as Bob Anderson’s version but sees his work as very different. “Despite the humor in it, ours was a much grittier, muckier world—we wanted to get the physicality of the period.” Such scenes can be expensive to stage—in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart an entire swordfighting scene was cut in postproduction, at a cost of £500,000.

  Hobbs reckons that Gene Wilder was his most promising actor-pupil, having worked with him in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother. “He could actually fence.” He also rates highly Ralph Fiennes, with whom he has worked in both film and theater. Fiennes started fencing in The Avengers and enjoyed it so much that he took extra coaching, even joining Hobbs’s London club, Swash and Buckle.

  Bill Hobbs describes the swordfights in pre-1960 movies as “two cuts high, two cuts low.” Their actual nickname in Britain was “Meat and Two Veg”—a variant on the French “batterie de cuisine” and “concert de casseroles.” He quotes his old friend and stunt coordinator Richard Graydon as saying to a new group of stuntmen, “In the old days, every stuntma
n was happy as they had in their repertoire three very effective sword moves. Then Bill Hobbs came along, added a fourth, and made it complicated.” Of course he did far more than that; he stressed that swordfights should not seek to emulate classical fencing; parries had to be wider (or even newly created) and attacks specially conceived, so that they would look convincing. As Errol Flynn confessed in My Wicked, Wicked Ways, “I’m not a fencer. I’m a thespian. But I know how to make it look good.”

  The latest form of cinema swordfight can be found in the high-tech world of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—both of which had the same fight arranger, Yuen Wo Ping.c He is now styled the “Action Choreographer,” and we have progressed far beyond the world of doubles or even of stuntmen. The new technology makes actors almost redundant, now that limbs can be excised in the editing room and figures made to bounce off the branches of trees and run up the side of walls. (Even though the cameraman for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl had to wade into duels encased in plastic armor.) While trick photography goes back to those earliest days of 1895, the swordfights in Crouching Tiger are exhilarating but exist in a make-believe world: at least with Fairbanks and Flynn we knew that someone was wielding the sword and were happy to believe it was the star himself, as often it was. Now it all seems like conjuring, a distant cousin to the fencer’s art. Yet Crouching Tiger’s director, Ang Lee, has declared, “Fight sequences are not about beating someone up or a kind of health exercise. It’s really all about an energetic cinematic language.” Perhaps the powers of high technology, allied with Eastern martial arts, are teaching Western audiences a new language for swordplay; if so, that language, in its turn, may have something to teach fencers—that it is not enough to find the balance between classic swordplay and realism. Keeping faith with the imaginations of the audience matters too.

  * Mark Twain, typically, picked up on the problems some actors could have with fencing terms. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) Tom is in a forest when he encounters his friend Joe Harper and, waving his wooden sword, declares that he is Robin Hood. Joe soon gets into the act: “Then thou are indeed that famous outlaw? Right gladly will I dispute with thee the passes of the merry wood. Have at thee!” They at once strike “a fencing attitude, foot to foot, and began a grave, careful combat, ‘two up and two down.’ Presently Tom said: ‘Now if you’ve got the hang. Go it lively!’ So they ‘went it lively,’ panting and perspiring with the work. By and by Tom shouted: ‘Fall! Fall! Why don’t you fall?’ ‘I shan’t! Why don’t you fall yourself? You’re getting the worst of it.’ ‘Why that ain’t anything. I can’t fall; that ain’t the way it is in the book. The book says “Then with one back-handed stroke he slew poor Guy of Guisborne.” You’re to turn round and let me hit you in the back.’ There was no getting around the authorities, so Joe turned, received the whack and fell.”4

  † Years later, Alan Sillitoe was to satirize this approach in a children’s book, The Incredible Fencing Fleas (1978):

  Frederick was breathless. “Now what do we do?”

  “You jump over my sword,” said Ferdinand, “and I’ll jump over yours.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “It will give us something to do.”

  ‡ During his years in London Rathbone had been a pupil of both Félix Grave and Léon Bertrand. He could be generous to fellow actors. Discussing The Court Jester (1956), in which he played opposite Danny Kaye in a deliberate spoof of medieval melodramas, he wrote in his autobiography, “We had to fight a duel together with sabre. I don’t care much for sabre but had had instruction in this weapon during my long association with all manner of swords.… After a couple of weeks of instruction Danny Kaye could completely outfight me! Even granted the difference in our ages, Danny’s reflexes were incredibly fast, and nothing had to be shown or explained to him a second time.”8 Rathbone put Kaye’s aptitude down to his being a brilliant mimic (about the same period, the French mime Marcel Marceau was also an excellent fencer), but his memory played him false: at the insistence of the production heads Kaye’s fencing was doubled—partly because Rathbone was then sixty-four, partly for the timing of the comedy effects, and partly for Kaye’s own safety, as he had to parry a number of cuts to head and legs with his eyes closed.

  Later, after his success in The Court Jester, Rathbone was at his Hollywood club taking a foil lesson watched by two old fencing hands. Each time he neared them they would intone, recalling the famous exchange that runs through the film, “Get it? Got it. Good.” Finally Rathbone could stand it no longer. Flinging off his mask he turned and seethed, “Please stop it.”

  § To give Nadi’s invective some support, a list, “Things You Need to Know About the Movies,” is currently circulating on the Internet. Entries include:

  Should you wish to pass yourself off as a German officer, it will not be necessary to speak the language, a German accent will do;

  Police departments give their officers personality tests to make sure they are deliberately assigned a partner who is their total opposite;

  The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window in Paris;

  You can always find a chain saw when you need one;

  —and so on. The one on swordplay reads: “It does not matter if you are heavily outnumbered in a fight … your enemies will wait patiently to attack you one by one by dancing around in a threatening manner until you have knocked out their predecessors.”

  ‖ In another Flynn movie, They Died with Their Boots On, a 1941 film of the years leading up to Custer’s Last Stand, the actor Bill Mead was thrown by his horse, and although he had the presence of mind to cast his sword forward to avoid falling on it, it stuck in the ground hilt down and he impaled himself fatally. More recently, Laurence Olivier listed the injuries he suffered as an actor. They include:

  3 ruptured Achilles tendons

  Untold slashes including a full thrust razor-edged sword wound in the breast

  Landing from considerable height, scrotum first, upon acrobat’s knee

  Hurled to the stage from 30 feet due to faultily moored rope ladder

  Impalement upon jagged ply cut-outs

  Broken foot by standing preoccupied in camera track

  Broken face by horse galloping into camera while looking through finder

  One arrow shot between shinbones

  Near electrocution through scimitar entering studio dimmer while backing away from unwelcome interview.18

  a During my time in publishing I commissioned both the memoirs of Vanessa Redgrave—a fencer of great potential, let down by poor eyesight—and a book about their father, Michael, by her younger brother, Corin, who won the public schools saber in 1956, and later, in 1960, came close to Olympic selection.

  In 1995, performing the title role in Julius Caesar at Houston’s Alley Theater, Corin jumped onto a table and, seeing that someone had inadvertently left a dagger there, decided to exploit the opportunity. With his next speech he kicked the dagger away forcefully, only to watch in horror as it made a gentle arc into a crowd of attendants, lodging itself in the forehead of an elderly actress. The assistant director, watching the performance from the stalls, rushed backstage. The wound was only superficial, but the assistant director, overcome by the sight of blood, fainted away, crushing his glasses as he fell. It is now mandatory on the London stage that any play with swordfights have a “fight rehearsal” before every performance.

  b Rob Roy was the perfect historical figure on whom to pin feats of swordsmanship. A contemporary of Donald McBane, Roy was a dedicated cattle rustler but with Robin Hood–like leanings. On one occasion, he encountered an officer of James II and a party of soldiers, who were hanging four peasants from a tree on the bigoted grounds that they were Noncomformists. Roy set about them with his broadsword to such effect that he killed both the officer and eleven of his men, the remainder taking to their heels.19

  c The theater, by contrast, finds it hard to compete with films for stupendous acti
on sequences, and most stage swordplay comes now from the classic repertory. The last time I saw modern fencing on stage was in the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price. Was America’s greatest playwright a closet fencer? I asked Miller about the role of Vinnie, the policeman on the edge of retirement who twice rehearses the fencing moves he recalls from college.

  Miller said that he had based it all on a boyhood friend who’d been on the university fencing team at Columbia. “I used to fool around with him at foil—when I wasn’t working on a job: I didn’t have the money to go to school yet. I was the target.”

  JOHN WAYNE: We’ll be sorry to see you hanged.

  STUART WHITMAN [INCREDULOUS, HAVING JUST WON A DUEL]:

  They’ve never enforced the laws against dueling before!

  —The Comancheros, DIRECTED BY MICHAEL CURTIZ, 1962

  Among those who control the world

  and protect the State

  There’s no one who doesn’t employ

  swordsmanship in his mind.

  —YAGYU MUNEYOSHI (1529–1606)