By Joe Valdez

What the *&#! Are They About?
In the mines of the Roman province of Libya, slave Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) sinks his teeth into the ankle of a guard, earning himself a death sentence. Recognizing an unbroken spirit he could mold into something great, slave merchant Batiatus (Peter Ustinov) purchases the condemned and returns with him to the city of Cupua, where Batiatus operates a gladiator school. Spartacus proves as agile intellectually as he is physically, though fellow slave Draba (Woody Strode) refuses his friendship, given that they may have to fight each other one day. Granted time alone with slave girl Varinia (Jean Simmons), Spartacus becomes enraptured with her.

Roman general Marcus Crassus (Laurence Olivier) arrives with a small party and requests to see two pairs of gladiators fight to the death. After the blood spectacle, Crassus buys Varinia, so outraging Spartacus that he launches a slave revolt. Moving from town to town, the rebellion grows in strength. In the Roman Senate, Gracchus (Charles Laughton) shrewdly dispatches the garrison of Rome to extinguish the uprising, paving the way for Julius Caesar (John Gavin) to take control of Rome and hold the ambitions of Crassus in check. Reunited with Varinia and befriending an escaped slave (Tony Curtis), Spartacus moves on Rome.

Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons in Spartacus

In the year 180 A.D., General Maximus (Russell Crowe) leads 5,000 Legionaries in a spirited victory over the last Germanic tribe holding out against the Roman Empire in northern Europe. Visiting the battlefront, the aging caesar Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) bequeaths protection of Rome to Maximus in the hopes that the people will resume control of the Senate from corrupted politicians. When hearing of the secession, the caesar’s ambitious male heir Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) murders his father, while his sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) aligns herself with Commodus in order to protect her young son Lucious (Spencer Treat Clark) from harm.

Maximus escapes execution in the forest, but is unable to save his wife and son from crucifixion. Taken for a deserter, he ends up in Zucchabar, the property of a freed gladiator and merchant named Proximo (Oliver Reed). Expected to meet a quick death in the gladiatorial pits of Morocco, Maximus, along with slaves Juba (Djimon Hounsou) and Hagen (Ralf Moeller) survives and becomes a favorite of provincial crowds. In Rome, Commodus assumes power by reviving the spectacle of gladiatorial contests in the Roman Coliseum. There, Maximus wins over the urban mob and vows to stay alive long enough to have his revenge over Commodus.

Russell Crowe and Djimon Hounsou in Gladiator

Writing
The genesis of Spartacus was with author Howard Fast — a member of the American Communist Party — who in 1950 was sentenced to three months in a federal prison for contempt of Congress, refusing to name suspected Communist contributors to a home for orphans of Spanish Civil War veterans. Once a prisoner, Fast used the prison library and his newfound sympathy for the disempowered to research the Roman slave rebellion of 71 BC. Fast would self-publish Spartacus in 1951. The book came to the attention of the wife of producer Edward Lewis in late 1957. Lewis was the business partner of Kirk Douglas in the actor’s Bryna Productions.

Douglas took Spartacus to United Artists, which was moving ahead with their own Spartacus project: The Gladiators, set to star Yul Brenner. Undeterred, Douglas renegotiated a 60-day extension on the property with Fast. When the author was unable to turn in a suitable draft quickly enough, Lewis and Douglas turned to Dalton Trumbo, the highly regarded screenwriter who’d spent 11 months in prison for contempt of Congress. On the strength of an adaptation Trumbo cranked out in three weeks, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton signed on, The Gladiators folded and Universal Pictures stepped up to finance Spartacus.

Kirk Douglas and Peter Ustinov in Spartacus

Dalton Trumbo had been in steady employment since his prison term — working on Roman Holiday, among others — but Kirk Douglas insisted that Trumbo receive screen credit, breaking the decade long Hollywood blacklist against talent with former ties to the Communist Party. Douglas, Olivier, Ustinov nor Laughton treated Trumbo’s dialogue as scripture, allegedly generating much of their own. Regardless of who what wrote line, Trumbo’s craftsmanship is evident. The unyieldly source material is given powerful dramatic momentum throughout, while a strong sense of character is never lost amid the tremendous and tremendously expensive set pieces.

David Franzoni became interested in gladiators after he’d dropped out of grad school. Bumming around the world, he was in Baghdad when he swapped a book on the Irish revolution with one titled Those About To Die, a 1958 study of the Roman Coliseum by Daniel Mannix. 20 years later, a biopic Franzoni had written on George Washington came to the attention of Steven Spielberg. While adapting Amistad for the director in Rome, Franzoni began researching what became Gladiator. Franzoni took some of his research to producer Douglas Wick, who saw contemporary parallels to a society distracted from the important issues by entertainment.

Connie Nielsen and Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator

Franzoni’s pitch to Spielberg and DreamWorks executives Walter Parkes & Laurie MacDonald for a movie set in the gladiatorial pits of the Roman Coliseum was enthusiastically received. The “sword and sandal” genre had been dead in the 40 years since Spartacus, but Franzoni and Wick thought the ancient world could be brought to life not just by computer imagery, but developing the story as a modern day morality play. Though Franzoni had provided a blueprint for Gladiator, playwright John Logan was brought in to improve the characters. Logan was credited with crafting most of the best dialogue that made it into the film.

After a cast reading at Shepperton Studios two weeks before the start of shooting, it was felt the script still wasn’t ready. Douglas Wick reached out to playwright William Nicholson, who streamlined the plot and made the characters more likable. Instead of a revenge story, Nicholson hinged Gladiator on the love Maximus felt for his family and highlighted his transience toward a pagan afterlife. “Script by committee” is usually a recipe for disaster, but Gladiator is an exception. The toil of numerous scribes, producers and studio executives resulted in exciting action sequences, terrific dialogue, complex characters and a story with a deep emotional core.

Russell Crowe in Gladiator

Writing edge: Gladiator

Casting
Howard Fast was not thrilled about Kirk Douglas playing Spartacus — finding the actor and some of his choices lacking in nobility — but along with the star, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton were always the first choices for their roles. Searching for a female lead with a Germanic look after Ingrid Bergman and Jeanne Moreau passed, Douglas settled on Sabine Bethmann, who lost the role of Varinia after three weeks of filming, replaced by Jean Simmons. The supporting cast is just as notable: Woody Strode, Herbert Lom (as a Sicilian pirate) and Charlie McGraw as the freed gladiator who proves Spartacus’ tormentor in particular.

Tony Curtis and his Brooklyn accent are not the easiest to buy as an escaped slave who becomes Spartacus’ most trusted advisor. The rest of the main cast is one for the ages. Some of the greatest screen actors in Hollywood history were available when Spartacus went into production and at least three are in the movie. Olivier and Laughton show no conscience gobbling up the scenery as longtime foes in the Roman Senate. Ustinov brings much needed wit and humility to the role of the slave merchant Batiatus. The athleticism and intensity of Kirk Douglas seem better suited to the role of Spartacus than perhaps any in his stoic film career.

John Hoyt and Laurence Olivier in Spartacus

There was some talk of Mel Gibson being offered the role of Maximus, but Russell Crowe was quickly settled on as a better fit for the part. After leading roles in two critically acclaimed films — L.A. Confidential and The Insider – Crowe was more familiar in Hollywood than by name in the general public. Casting Commodus, Jude Law was screen tested, but director Ridley Scott had worked with Joaquin Phoenix on a movie he’d produced called Clay Pigeons and was intrigued enough to push for him as the morally bankrupt caesar. Connie Nielsen and Djimon Hounsou bring strength and agility with their obvious physical attributes as performers.

Louis Di Giaimo was the casting director and to whatever degree he was responsible for filling out the supporting roles, Gladiator was extraordinarily well cast. Richard Harris seemed reinvigorated on screen as the dying emperor; his moments with Crowe and his death scene are tremendous. Oliver Reed returned from 20 years of anonymity and steals the film as the charismatic slave merchant, the last father any of his men will have. Reed unfortunately died of a heart attack at the age of 62 with three weeks of shooting to go. Derek Jacobi, Ralf Moeller and bodybuilding legend Sven-Ole Thorsen (as the tiger gladiator) give commendable performances.

Ralf Moeller, Djimon Hounsou and Russell Crowe in Gladiator

Casting edge: Even

Production value
Spartacus went into production January 1959 in Death Valley under the direction of Anthony Mann, who’d shot a number of successful westerns for Universal. Good with action and crowds, Mann was overwhelmed by Douglas, Olivier and Ustinov, prima donna writer-directors each pushing to do things their way. After three weeks, Mann asked to be let go. Douglas called up a promising 30-year-old director under contract to his production company. Busy developing a screen adaptation of Vladimir Nobokov’s Lolita, Stanley Kubrick agreed on a Friday night to take over the $12 million budgeted Spartacus. He arrived on the set Monday morning.

Unable to make changes to the script he’d inherited, Kubrick did benefit from the work of Saul Bass, the acclaimed graphic designer who’d created title sequences for Anatomy of a Murder and North By Northwest. In addition to the majestic title sequence he would design for Spartacus, Bass had also been tasked with location scouting and with designing the gladiator school. Three weeks of second unit photography took place in Spain — utilizing the Spanish army for the shots of thousands of marching soldiers — though most of the battle was actually shot on the Universal backlot. Russell Metty served as director of photography.

Peter Ellenshaw was a matte artist on Spartacus

Stanley Kubrick would sever his business relationship with Kirk Douglas following Spartacus, resenting his lack of creative control over the production. After decades of disowning the blockbuster, the visionary director conceded late in life that Spartacus turned out better than he felt at the time. In spite of being a director for hire, Kubrick did replace Sabine Bethmann with Jean Simmons and insisted on playing classical music during a number of key scenes, heightening the performances of Douglas, Simmons and Woody Strode. Elegantly composed visually, Spartacus has a more humane feel than any picture Kubrick would ever direct.

Ridley Scott was on the short list of directors whose finesse for creating worlds and spectacle was well suited for Gladiator. Knowing that Scott was a graphic designer, Douglas Wick and Walter Parkes presented him with a 19th century painting by Jean-Léon Gérômeen titled “Thumbs Down”. More so than their pitch or the script, it was the gladiatorial painting that won Scott over. The exacting director was used to taking his time, but seemed reinvigorated by his experience with Gladiator. At one point, Scott wanted Maximus to fight a rhinoceros and storyboarded the sequence, before the reality of working with either live rhinos or a $1 million CG facsimile scotched the idea.

John Nelson and Mill Film supervised visual effects for Gladiator

Gladiator commenced shooting February 1999 in Surrey, England, in an area the Royal Forestry Commission had slated for deforestation. Collaborating with director of photography John Mathieson, Scott had the entire German front sequence — the first act of the film — finished in just over three weeks. For the provincial scenes, production designer Arthur Max built an arena into the side of an ancient village at Ait Ben Haddou, Morocco. The third act of the film was shot in Malta, where the Roman Coliseum was partially rebuilt out of plaster and plywood at a cost of $1 million, with the upper tiers and other elements added in with CG.

I didn’t care for Gladiator when it opened. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon had the narrative elegance and emotional power and Gladiator was buttered popcorn to me. But the 155-minute theatrical version of Gladiator has been supplemented on DVD with an extended cut clocking in at 171 minutes. Reinserted are a conspiratorial scene between Lucilia and Graccus, Commodus hacking away at a bust of his father and a terrific scene where Commodus supervises the execution of two Centurions. As with Kingdom of Heaven, the extended cut of Ridley Scott’s epic contains more texture and intelligence than the box office friendly version.

Kirk Douglas and Charles McGraw in Spartacus

Production value edge: Gladiator

Music
With the exception of Stanley Kubrick, the greatest contributor to the success of Spartacus would be Alex North, who composed the vibrant musical score. For the film’s preservation on laserdisc by the Criterion Collection in 1991, Peter Ustinov would comment that the only thing that ages the film for him is its music. It is hard to imagine Stanley Kubrick going with something so romantic if he’d had his way, but North’s marvelous score is Old Hollywood at its finest. It doesn’t punctuate the action as music by John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith would have years later, but sets the table for a big time movie going experience.

Again, time has evened out the grouchy reaction I had of Gladiator after it swept the Academy Awards over Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, particularly where music is concerned. Normally a big time hater of the bombastic scores Hans Zimmer turns in for Jerry Bruckheimer productions, I’m actually enamored of his work on Gladiator. Instead of coming on like a psychic jackhammer, Zimmer’s score is mysterious and majestic, the soundtrack I would have between my ears if transported to the Roman Empire. Zimmer collaborated here with Australian vocalist Lisa Gerrard, whose Mediterranean flavor is used in just the right doses.

Kirk Douglas and Woody Strode in Spartacus

Music edge: Gladiator

Cultural impact
Through its original theatrical run, re-release in 1967 and restoration in 1991, Spartacus would earn $11.1 million in the U.S. That was enough to make it the third highest grossing film released in 1960, back when tickets were 25 cents. Nominated for six Academy Awards, it won four: Best Supporting Actor (Peter Ustinov), Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design. Beyond its legacy as one of the most entertaining roadshow epics of the 1960s, Spartacus defied social conservatives like the American Legion, which vilified the film for giving two “Commies” a writing credit. As a result, Spartacus broke the Hollywood blacklist.

Opening May 2000, Gladiator was a global blockbuster, grossing $187.7 million in the U.S. and $269.9 million overseas. A hit all over the world, the film definitely had its impact felt in Hollywood, which quickly greenlit Master and Commander, The Last Samurai, Cold Mountain, Troy, King Arthur and finally, Kingdom of Heaven, briefly restoring the historical epic to prominence among studio production slates. Gladiator would be nominated for 12 Academy Awards and win five: Best Picture (Douglas Wick, David Franzoni, Branko Lustig), Best Actor (Russell Crowe), Best Costume Design (Janty Yates), Best Sound and Best Visual Effects.

Cultural impact edge: Spartacus

Russell Crowe in Gladiator

Winner: Gladiator

Spartacus will always be one of the grand entertainments of the 1960s and significant for breaking the Hollywood blacklist along the way. Gladiator won lots of awards and made some people very rich. Both were being written as they were being filmed, an early indicator of total fucking disaster. Yet both have achieved status as classics. Personally, I find Gladiator to be the better film, the state of the art in story, casting, music and of course, visual effects. Maybe in 40 years, it will look as dated as Spartacus, but today, it reigns supreme among historical epics, with Master and Commander in its rearview mirror.

Your thoughts?

Synopsis
In the waters surrounding Jamaica of 1668, pirate Morgan Adams (Geena Davis) – daughter of buccaneer Black Harry Adams (Harris Yulin) – escapes the latest attempt by authorities to capture her. Rowing out to rejoin her father aboard his ship the Morning Star, Morgan discovers her uncle, the nefarious Dawg Brown (Frank Langella), has commandeered the vessel and forced Black Harry onto the edge of the plank. Dawg seeks Black Harry’s fragment of a treasure map their father divided and left each of his three sons. Morgan’s efforts to rescue her father come up short, but before he dies, Black Harry reveals to her the location of his piece of the map: his scalp.

Morgan assumes command of the Morning Star and sails to Port Royal, where she seeks a Latin translator to decipher the clues on her dead father’s scalp. Meanwhile, pickpocket William Shaw (Matthew Modine) is arrested trying to lift jewels from polite society and is sold into slavery. Morgan rescues him from the auction block as naval authorities led by Governor Ainless (Patrick Malahide) fire on them. The crew of the Morning Star locates Morgan’s other uncle and obtaining the second map fragment – which Shaw discovers inside a barrel of moray eels – narrow the location of the family fortune to Cutthroat Island. A typhoon, double crosses, sword duels, a naval battle and a monkey complete the tale.

Production history
In the late 1980s, producer Jon Peters optioned a book by John Carlova titled Mistress of the Seas. It was based on the incredible true life adventures of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, 18th century women who disguised themselves as pirates to take to the high seas, where they became intimate with their captain, “Calico” Jack Rackham. By the summer of 1993, Peters had enlisted Paul Verhoeven to direct the torrid tale. Entertainment Weekly quoted an unnamed source as saying, “What he had in mind was a sex film that, oh, by the way, had a couple of ships in it.” Geena Davis and Harrison Ford were interested, but Columbia Pictures – wary of a big budget sex film – pressed Verhoeven to focus on a conventional love triangle between two male buccaneers and Anne Bonny. Davis reluctantly dropped out and Mistress of the Seas never made it out of the harbor.

In the estimation of Mario Kassar – owner of Carolco Pictures – Columbia’s interest in pirates legitimized a rival swashbuckling script he had in his pocket titled Cutthroat Island. Written by Michael Frost Beckner & James Gorman, the project was one of two lavish period action pictures Kassar intended to produce. The other was the highly anticipated Crusade, with Arnold Schwarzenegger signed to play a knight carrying Christ’s cross back to Rome (with Paul Verhoeven navigating the journey). Carolco had spared no expense producing lavish fare from Total Recall to Chaplin, The Doors to Basic Instinct, many of them hits, but by the end of 1994, the company was $43 million in debt. Kassar made the decision to cancel Crusade – writing off $13 million in pre-production costs – and bet the fate of Carolco on Cutthroat Island.

Renny Harlin – director of Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger – committed to Carolco’s pirate movie, and after a rewrite by Raynold Gideon & Bruce Evans, Michael Douglas accepted a $13 million offer to star as William Shaw, a gambler who falls into servitude to pay off a debt. Geena Davis – who had recently married Harlin – was not a fan of the script, but once Douglas came aboard, she agreed to play Morgan Adams, a bookkeeper who seduces Shaw into the company of her fellow pirates. While Douglas was finishing Disclosure in Seattle, Harlin and Davis brought in screenwriter Susan Shilliday to bolster the female lead. Douglas got a look at the changes and was not happy with what he saw. “They had a hard time searching for who Shaw was. I just was not comfortable with the part. The combination of not seeing it on the page and not knowing where it would go. I was feeling uncomfortable, and I wanted out.”

Geena Davis would later refute the notion that Michael Douglas got cold feet because a leading lady was upstaging him, but admitted that once the star dropped out, Cutthroat Island should have folded. “I, of course, assumed the whole project would be canceled. It was all based on Michael Douglas’s being in it. To my horror, I learned not only would they not cancel, but that I had a legal obligation to go ahead, unlike Michael. I tried desperately to get out of this movie.” A senior executive at Carolco later told the New York Times, “We knew that if we shut it down it was certain Chapter 11. If we made the film, there was at least some chance we could survive. It was a classic case of going forward when you have no other choice.”

Budgeted at $65 million, Cutthroat Island was set to film on the Mediterranean isle of Malta. A crew had been assembled and as of the spring of 1994 was on location building sets. As of July, Harlin was still in Los Angeles searching for someone to replace Michael Douglas. Jeff Bridges, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Keanu Reeves, Ralph Fiennes, Kurt Russell, Michael Keaton and even Charlie Sheen were offered the part. All passed. In a memo intended to pump up his crew, Harlin wrote, “When the casting concerns have been resolved and I arrive in Malta, I want to see the most spectacular and eye-popping sets, the most interesting and unusual props, and especially weapons and special effects that leave the audience gasping in awe and stunts that no one thought possible before. No sequence or setting that you’ve seen in movies before is good enough. Any idea that has been previously used has to be reinvented and cranked up 10 times.”

The casting merry go round stopped at Matthew Modine when the wholesome actor accepted the role of Shaw. Though Modine’s fee was a $12 million savings over Michael Douglas, screenwriter Robert King had to be brought in to reconfigure Cutthroat Island in one month as a vehicle for Geena Davis. Six weeks before principal photography was to begin, Harlin arrived on location. Production delays had spiked the budget to $80 million and the script was still considered unworkable. Script doctor Marc Norman was added to the payroll at a cost of $800,000. His job entailed being rousted at 1 am, driven to the set and using a legal pad to write whatever scene was being filmed that morning. Norman recalled, “I was the guy in Malta stuck with trying to make that work. I did get paid well. But it was really hell.”

By the time Cutthroat Island commenced filming October 1994, the film’s balance sheet included some 2,000 costumes, 309 firearms, 620 swords, 250 daggers and at least 100 axes. Several dozen horses needed for a carriage chase had to be flown from Hungary with their grooms at double the cost due to EU regulations that prohibited the transport of animals in boats. Two full sized pirate ships were constructed at a cost of $1 million each, one of which caught fire during filming, forcing production to shut down for three days. Wrapping second unit photography off the coast of Thailand in March 1995, Harlin was confident he could meet a release date of July 4. The director confided to Variety’s Army Archerd: “The smartest thing I ever did was to go to the tank in Malta. All the complicated stuff was controlled. I can’t image doing it on the ocean where you can’t control waves, winds, currents. It would have been impossible.”

Deciding the film was not ready, Carolco pushed Cutthroat Island back to December. MGM/UA – intending to spend $30 million to distribute and market the picture – downgraded to $18 million as the release date neared. Once critics weighed in, word of mouth went from dismal to worse. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “So Cutthroat Island proves too stupidly smutty for children, too cartoonish for sane adults and not racy enough for anyone who regards Ms. Davis in a tight-laced bodice as its main attraction.” Desson Thomson, the Washington Post: “It takes a two-hour act of will to keep facing the screen during this moribund movie. Every cliffhanger is enough to make you a cliff jumper.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “Younger teen audiences might be carried away by the escapades up to a point, but there is little flair or grace on display, as the sheer effort of capturing the tumultuous doings on camera is all too apparent. No one in the film seems to be having much fun, and the effect is contagious.”

The cost of producing, marketing and distributing the film totaled $115 million. Its box office take was $10 million in the United States, $4 million overseas, grosses which officially made Cutthroat Island the biggest commercial disaster in movie history, the first film to lose $100 million. Carolco – which filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection a month before the film was even in theaters – lost about $47 million in the debacle. The rest of the loss was divided among the overseas distributors Kassar had pre-sold the film to: Pioneer Electronic Corporation of Japan, Canal Plus of France and Rizzoli Editore of Italy. The I.R.S. was at the front of the line to collect $15 million in unpaid taxes, claiming that Carolco concealed profits through its tangled deals with overseas corporations.

In an interview with IGN FilmForce in 2001 – three years after he had filed for divorce from Geena Davis – Renny Harlin offered his post mortem on Cutthroat Island. “We had an essential flaw, which maybe wouldn’t be such a problem today, but in those days, a female heroine in sort-of a young boy’s fantasy action movie just didn’t gel. Certainly the movie has flaws, but on the other hand, it has some pretty big production values and pretty fun action sequences that I think – in the right atmosphere with the right marketing and so on – could have turned out much better. At the same time, you have to realize that you can’t succeed every time and – even with the best intentions – we make mistakes and things don’t work out so great.”

Opinion
While Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World would engage audiences with its character pathos and historical detail – and the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks would at least offer up buckets of intense audience appreciation – Cutthroat Island is like a Mad Lib filled out by a mental defect who can’t get enough pirates in his life. Every single cliché of the swashbuckling genre is on display here – a monkey, a plank, a peg leg and a treasure map appear within the first 10 minutes – but what’s missing is even one scene that rises to the spectacular edict laid down by director Renny Harlin to his crew. Instead of reinventing and cranking up the genre by ten times, it doesn’t even feel like anybody bothered to wake up and hit the fucking snooze bar.

The only aspect of Cutthroat Island handled with any feeling of conviction are the explosions, which is what the movie lives and dies by. Though Geena Davis would go on to be a semifinalist for the women’s Olympic archery team in 1999, it’s painful to watch how disinterested she is at being an action hero. The wry, brainy and at times very sexy ingénue is just about laughable as a pirate. Her chemistry with Matthew Modine is non-existent, the action choreography clumsy and the seven writers who drew a paycheck seem to relish their work like it was slave labor. The location scouts and visual effects technicians earned their lunch money at least, while the high throttled musical score by John Debney probably has more fans than this wreck of a movie does.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Debacle on the High Seas”. By James Sternhold. The New York Times, March 31, 1996.
Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops. By James Robert Parish (2006)

Synopsis
In April 1805 off the coast of Brazil, the HMS Surprise – 28 guns and 97 souls – has been ordered by the British Royal Navy to intercept the Acheron, a French vessel intent on carrying Napoleon’s war to the Pacific. As the Surprise cruises into a fog bank, officer of the watch Hollom (Lee Ingleby) glimpses something. Too indecisive to take action, young midshipman Callamy (Max Benitz) is the one who issues a beat to quarters. Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) spots the enemy moments before it fires on them. The Surprise escapes into the fog, but Dr. Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) reports nine lives lost in the attack.

The first lieutenant (James D’Arcy) states that with repairs they can make it home, but Aubrey notifies his officers they’re not going home. Though outclassed, the captain intends to stop the Acheron before it reaches the South Seas. In a typhoon, the Surprise is ambushed again, forcing Aubrey to choose the life of one of his men for the survival of the ship. Dr. Maturin – also the captain’s friend – confides that perhaps they should have turned back weeks ago. “You’re not accustomed to defeat. When chasing this larger, faster ship with its long guns, it’s beginning to smack of pride.”

Aubrey concludes that the Acheron will head for the British whaling fleet at the Galapagos Islands and charts a course there, promising Maturin, “You can wander at will, collecting bugs and beetles to your heart’s content.” But when survivors of a sunken whaler alert Aubrey to the position of the Acheron, those plans change, “Subject to the requirements of the service.” The doctor considers it another sign of Aubrey’s abuse of power and questions how they can best serve their country, as a ship of war, or a ship of discovery.

Production history
In 1995, production executive Tom Rothman was on vacation in rural Connecticut and was stuck indoors due to weather. His father-in-law gave him a copy of Master and Commander, the first in what became twenty-one novels by Patrick O’Brian chronicling the friendship between English naval captain Jack Aubrey and his ship’s physician, Stephen Maturin, during the Napoleonic Wars. The New York Times Book Review raved in 1991 that the books were “the best historical novels ever written.” Rothman was told if he could make it through the first hundred pages, he’d probably like it.

Rothman not only made it through the first hundred pages, he was hooked. “I thought if it could be done right it would be wonderful for as many reasons. It could be one of the great buddy films of all time on a vastly romantic, thrilling canvas, a return to what great studio filmmaking used to be.” Rothman suggested this to his boss, Samuel Goldwyn Jr., who flew O’Brian to Los Angeles to talk. The author stated that the appeal of the Hornblower period of English history was in its high adventure, but what was typically lacking – and what he invested his books with – was “lifestyle.”

Goldwyn set the project up at Touchstone Pictures. A fan of Picnic At Hanging Rock, Gallipoli and Witness, he approached Peter Weir to direct. Weir turned the offer down. John McTiernan was considered, but the scripts that came out of the studio emphasized action at the expense of O’Brian’s “lifestyle.” Touchstone put the project into turnaround, where Fox ultimately picked it up after Rothman ascended to co-chairman of the studio. By this time, Weir had completed The Truman Show and was in L.A. bidding his services for his next film.

Instead of giving the director a pitch, Rothman presented Weir with a sword and asked him to take command of the adaptation of O’Brian’s naval adventures. Weir recalled, “I read all the books. I loved the series, but I really didn’t think Master and Commander would make a good movie. I said if I were going to do O’Brian, I’d start somewhere in the middle with one of the long voyages and get to know these men when they were already friends. Tom told me to go away and do just that.”

Working with John Collee, Weir adapted the tenth book – The Far Side of the World – trimming most of the scenes that took place ashore. According to Weir, “I didn’t want any architecture. I didn’t want crinolines, or carriages rolling down the streets. I wanted to be at sea, to open the picture at sea and to hardly touch land.” Before the project was even greenlit, Weir implored Fox to purchase a vessel he found suitable to stand in for the HMS Surprise at sea; the Rose, a tall ship whose namesake served as a sail-trainer for the British in the 1750s. The cost: $1.5 million.

The filmmakers wooed Russell Crowe to play Captain Jack Aubrey. Crowe had dreamed of working with Peter Weir, but not only voiced reservations about the script – which Akiva Goldsman was brought in to polish, emphasizing “Jack’s confusions, metaphors and aphorisms” – but was committed to star in Cinderella Man, at that time for director Lasse Hallström and Miramax. When Weir refused to wait a year for Crowe, the star agreed to go to sea first. Partnering with Miramax and Universal, the film was greenlit at $135 million. Shooting commenced in June 2002 in a 6.5-acre tank at Fox Studios in Baja, Mexico.

Eighteen weeks of filming in the tank and a week in the Galapagos, the film’s budget climbed to $150 million. Once Weir and Industrial Light & Magic realized how long the 730 effects shots were going to take to render believably, their release date was delayed from June to November 2003. A lukewarm test screening in Aurora, Colorado complicated matters even further. To help the film appeal to women, the studios suggested inserting scenes on land between Aubrey and a wife. Weir refused. The expensive film played to nearly universal acclaim by critics, but fell short of expectations for a franchise, grossing $210 million worldwide.

Opinion
The advent of digital effects and the box office take of Titanic paved the way for a new slate of historical epics at the turn of the century, but the only one to reach the bar set by genre master David Lean was Peter Weir and Master and Commander. Gladiator, Cold Mountain, The Last Samurai and Troy have their moments, but this is an epic that succeeds from beginning to end. It does so because the film devotes just as much detail to the nuances of character, friendship and morality as its does to action, without giving the short end of the stick to either one.

While the lack of a love story or a nasty villain may have dimmed the commercial appeal of Master and Commander, the film doesn’t heap dopey plot developments on the audience. Its richness lies in the devotion of the filmmakers to recreating a bygone world, stitch by stitch, word by word, aboard a British naval vessel in the early 19th century. This is a marvel on every conceivable technical level, particularly the miniature model work by Weta Workshop and the visual effects by ILM, which are seamless. Intelligent and captivating, the film stands out as the best “guys movie” in recent memory.

Marilyn Ferdinand at Ferdy on Films, etc. writes, “Master and Commander is a film that goes from strength to strength. Following the blueprint of authenticity that made the O’Brian books so popular, this film is a time machine … The customs of the British Navy at this time are well observed, from the manner of salutes given to the officers, to the details of a flogging, to the medical practices of the time, and the fine craftsmanship of the carpenters who were always aboard to build spare parts, make repairs, and fashion objects in their idle time that collectors can’t get enough of these days.”

“It’s a The Perfect Storm with a far more rousing story, or a U-571 with hugely better dialogue. And since I liked both of those critically-panned ocean-going films, I can’t help but love this one. It won’t teach you much of anything about the Napoleonic Wars, but if you’re interested in old-time military conflict from one ship’s perspective, you’re not going to do much better than Master and Commander,” writes Brian Webster at Apollo Movie Guide.

David Levine at Filmcritic.com writes, “Master and Commander could have easily become a stereotypical action picture where every scene is punctuated with explosions and other big budget special effects. While the film’s budget does exceed $100 million, Weir refreshingly concerns himself most with the relationships between all classes of seamen, from cook and carpenter to midshipman and lieutenant … But the real credit here should go to Weir, whose transformation of O’Brian’s novels into a completely literate and engrossing on-screen drama deserves nothing short of the highest honor. Master and Commander is a masterpiece.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In French occupied Germany, 1811, Will Grimm (Matt Damon) and his brother Jake (Heath Ledger) arrive in the town of Karlstadt. The locals are under the impression that a witch has afflicted the area around a mill. Experts in folklore and combating the supernatural, the Brothers Grimm vanquish her. Out of sight of the locals, the witch is revealed to be a trick manufactured by the Grimms.

An Italian tongued magistrate and designer of torture devices named Cavaldi (Peter Stomare) arrests the brothers and brings them before the French general (Jonathan Pryce) in charge of the kingdom. They’re informed that nine children have disappeared near the woods of the town of Marbaden. Villagers have attributed this to the supernatural, but the general believes it’s a hoax and dispatches the brothers to uncover the culprits.

A local woman (Lena Headey) guides the Grimm boys and Cavaldi into the woods, where a castle lies in ruin and the trees appear to move. The forest turns out to be truly cursed, complete with a wolf who stalks girls in red hoods, a gingerbread man, and a mummified queen (Monica Bellucci) with endless hair who stares into mirrors and asks who is the fairest one of all.

Production history
Terry Gilliam hadn’t directed since September 2000, when his decade long journey to film Don Quixote was shut down five days into shooting. Two years later, producer Charles Roven sent Gilliam a script called The Brothers Grimm. Written by Ehren Kruger, MGM had spent two years developing the project. Gilliam read it and didn’t like it. But he needed to work, and felt the film would allow him to revisit his childhood love for faerie tales.

Gilliam & Tony Grisoni rewrote the script. With Matt Damon and Heath Ledger eager to work with Gilliam, MGM greenlit the film. It came close to being shut down when Sony Pictures acquired the studio. Luckily, Harvey and Bob Weinstein stepped in, picking up the $75 million budget. They obtained distribution rights in the U.S., but more importantly, would now oversee all aspects of the production.

For the female lead, Gilliam and Damon both wanted Oscar nominee Samantha Morton. Bob Weinstein felt her arms were too big, and Lena Headey was cast instead. Gilliam and Damon wanted his character to fashion a prosthetic nose. The director sent makeup tests to Harvey Weinstein and felt they had an all-clear, but the day before filming began in June 2003, the studio head vetoed the nose.

As the 17-week shooting schedule at Barrandov Studio in Prague fell behind, Bob Weinstein went to visit the production. Gilliam’s director of photography Nicola Pecorini was blamed for the delays, fired and replaced by Newton Thomas Siegel. Gilliam completed filming and – refusing to talk to the Weinsteins at this point – began assembling the film for a November 2004 release.

A 140-minute version was test screened in the spring of 2004. Reaction was mixed, but Gilliam learned he would have plenty of time to hone the film when the Weinsteins announced they were splitting from parent company Disney. The release of several of their projects was put on hold indefinitely, including The Brothers Grimm.

Gilliam took six months and went to Canada to make another movie, Tideland. Of the Weinsteins, Gilliam said they “walked away with a lot in their pockets, but films were abandoned.” The Brothers Grimm was finally released in August 2005, where the story of how tumultuous the production had been was far more interesting than anything on the screen. The movie was commercial failure, grossing $37 million in the U.S.

Like Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam began his career as an animator. While the macabre Burton works within the system – directing blockbusters like Batman and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Gilliam has stayed a maverick, battling producers, studios and insurance companies to get films like Brazil and Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas on screen whatever the price.

Damon and Ledger were cast against type, with Damon playing the charismatic brother, and Ledger trying to pass himself off as the goofy bookworm. The casting mistake aside, the film is so hyperkinetic and silly that character or story never elbow their way into this mess. The digital effects are iffy, and unlike the great faerie tales, there’s a total absence of either wonder or menace to the movie.

Opinion
The Brothers Grimm is like some ragged soldier who raises a white flag, limps across a battlefield, then steps on a landmine and explodes anyway. It’s messy, but the act of capitulation is what’s really sad. This feels like a tired movie from an exhausted director pretty much just going through the motions. The art design, props and wardrobe are a triumph, but underneath, the entire project is just a shotgun marriage of Indiana Jones and Shrek, mass produced to sell tickets.

“If you and your family are looking for some fairly mindless pablum to spoon into your minds, this will fit the bill nicely. Just don’t expect the true spirit of the original Brothers Grimm,” says Alex DeLarge at Movies For Guys.

Marilyn Ferdinand at Ferdy on Films, etc. writes, “Degenerating into noise and catastrophe using fair-to-poor special effects, the plot barrels over the characters and teeters on the edge of incoherence until it reaches its wimpering end.”

“I can see behind the creaky artifice of a troubled film to the magic underneath, but The Brothers Grimm does not have enough magic in it to survive the scrutiny,” writes Daniel Kasman at d+kaz.

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In New York City of the year 2000, Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) returns from college following the death of his father, king and CEO of the Denmark Corporation. His mother Gertrude (Diane Venora) has hastily married the king’s brother, Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan) and Hamlet – who sulks around in a Peruvian cap and tapes himself on digital video – suspects foul play.

Living with his family in the Elsinore Hotel, Hamlet is notified by a security guard that his father was spotted in an elevator. Hamlet confronts the Ghost (Sam Shepard) and is informed that the King was poisoned by Claudius. Ophelia (Julia Stiles) makes overtures to see Hamlet, but is advised by her brother Laertes (Liev Schreiber) that Hamlet will one day be king, and she cannot get involved.

Polonius (Bill Murray), advisor to the new king, informs him that Hamlet has been acting strangely. Claudius employs two of Hamlet’s friends from school, Rosencrantz (Steve Zahn) and Guildenstern (Dechen Thurman) to gain Hamlet’s trust to find out what he knows.

Hamlet makes an avant garde video titled The Mousetrap and with the help of his friend Horatio, plans to screen it for his family, to “catch the conscience of the king.” When Claudius reacts visibly to a display of poison and murder, Hamlet knows the ghost speaks the truth, and plans his revenge.

Directed by Michael Almereyda, who adapted the script from William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet was produced for less than $2 million. According to Hawke, everyone worked for free in order to retain creative control. Despite being released in May, the film performed well in New York and L.A., but failed to draw crowds when it expanded to 64 screens nationwide. Without support from its distributor – Miramax – it quietly disappeared.

Opinion
There’s uniformly strong work among almost everyone in the cast, but what kills this experiment is its extremely low budget, and Ethan Hawke in the title role. Almereyda never demonstrates any aptitude to make Hamlet relevant in a modern setting. Hawke has yet to give a performance where I haven’t thought, “There’s a guy giving a performance,” and doesn’t possess much dexterity for Shakespeare.

“Measure for measure, I liked this Hamlet more than the Mel Gibson version, less than the Kenneth Branagh version, and about the same as the famous 1948 Laurence Olivier version,” writes Jeffrey Anderson at Combustible Celluloid.

Dan Jardine at Apollo Movie Guide says, “Visually and kinetically, the film is a washed out and dispassionate variation on Baz Luhrman’s intriguing … Romeo+Juliet. Despite the New York setting, Almereyda fails to take advantage of the wealth of visual resources at his disposal.”

“The major Hamlets are Olivier, [Richard] Burton, [Derek] Jacobi, [Kevin] Kline, and Branagh,” writes Alan Vanneman at Bright Lights Film Journal. He calls the Hawke version, “a serious, and seriously unsuccessful, attempt to re-imagine the play.”

© Joe Valdez

The loathsome goblin Blix reports to his boss, Darkness (Tim Curry), evil incarnate, who seeks to banish daylight. To accomplish this, Blix is sent to kill a pair of unicorns and bring back the horns. At the same time, a princess named Lily (Mia Sara) enters the forest looking for a boy named Jack. Played by Tom Cruise, he’s a forest guardian who decides to impress Lily by showing her the unicorns.

Blix and his goblin cohorts use the opportunity to attack one of the creatures. This causes a winter to fall over the forest and the couple to become separated. Jack is confronted by faeries, gnomes and elves, including the Gump (David Bennent), who is livid when he discovers that Jack took Lily to see the unicorns. Jack says that he did it for love, and lopes off with them to find the unicorns.

The goblins locate the remaining unicorn, and take both it and Lily back to Darkness. Jack and the forest sprites make their way past a swamp witch (Robert Picardo) but find themselves trapped in a dungeon, where they are primed to barbecued. They escape with the help of a faerie named Oona, but Jack discovers that Lily has been turned by Darkness and requested to kill the unicorn.

Director Ridley Scott was a fan of Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version of Beauty and the Beast and screened it for novelist and poet William Hjortsberg in the projection theater of the Beverly Hills Hotel. The writer responded favorably and over the next five months, came up with a story for a movie. Titled Legend of Darkness, it was a faerie tale, but dark in tone and aimed at an adult audience.

A 113-minute cut was shown before a preview audience. It did not test well. MCA/Universal felt that the score by Jerry Goldsmith and the length of the picture would hurt its chances appealing to teenagers. While it was released in Western Europe and Japan with the Goldsmith score intact and a running time of 94 minutes, for the U.S. release, Ridley Scott replaced Goldsmith’s score with one by synth group Tangerine Dream. He also cut the film all the way down to 89 minutes.

The $25 million budgeted film was panned by critics and confused audiences. It became a cult favorite, particularly when word got out that Jerry Goldsmith’s unused score was his best ever, and that Scott’s original cut had been 125 minutes. An “ultimate edition” released on DVD in 2002 seeks to clear the matter up.

Legend is a crash course the effect that music and editing has on a film. I’ve never liked Legend and still don’t, but after seeing what Scott originally had in mind, I appreciate it a bit more. The 89-minute version scored by Tangerine Dream is a crappy rock opera from the ’80s. The 113-minute version scored by Goldsmith is at least more sophisticated and allows the viewer to savor the film’s fantastic design.

The photorealistic, 360 degree primordial forest designed by art director Norman Reynolds, the ghoulish makeup effects by Rob Bottin, and the strong score by Goldsmith rate the film a triumph of technical splendor. But the script is just a cut and paste job of popular myth, with absolutely nothing in the way of character or narrative to give it a pulse. Scott might have been better off just remaking Beauty and the Beast.

Tom Cruise is outright ridiculous in this, playing a primeval nature boy, a role he’s refused to discuss over the years. The movie never has a chance as soon as he appears with a bird on his shoulder. Tim Curry is terrific under all the makeup, but it’s wasted effort. Legend is an ambitious failure – fluctuating between gothic storybook and kneejerk sweet, European and American in tone – but is still a failure.

“If you’ve seen this movie on tape or at the theatre in the past and thought it was worth the time to watch, it’s well worth your time to see it again in the uncut presentation,” enthuses Jackass Critics.

Scott Weinberg at Apollo Movie Guide states, “While the director’s cut certainly doesn’t eliminate all of Legend’s flaws, it does go a long way toward improving the movie in several ways.”

Legend “gets a mild recommendation simply for righting wrongs and restoring so much good material to a movie which, while still lacking, gains a sense of heart in the restoration,” writes Matt Anderson at Movie Habit.

View the first nine minutes of the “Making Of” featurette on the Ultimate Version DVD.

Documentary directed and photographed by Amanda Micheli begins in 2000, as Lucy Lawless’ stunt double on the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess – 22 year old Zoe Bell – finds herself out of work when the show ends. Bell leaves her family in Auckland and arrives in L.A., where Jeannie Epper – Lynda Carter’s stunt double on Wonder Woman twenty-five years previous – takes Bell under her wing and attempts to help her career in film.

Epper is daughter of stunt pioneer John Epper, whose entire family has dedicated itself to continuing his legacy. This includes Jeannie Epper’s daughter Eurlyne, who landed on her neck during a routine fall four years previous, and has to watch from the sidelines during her rehab, while Jeannie continues to work into her 60s, even after she donates a kidney.

In spite of her connections, Bell is passed over for a job on a TV series, but a year later, Epper gets her into a high fall training session, where Bell comes to the attention of a scout looking for a stuntwoman to double for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. He invites her to audition for the film’s stunt coordinator, Master Wo-Ping, and director Quentin Tarantino.

In addition to Lawless and Tarantino, Micheli interviews Steven Spielberg – who met Epper when she and most of her family worked for him on 1941 – and he talks about the stuntwoman being a recent breakthrough in Hollywood. Up until the women’s movement, men in wigs routinely doubled for women where stunts were concerned in movies and TV.

Stunt coordinator Terry Leonard – who performed the truck undercarriage gag in Raiders of the Lost Ark – states, “The girls do have a tougher job, just because of the costumes.” With wardrobe that usually features a bare midriff, arms, legs or all of the above, stuntwomen can’t pad up. Footage from Wonder Woman shows Epper never used padding at all.

Double Dare came to my attention after seeing Zoe Bell not only play herself in Grindhouse, but perform a mind blowing moving vehicle stunt that surpasses the one in Raiders. She comes off as the same utterly rad chick here. During her audition for Kill Bill, she wipes out on a flip four times in a row, but what impresses Tarantino is the way she wipes out, getting up, laughing about it, and doing it again. Her toughness wins her the job.

This type of strength among women in show business is what Searching For Debra Winger completely ignored, and I don’t mean physical strength. Stuntwomen don’t complain about getting older, losing jobs or not getting respect. Instead, they do what the men do, only they do it better. As Bell departs for China to train with Wo-Ping, Epper’s advice to her is “Don’t get all frazzled when you’re over there. Just do your job.”

Micheli does such a subtle job telling her story that I hesitate to call the film a “documentary” at all. The camera crew and docu-style is almost invisible, and we’re simply able to follow a professional woman in a two or three year span of her career, being mentored by another woman and overcoming barriers through pure devotion to her craft.

Double Dare is only one hour and twenty minutes long, and while I would have enjoyed seeing a lot more stuff, it feels perfectly framed. Spielberg is wonderfully articulate about the Eppers and the tradecraft of stuntwomen. A segment at a Xena convention is wonderful, and watching Bell receive word she’s won the job on Kill Bill is a joy.

Another joy is watching Zoe Bell do a header off a 35 foot ladder into an airbag (it looks like a 100 foot ladder) and hearing Epper ask her if that was fun. “Fuck yeah!” This summed up the movie for me, which is passionate and a must-see for movie fans. It took Netflix two weeks to make this DVD available to ship to me, but if you can locate it, I highly recommend checking this one out.

“When sorcery thrived and wild adventure was forever in the offering,” according to our narrator, the nefarious Titus Cromwell (Richard Lynch, who took a break from menacing Charlie’s Angels and Buck Rogers on TV) comes ashore Doom Island. With the help of a witch, he releases the slimy sorcerer Xusia (Richard Moll) from a tomb.

Cromwell employs Xusia’s black sorcery to help conquer the rich kingdom of Ehdan. Plague and death soon decimate the land, but Cromwell decides to get rid of his sorcerer before he gets too uppity, throwing him over a cliff (which unfortunately killed stuntman Jack Tyree when he missed the airbag during his fall).

Cromwell kills the king and queen of Ehdan, but the young Prince Talon wields a special sword that fires its three blades like missiles. Where the sword comes from, or where you go in Ehdan to order replacement blades, is never explained. Talon escapes.

Years later, Talon (Lee Horsley) returns to Ehdan as an all-purpose warrior, buccaneer and kingdom restorer. Prince Mikah (Simon MacCorkindale) and his sister Alana (Kathleen Beller) consider themselves the rightful heirs to Ehdan and plot to overthrow Cromwell. “The rebellion begins tomorrow, spread the word!” This is actual dialogue from the movie.

They don’t get very far. Cromwell captures Mikah on the eve of the big rebellion. To rescue him, Alana turns to Talon. After some hilarious double entendre about how the princess will pay anything for Talon’s sword, Alana gets herself captured. Using a secret storm drain, Talon sneaks into the castle. Then he gets himself captured.

Cromwell is to marry to the spunky princess, who has a habit of gaining a man’s trust, then putting her knee into their groin. The King is paranoid that the sorcerer Xusia will pop up at any moment to exact some terrible revenge. Meanwhile, Earl Maynard – from Black Belt Jones and Truck Turner – leads a gang of mercenaries who sneak into the castle to free Talon.

Directed by Albert Pyun and written by Tom Karnowski, Albert Pyun & John Stuckmeyer, The Sword and the Sorcerer sits alone atop the trash heap that includes rip-offs of Conan the Barbarian, rip-offs of The Road Warrior, and in some cases, both.

Budgeted at $2 million – and looking like $1.5 million never made it on the screen – the independent production became almost as big as the blockbusters it was copying, grossing $40 million in the U.S. I saw this in the theater and recalled several scenes vividly: a slimy sorcerer pulling a witch’s heart out, a boy getting his hand pinned to a tree by an arrow, and the first crucifixion that ends happily.

This flick is not good, let me be clear about that. It looks like crap. The fight choreography is a joke; bad guys are either thrown into walls by Lee Horsley, or stand still long enough to be hit with a sword. To conceal the lack of craftsmanship, the majority of scenes are shrouded in either mist or darkness. The casting is subpar, even for a silly B-movie.

That said, I could see why The Sword and the Sorcerer was a box office hit. The filmmakers put together a product that was more complex, even more elegant, than something like The Beastmaster. The script actually has some wit attached to it. There are also enough double crosses and betrayals to inspire Machiavelli. The writers even named the chief conspirator of the show “Machelli.”

David Whitaker composed a swashbuckling musical score that’s a notch above the B-movies of the day, even the great B-movies. And instead of employing ambitious special effects or setups that would have looked cheesy, the script features what the filmmakers could handle: people running in and out of dungeons, with lots of fighting and lots of beautiful naked women. I liked it as a 9-year-old, and I like it now.

Producers Robert Bremson, Brandon Chase and Marianne Chase also made an exciting Jaws rip-off starring Robert Forster called Alligator. A title card before the end credits of this one announced, “Watch for Talon’s next adventure. Tales of the Ancient Empire. Coming soon.” But when the film ended up being a smash, instead of risking their take on another Talon, the producers quit while they were ahead and retired from the film business.

In England, 1685, open rebellion has greeted the ascension of the unpopular King James to the throne. Dr. Peter Blood (Errol Flynn, in his debut as a leading man) is summoned in the night to attend to the wounds of a rebel fighter. A war veteran and former seaman in the Dutch navy, Peter has “had adventure enough in six years to last me six lives” and prefers practicing medicine to fighting.

Swept up by authorities, Peter is imprisoned for three months before being found guilty of treason. He asserts his innocence, maintaining that his duty was to the man’s wounds, not his politics. “Your sacred duty, rogue, is to your king!” growls the judge, who condemns him to hang. Peter and his fellow prisoners are spared when the King realizes he can turn a profit selling them as slaves.

Shipped to Port Royal, Jamaica for sale, Peter turns his barbed tongue on brutal plantation owner Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill). The colonel wants nothing to do with the insolent rogue, preferring to see him shipped to the mines, but his regal daughter Arabella (Olivia de Havilland) likes what she sees and bids for him herself.

Peter is taken off work detail and put to use doctoring the foot of Port Royal’s governor. He uses the appointment to secure a vessel and plot an escape with his fellow slaves. Unexpectedly, a Spanish galleon attacks the town. Peter leads the men in commandeering the ship, repelling the Spaniards. But Peter is torn between his freedom, and his love for Arabella. He sails to his freedom.

Forging the men into a crew, Peter becomes Captain Blood, a menace on the high seas. After pillaging treasure, he settles on the island of Tortuga, “Where easy money consorted with easy virtue.” He accepts an ill-advised partnership with a hard-fighting, hard-gaming French rascal, Captain Levasseur (Basil Rathbone). When Levasseur captures Arabella, the men go from partners to enemies.

In 1934, the Legion of Decency had been formed in an attempt to monitor morality in the movies. The studios discovered that by returning to the genre of costume epic – made popular by Douglas Fairbanks in the 1920s – they could avoid censorship issues. Treasure Island became a hit for MGM, and Warner Brothers scored with an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Warner Brothers acquired a novel by Raphael Sabatine called Captain Blood, which had been filmed already in 1924. It was envisioned as a vehicle for Robert Donat, but he turned it down. Clark Gable, Ronald Colman and George Brent were considered, as was a 25-year-old contract player from England named Errol Flynn. The studio not only took a chance on Flynn, but 18-year-old Olivia de Havilland, a contract performer who had yet to be cast as a leading lady.

Directed by Michael Curtiz and adapted by Casey Robinson, Captain Blood not only features two of the best starring debuts in Hollywood history, but is without question the greatest pirate movie ever made. Shot almost entirely on soundstages, featuring miniature ships, it clearly lacks the production value of Waterworld or Pirates of the Caribbean, but it has something those high seas spectacles lack. Elegance.

Casey Robinson’s screenplay features terrific historical context and depth. In pirate movies, we typically meet our hero already on the high seas, acting “piratey,” and the stories immediately surrender any type of character development to cartoon buffoonery. Errol Flynn is introduced as an urbane man, a thinking man, and we witness how injustice and imprisonment drive him after pirate’s booty.

No real derring-do even occurs the first hour. The script builds camaraderie between the men, explores the 17th century British colonial empire, and develops the relationship between Flynn and de Havilland. The pair have a natural chemistry that is unmatched in motion pictures, even by Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in the Star Wars trilogy. To illustrate how good, this became their first of eight pictures together, something that would be inconceivable today.

Michael Curtiz brings a fantastic energy, imagination and visual sheen to the movie, and a huge debt to the picture’s box office success is a sweeping orchestral score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Basil Rathbone has a small role, but demonstrates why he was at the time, the best swordsman in Hollywood, in a standout duel against Flynn, shot on the rocks of Three Arch Bay in Laguna Beach, California.

Captain Blood was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. 1935 was the last year that Academy members were permitted to write in candidates overlooked in the official ballots, and Curtiz, Robinson and Korngold were all write-in nominees, demonstrating how big an impression the film made on their peers. Flynn & de Havilland shot to overnight stardom, but what struck me is how much fun the flick is, even 75 years after it was made.

In the year 1191 – while King Richard the Lionhearted has been detained returning from the third Crusade – his treacherous brother Prince John (Claude Rains) has declared himself Regent of England. The ruthless Sir Guy of Gisborune (Basil Rathbone), ruler of Nottingham, uses Richard’s absence to over-tax and oppress the Saxon people.

In Sherwood Forest, Gisbourne finds a peasant poaching a royal deer. Before he can hit the man with his mace, it’s shot out of his hand with an arrow drawn by the gallant, impudent Sir Robin of Locksley (Errol Flynn). Robin later crashes a banquet at Nottingham Castle with a slain deer draped over his shoulders. He introduces himself to the regal Lady Marian Fitzwalter (Olivia de Havilland) and is asked whether he feels the Saxons are over-taxed.

“Overtaxed, overworked and paid off with a knife, a club or a rope.” Marian is indignant, “Why, you speak treason!” “Fluently,” he replies. Robin promises rebellion against anyone attempting to usurp King Richard. Guards try to apprehend him, but Robin escapes from the castle with acrobatic leaps and bounds and rides away.

Word spreads that Robin wants the peasants to band together to resist Prince John. Accompanied by Will Scarlet, Robin encounters the boisterous Little John (Alan Hale, reprising his role from the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks version) and challenges him to a duel of quarterstaffs over a stream. He joins the Merry Men of Sherwood, along with the portly Friar Tuck (Eugene Pallette).

Springing out of trees and camouflaged vines, the merry men ambush a well-armed caravan led by Gisbourne carrying tax money to London. Marian has accompanied the caravan, and when Robin falls in love with her, and for the chance to see her again, places himself in harm’s way repeatedly, disguising himself and participating in an archery tournament designed to trap him.

In 1935, a costume and set consultant on Warner Brothers Pictures’ Captain Blood named Dwight Franklin sent a memo to studio chief Jack Warner, in which he proposed James Cagney “would make a swell Robin Hood.” Warner Brothers was in the process of an image makeover, moving from contemporary stories that might lead to trouble with the censors, to a wider range of pictures, like Busby Berkeley musicals, and costume adventures.

Cagney was under contract to Warner, but walked in a dispute with the studio. Warner Brothers announced that Errol Flynn, 27-year-old star of Captain Blood, would play Robin Hood instead. William Keighley was named director, but when the picture fell fifteen days behind schedule, Michael Curtiz was employed to replace him.

Curtiz had a flair for staging big action sequences, and while he favored elaborate camera setups that sent the film’s budget to $2 million – the most expensive in Warner Brothers history – The Adventures of Robin Hood became the studio’s biggest grossing film of the year.

As theatrical and intermittently corny as films of the era may seem today, this is the definitive swashbuckling adventure featuring Robin Hood, as timeless as it is entertaining. It was shot in three-strip Technicolor, and it looks far more lush and vibrant than any action film produced in the last fifty years.

The climactic duel between Flynn and Rathbone (who was the better fencer, and hated having to lose to Flynn) is one of the great sword fights in the movies. The vast soundstages at Burbank Studios are used to very good effect in the duel, and accompanied by Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s rich orchestral score, Flynn versus Rathbone is worth a rental alone.

Flynn and de Havilland have remarkable chemistry together, and share a beautifully played scene on a balcony. The script – credited to Norman Reilly Raine and Seton Miller -“ isn’t very deep, and I might mumble if the subject of men in tights is mentioned, but nothing in the picture feels false. Above everything else, it’s fun. It made me want to snap a radio antenna off an SUV and use it as a sword.

The Adventures of Robin Hood was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won for Art Direction, Editing, and Music. More stuntmen were employed than for any movie that had been made up to this point, and they’re put to efficient use, diving off stairwells and getting shot with arrows. Very cool stuff. Bidwell Park in Northern California was used for Sherwood Forest.