THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
JOLLY ROGER THE SCREEN The opening scene in Swashbuckler establishes all the ground rules. Pirate Nick Debrett (James Earl Jones) is about to be hung by a detail of troops with Major Folly (Beau...
...Director Goldstone has had sense enough to realize that the fact he was making a parody did not excuse him from having as many stupendous action sequences as a straight Swashbuckler would have...
...In other words, she remains throughout true to her nature in that first scene until she and Lynch fall into each other's arms, and in love, in accordance with all the old formulas...
...This makes it ideal for doing what all genres try to do: write the history of our own times under the pretense of showing us someone else's...
...Ned Lynch (Robert Shaw) has sailed into view beyond the ramparts of Kingston on which they stand...
...Since such derring-do cannot be accomplished on a sky hook, there is a few moments' delay while the crew rigs up something for Lynch, to swing from...
...Swashbuckling has always been the most artificial of all the genres save,, perhaps, the musical...
...What is being suggested by any number of things here the expression on Nick's face, the part of the chaplain, Folly's folly is crystallized in the scene when Lynch's ship heaves to so he can swing ashore to rescue Nick...
...Although it is a far more neglected genre than the Western perhaps because it is a little too remote the Swashbuckler is even better suited than the Western to be a neutral medium, a tabula rasa, for contemporary mores...
...With an unwavering chorus-girl smile fixed on his face, Lynch supervises as deckhands leap onto the ramparts to secure the line on which, he is to swoop down and snatch Nick from the jaws of death...
...As a rule she came into her pirate's custody as unexpected, unwanted plunder, and then, for awhile at least, she would turn into a ward whose guardianship would be pure embarrassment to him...
...Even more than the Western, the Swashbuckler is a genre set in a time and place so remote and peripheral, none of us feels any responsibility for the history that occurs there...
...As Folly orders the trap door sprung beneath poor Nick, Lynch's first salvo clears away the masonry in back of Folly and alters the expression on his face from stupid offici-ousness to stupid astonishment...
...A certain clumsy ponderousness with which all this occurs might almost be a step in the direction of greater screen realism...
...Despite the heroine's timely sauciness and other modern improvements, however, Swashbuckler has not tampered too much with the ancient machinery of its genre...
...At this the wellbred young maiden's character is immediately established as Folly finds a knife pressed to his groin and she coos, "Let us pass or I'll cut them off...
...It results not from the inherent awkwardness of what these men are trying to do, but from the ridiculously casual and unconcerned attitude they take in doing it...
...It goes beyond all realism and becomes even more preposterous than swashbuckling was in its heydey...
...After having cut short the prayers of a chaplain whose manner suggests he's used to being cut short, Folly is ready to be unaware that, behind his back, the ship of Capt...
...Pirate Nick Debrett (James Earl Jones) is about to be hung by a detail of troops with Major Folly (Beau Bridges) in command...
...In subsequent scenes she takes on one of Lynch's whores in a saloon brawl, holds her own in a sword fight against Lynch himself, makes overtures to him that are strictly business, and upsets life aboard his ship not by her prissiness, like the Swashbuckler heroines we used to see, but by her immodesty...
...Shaw, Goldstone and the others so clearly enjoyed the romp they had making this movie that even if it had nothing else to recommend it, their good spirits would still be amusing...
...As she and her mother are being turned out of their home, Folly tries to take the liberty of searching their luggage...
...We have so little hard and independent information on the Swashbuckler's times that we are at liberty to write, erase, modify and rewrite what was written before without fear of contradiction...
...This is a lark we are on rather than an adventure...
...Jamaica, as is well known, is a swell place to take a vacation, and that is obviously just what everyone in Swashbuckler did there...
...But there is something about this scene in Swashbuckler that goes too far...
...But times have, as they say, changed...
...Later, if she were lucky, a little romance might come of it all...
...When the leading lady (Genvieve Bujold) makes her first appearance in this film, she is in the process of being dispossessed by Folly at the orders of the real villain of the piece, the Lord High Governor (Peter Boyle...
...In the Swashbuckler of yesteryear, for instance, the leading lady was usually some gentlewoman in distress, an Olivia de Havilland or Rhonda Fleming who was appalled, or even fainty, at the bad manners and rough ways of whatever brigand she fell prey to...
...Only Nick remains in bold view, partly because the rope is still around his neck, Hut more, judging by the expression on his face, because he is confident Lynch can demolish the ramparts with cannon fire without touching him in the process...
...There is now another brief respite while Nick's bonds are cut, then he and Lynch are airborne again on their return to the ship...
...We knew all along that, even if privateers did swing from adventure to adventure like Tarzan through the jungle, they never did it so facilely, so .deftly, so quickly and so spontaneously as Errol Flynn would have led us to believe...
...The resulting movie is a couple of hours vacation itself.COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Although Folly manages to bluster a few orders, essentially he and his troops take coyer and wait for Lynch to finish blowing the ramparts to smithereens...
...On the contrary, it required that such sequences be more outlandish than ever...
...Along with Folly's ineptness and everything else in this scene, the leisurely pace at which it proceeds assures us that there is no contest here...
...Folly's troops cower patiently while all this is accomplished, and at last Lynch swings gracefully ashore, still beaming, to Nick's side...
...The slowness of the scene is not elaborative, but dilatory...
Vol. 103 • September 1976 • No. 19
