I’m no expert, and it’s been a long time, but the Richard Lester version of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers seemed to have some fairly authentic swordfights – it was certainly the first I saw where it actually looked like they were fighting, not fencing.
The Richard lester version of The Three and Four Musketeers that came out in the 1970s (the ones with Michael York and Oliver Reed) has some excellent sword fighting in it. Although sometimes played up for laughs ( the fight on the ice, for example), the actual swordplay is good. And it’s one of the few movies where they actually get TIRED while fighting- very realistic!
I’ll throw this out there because I have no idea, and it hasn’t been mentioned yet…be gentle.
Kingdom of Heaven
Accuracy? I don’t know about that, but I really enjoyed that movie. Of course I really like 13th Warrior as well.
-rainy
Also, how does the sword play in LadyHawk hold up. I remeber being impressed at how Rutger’s character fought with everything he could lay his hands on, pushing opponents off balance etc. Seemed the usual thrust/parry, thrust/parry had been greatly expounded on/
-rainy
Great question, tdn.
Kurosawa’s movies do show pretty realistic feudal Japanese warfare. The scene in The Seven Samurai where the two rônin are facing off against each other and one of the onlookers says something to the effect of, “Why doesn’t he quit. It’s obvious who is going to win,” stands out in my mind. There’s a long period of feeling each other out, one person commits, the other responds, and one of them gets cut all to hell. Notice that the winner of that duel gets a nice cut down one brow to his cheek. That’s how close the margin was between living and dying.
The duel scene in Rob Roy was particularly well done. Just about everyone who is involved in eastern or western martial arts agrees on this movie. The styles they used were not anachronistic and both actors did a very good job of making it look as real as possible. It’s not that Rob Roy’s sword was particularly heavy, he was not used to duels and he got wounded early on. Even slight blood loss will tend to weaken you, and he had at least one cut to his sword arm, which would impair him even more. That, and the fight went on for several minutes. That takes a toll. Try vigorously swinging a 2-3 pound weight around for 5 minutes and see how chipper you are at the end of that time period.
While I loved the Lord of the Rings movies, I didn’t like that the warfare was given such short shrift. The gear was well-made and realistic. I wish I could get a real sword made like Aragorn’s ranger sword; the authorized reproductions are wallhanger crap sword-like objects. The hero characters’ scenes were done very well. I have few complaints about how any of the Fellowship fought. Some little bits were even outstanding IMO. Mass battles, though, were severely lacking in tactics or even proper weapon utilization much of the time. For example, in Return of the King, the Rohirrim didn’t even use their shields when they charged. I know that in reality that was due to not having enough horsemen trained to ride that way, but it annoys a bit.
The duel in Troy was generally well done. They did a very good job of showing what fighting with a spear and shield would have been like. Both characters used their shields as weapons, and the swordplay was believable. There were even a few moves that when I viewed them made me think, “Ooh, nicely done.” Brad Pitt and Eric Bana must have worked their asses off to make that look as good as it did, because I don’t think either one of them had a prior background in martial arts.
Errol Flynn was a fencer and it shows. All his movies that I’ve seen had lots of flashy swordplay that would never have worked with a real sword of the type he was supposed to have been using. The only reason he could do it even in stage fighting was because the sword blade was not steel but aluminum.
The Count of Monte Christo is a slightly boring film but has a good smallsword duel in it. Dangerous Liaisons has a very young Keaneu Reeves and John Malkovitch fighting it out with smallswords. It is short, nasty, and pretty realistic. The Mask of Zorro has some really good stuff mixed in with the flash.
The Hunted (the 1995 one with ninja and Christopher Lambert) had some good sword work, mostly the stuff done by Yoshio Harada (Takeda in the movie). There’s one scene where he’s partially surrounded and he has his head down with his eyes partially unfocused as he glares up through his eyebrows. He did that so that he can both make full use of his peripheral vision and protect his eyesight from glare. That’s a nice little detail that only martial arts geeks would catch. The movie itself is fairly bad, even if you ignore most of the ninja crap and the fact that Joan Chen and John Lone, who play two of the main characters, are Chinese, not Japanese.
They’re not sword fights, but I’d like to plug two films that I think had particularly well-done fight scenes: The Bourne Identity, which had hands-down some of the most realistic fights I’ve seen in cinema, and The Hunted (2003, Tommie Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro) which had a really nasty knife fight. Most martial arts teachers who teach realistic self-defense will tell you that at the end of a knife fight, in most cases one person will probably go to the hospital and the other will go to the morgue. This fight showed what that would be like.
If I didn’t include it, my list of three movies would have to have included a “Hi Opal!”
No doubt there were plenty of problems with that movie, but there were a few things I liked. The mud, for one. I get sick of seeing medieval movies where the peasants look like they just came from the dry cleaners.
In general the further back you go in time (in movies) the more disconnected the swordplay tends to be with the real thing. Modern sport fencing is usually spot on. Earlier classical fencing is in most cases well done if a little stylised. Renaissance sword fights are usually way off, though there are a few gems that stand out. Medieval swordplay doesn’t resemble the real thing in any movie I’ve ever seen. And even the large scale combat is usually not depicted correctly.
Apart from that there is also a limit on our knowledge of ancient martial arts as well, specifically, we don’t have any treatises of martial arts from europe before the high middle ages. So we have a good grasp of how weapons such as the longsword, sword and buckler, messer, falchion, spear, pole-arms, and other weapons from the high middleages and renaissance were used, but we don’t have a clear picture of how sword and large shield were used during say the migration period. We know well how rapiers were used, but the tactical use of the great renaissance dopple-handers remain more speculative than I’d like.
When it comes to realistic sword fights in movies stick to sport fencing and classical duels with smallsword or saber. Anything earlier is likely to be wrong, heavily stylised stage combat.
Deathstalker
d&r
While I agree with you in theory, there’s always the possibility that someone has done what research is possible to do, and has decided this is the way it would have been…
I know, I know, I’m giving Hollywood waaaaaay to much credit. But since we don’t have anything really solid to go on besides tapestries and a few written sources before the Fechtbooks (sp?), it’s quite possible they’ve got it right. Not likely, but possible.
I disagree with you Tristan.
I would say that some of the Historical Martial Artists studying earlier sword and shield combat MIGHT have it right, or more realisticly, they probably have a good starting point about now.
Hollywood sword and shield fight scenes are littered with moves that have absolutely no martial value in them at all. They are based on stage combat techniques that look flashy and help convey a story.
They are NOT, however, based on proper martial study and applications of correct timing, measure, attitude or real-world martial validity.
If I could I would show you some fo the moves used by actors in such films, and clearly demonstrate why they simply do not work.
So no, we don’t really know how vikings and other migration era cultures used the sword and shield. Hollywood certainly doesn’t have a clue, heck they don’t know how medieval weapons were used and we have treatises and fechtbuchs and large comunities of martial artists studying them. Really even those HEMA practioners studying early sword and shield will be the first to tell you that right now, all they have is educated guesses.
I’m still hoping somewhere, lying in some dusty shelf in some museum is a manuscript on early sword and shield. That would be a great find!
[monty python] “ow do you know 'e’s a king?”
“'E’s the only one not covered in shit!”
[/monty python]
Don’t ruin Errol Flynn for me, folks–I loved Captain Blood growing up (Family Classics with Frazier Thomas–great show!). I am more familiar with fencing in movies than sword play, though. It may all be make believe, but it looks great.
The sword fight at the end of Mel Gibson’s Hamlet I remember as being particularly realistic looking. They showed 2 styles, large 2-handed swords and smaller, one (or was it hand and a half?) handed swords.
IANBA*
Actually, from a kendo perspective, the lightsabre duel between Darth Vader and Ob-Wan Kenobi in the FIRST Star Wars movie was rather realistic. In that you had an old man who kept his sword pointed on center in Darth’s face, and avoided any flashy moves, versus a huge strong cripple who lumbered around trying to smash him down.
*I Am Not Bob Anderson.
It might be cheesy, and there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t accurate, but I’m actually quite fond of the 1993 (?) Three Musketeers - the one with Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt & Charlie Sheen. Oh, and a wonderfully sinister Tim Curry. 
I like the fact that they get dirty, and they use “ungentlemanly” techniques during most of the sword fights. I realize it’s not quite “medieval”, but it’s close.
It probably won’t be popular, but I really enjoyed The Last Samurai, ditto for Troy. And for a fun swordfighty movie in modern-esque times, there’s always the original Highlander.
It was somehow historically accurate. The names of people and places weren’t made up.
Also, the guy playing Saladin was pretty good. I regret they didn’t hire any other actor for the movie.
No but a lot of the material around them was :). The Kingdom of Heaven has it’s moments, but despite some nice historical touches ( like the time and manner of Reynald of Chatillon’s fate ), it was indeed chockablock with errors and omissions of all sorts.
On the sword side of things, I think Kinthalis covered this in another thread, but the “high guard” thing was real, but perhaps a bit shallow ( you likely wouldn’t stick with a sigle guard continuously ). Again the stereotype of curved Saracen swords ( not universal in the film ) is not terribly accurate for the period. And I think it may have been stetching the time line just slightly for hand-and-a-half swords.
- Tamerlane
Do you want medieval settings, or just good swordplay? For the latter, let me recommend The Duellists, with Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel as French officers in the Napoleonic period (based on a true story). They fight several duels, with sabers, smallswords, sabers again, pistols, sabers on horseback, and finally pistols again. The swordplay looks very realistic to me.
It’s Excalibur. Don’t know why that’s misspelled so often. And it’s not fair to judge John Boorman’s movie on historical accuracy; it’s a mythic fantasy, not a historical piece. Instead, try to imagine the feeling on the set while Boorman directed his naked 17-year-old daughter as she lay underneath Gabriel Byrne in his rather fantastical plate armor. How many takes did they shoot? Did she get any scratches?
Speaking of Arthurian movies, I’d recommend Lancelot and Guinevere (variant title: Sword of Lancelot). It starred Cornel Wilde, who was an Olympic-level fencer, and has a couple of really good fights. (Also some serious heat coming off Wilde’s voluptuous wife, Jean Wallace, playing Guinevere as, frankly, kind of a selfish slut.)
Also, The Knights of the Round Table has a good extended scene with Robert Taylor as Lancelot and Mel Ferrer (an expert fencer) as Arthur, fighting with longswords. Anyway, I find it fun because they seem to be fighting out with sheer joy rather than anger, and end up the fight as friends.
The Black Shield of Falworth, with Tony Curtis, actually has some excellent fight scenes. (Based on a good Howard Pyle book, Men of Iron.)
As mentioned, the swordplay in Kingdom of Heaven was rather hokey, but the armour was nothing short of excellent (at least for the Crusaders); definitely looked late-12th Century to me.
There are a couple of really good versions of Prisoner of Zenda that both have an excellent climactic swordfight: Ronald Colman vs. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (in a rare villain role) in the black-and-white movie, and Stewart Granger vs. James Mason in a good color version (basically a scene-for-scene remake).
I haven’t commented on a lot of films because I haven’t seen them personally. I missed The Last Samurai though. Some good stuff in that. Historical accuracy blew (the insurrectionists mostly adopted modern technology, did not fight with old weapons and armor, and the US Army was far from respected at the time) but the sword fights were pretty well done.
(Unlike a lot of people on these boards, I don’t give a rat’s ass what Tom Cruise does outside the studio. He has been in some enjoyable films, and I won’t let his real life predjudice what I get out of the projects he’s involved in. And let’s face it, a lot of decent art is made by outright loonies; people who act like they belong down at the homeless shelter with the tin foil hat crowd and the winos when they’re not “on.”)
I saw The Last Samurai in the US with my Japanese girlfriend. Aside from the combat, we both felt that they did a pretty good job of catching at least some of the spirit of Japan. I have a feeling that the parts we enjoyed the most, because they rung true, were the parts that people who don’t know much about Japan held to be improbable, weird, or too sappy.
The problems I have with it are more specifically about its historical inaccuracy:
Great Kilts?
Clan Tartans?
Claymore?
Woad?
Nevr mind the mis-stagings of the battles and the juggling of the timelines of various characters, it’s the combat that’s most glaringly wrong to me. It may feel “gritty” and therefore “authentic”, but that’s a fake authenticity, IMO.
And The Bruce gets more shafted in this movie than Jill Kelly in any of hers…
Nitpick - Wallace’s two-handed sword may have been anachronistic, but it didn’t have a claymore’s distinctive slanted crossguard.