Not a movie, but the Bronn v Ser Vardis Egan swordfight in the first season of Game of Thrones was pretty great (and, in my understanding, actually pretty realistic as screen sword fights go). I also loved the (incredibly brutal) Hound + Arya vs a handful of Lannister soldiers fight in the inn (season 4, I think).
He, of course, played Zorro in the Walt Disney series of the same name back in the '50s.
Erroll Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, Captain Blood, and The Sea Hawk are the Holy Trinity of movie swordfights, giant shadows on the wall and all.
The first 1:30 of Covington Cross was kind of fun.
Perhaps not the most realistic, but certainly unexpected and entertaining - the re-animated corpse sword fight from Stardust.
It was my understanding that Basil Rathbone was very disappointed when he had to lose a duel, as he was an excellent swordsman.
I submit Ronald Colman vs. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in The Prisoner of Zenda. The Prisoner of Zenda(1937) - Rassendyll vs. Rupert of Hentzau - YouTube
Is that the one with the poodle heads sticking out of a pie?
I was ninja’d on Covington Cross? I’ll go stand in the corner.
On the complete other end of the realism scale are the various duels between Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Ziyi Zhang, Maggie Cheung, and Tony Chiu-Wai Leung in Hero. Completely unrealistic - flying through the air, dancing over the still surface of a lake; almost completely in the mind, for the sword/spear fight between Nameless and Sky - but visually stunning. Hero is proof that a piece of totalitarian propaganda can be nonetheless be an amazing film.
I haven’t watched GoT. is this the Bronn vs Egan fight? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NN30YMzja6Y
That’s a tough scene. The guy in the helmet was swinging for the fences every time while the other guy patiently waited for a chance to hit the weak spots (underarm, behind the knee). Pretty cool.
Love the use of the sheild as a bludgeoning weapon!
I associate Harvey Keitel so strongly with crime movies. It’s weird to see him in a period piece. Cool fights, though, and I wasn’t expecting that last one to end so abruptly.
I always kind of thought MacGregor realized the other guy was too quick, so he overplayed his exhaustion to sucker him a bit. Walking forward dragging your sword on the floor is way over the top. Playing out like a man who’s given up and walking in to death.
Cunningham should have just stabbed him in the neck from the side as soon as MacGregor dropped - stopping to gloat, and even taking his eyes off target are a definite no in the evil overlord list.
That might be a potential strategy, but not to the point that Cunningham had his blade to his neck. Relying on your enemy to gloat before dispatching you might be a safe strategy for James Bond but for almost anyone else. And MacGregor had even let his sword out of his grasp. Far too chancy to take it that far.
Yeah, that’s the one!
IIRC we’ve discussed this here before (in GQ I think)–how would a REAL sword duel, to the death, proceed between two highly skilled principals?
On the one hand we have Olympic style fencing, but (a) the swords there are very thin and lightweight), and (b) there is no ultimate penalty to be paid if you lose, so it’s all about the offense and striking first. Which typically happens within 5 seconds after the starting signal…
Would we indeed see a number of minutes of a chesslike sword match, each principal carefully trying to probe the defenses but always maintaining a defense first mentality? [Me I am specifically thinking of the duels in Roger Zelazny’s Amber series where he goes into a fair amount of detail w.r.t. the techniques and thought processes involved] Or would they be over almost as quickly as an Olympic duel? We would I suppose have to go back to the days of real duels for any direct examples.
Don’t know if it qualifies as “great”, but here’s one with Burt Lancaster: The Flame And The Arrow.
Burt and Nick Cravat did some really impressive acrobatic stunt work in those days.
Quartz:
Great call. This movie gets, and deserves, a lot of criticism, but the swordfight scene is great action.
This might be a bit obscure, because the movie should be far better-known. The duel in Powell-Pressburger’s 1942 The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp.
Lieutenant Clive Wynn-Candy (Roger Livesey) fights Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) over a perceived insult to the Imperial German Army officer corps during the Boer War period. Not only is it a great match, but the friendship that develops afterward between Clive and Theo, complicated by each loving the same woman and their being on opposite sides during WWI, followed by Theo’s abdication from 1934 Nazi Germany, is wrenchingly moving.
Livesey and Walbrook were SUCH fucking good actors.
(Most film buffs know the Powell-Pressburger masterpieces The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, but dig deeper. Pretty much every movie they made was solid gold)