Recently, I read on a certain webpage that Star Wars: Episode III will have the “longest swordfight in cinematic history,” weighing in at an obnoxious 12 minutes long.
That’d better be a pretty damn good swordfight, or else the audience will get bored pretty quickly. (Although I am recalling that the climactic fight in Iron Monkey was pretty long, and the audience loved it.)
I do think the claim that it’s the “longest” in film history is pretty bold. Can anybody out there name any films that have a longest swordfight? (For the sake of argument, swordfights that are broken up by other scenes–a la Pirates of the Carribean–count for this debate.)
I’m guessing they’re probably talking about individual duels. Offhand, I’d think that some of the battle scenes in movies like Spartacus or Gladiator (or any number of Kurozawa films) were longer than twelve minutes.
“Scaramouche” with Stewart Granger is the longest continuous scene sword fight in Hollywood history I’m aware of. 6 1/2 minutes. Fantastic stuff. Stewart did all of his own fencing.
I don’t think that showing a sword fight, then cutting back and forth to 5 or 6 other battles ongoing is quite the same thing. That means that the sword fight in “Return of the Jedi” would count as lasting about 30 minutes or so, whereas the on-screen stuff might have been 3 or 4 minutes.
[QUOTE=ResIpsaLoquitor]
[in refrence to the OP’s spoiler]
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Schwing!
As I recall, Ridley Scott’s first film, The Duellists has a pretty long swordfight, but I’ve no idea as to how long. It didn’t seem to drag much.
The Liam Neeson movie Rob Roy also has a long swordfight at the end, which actually works quite well in the framework of the story. It’s basically the culmination of several story elements.
A logn swordfight may or may not be annoying… depends how it’s handled, I suppose. I wonder if Lucas has the chops to carry it out that long successfully.
The Duel of the Fates in SWE1:TPM was a pretty good length, broken up or not. And it was pretty riveting up till the anti-climactic finish.