I’ve been wondering when and how someone was going to try to shoehorn that scene into this thread. Great scene, but it’s the epitome of a fake, choreographed fight IMO.
It’s Westley, by the way.
If you read “Duelling with sword and pistol” there are many accounts of sword fight duels and there is a lot of slicing, cutting, and stabbing. The usual rule is if a participant could not continue or look to be so the seconds would intervene. This can mean a lot of ugly cuts before one person is incapacitated.
The Duellists shows this rather well with the 4 sword duels ending thusly:
- Small sword duel ending after much intensity with a thrust through the body.
2 ) Cavalry Sabre Injury delivered to one opponent and intervention by said person’s lady before more can happen.
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Small sword duel ends very quickly when a stab to the body means one participant cannot continue.
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Brutal sabre fight that results in many cuts and exhaustion to the duellists. Ends when they start grappling and the seconds intervene.
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Sabre fight on horseback- ends when one gets a cut to the fore head and he cannot continue.
Small sword and rapier fights could end quickly, but often they did not. Sabre duels could be much more ugly affairs. But either one could end with one or both opponents a bloody mess.
The fight in Dazed and Confused looked pretty familiar. Standard high school fight.
I was talking about genuine fights not duels.
But it’s supposed to be - it’s a story after all - but a friend who knows swordplay has told me they do accurately use the moves and styles that they spout.
But they’re all choreographed.
Except one: Errol Flynn vs Basil Rathbone. I forget the title of the film, but Rathbone was a master fencer, so he just let Flynn have at it.
A History of Violence.
And the granddaddy of them all, Bad Day at Black Rock.
This isn’t quite what you’re discussing, but I always liked the “fight” scene at the end of Silkwood, where Kurt Russell’s character sucker punches Craig Nelson’s.
On my planet, that’s the way a fight would really go: Good Guy is standing near Bad Guy; Bad Guy is looking away and has no idea he’s about to be punched; as BG turns back toward GG, GG delivers one hard but amateurish punch to BG’s chin; BG is a bit stunned but still on his feet; GG grabs and holds his own (punching) hand as if the punch just broke every bone in his hand, and quickly slinks away like he’s afraid BG will retaliate.
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This is the scene I came in to mention. I remember both men as being awkward, even frightened, when it came to using their swords. It’s a pretty funny scene in its way, it’s a shame I can’t find it on YouTube. When I first saw the movie I said “This is probably the most realistic swordfighting scene ever.”
My experience with fencing is that if you’re equally matched, it can go on forever with every one of your thrusts parried, but none of your opponents ripostes too difficult to block.
I wonder how long a real rapier (or most likely sabre) fight would’ve taken until one of the combatants got worn down and made a fatal mistake. Ten minutes? Twenty? Sixty, with a break for juice and crumpets?
Um, what? Cartoonish Hollywood staged fighting complete with CGI? There’s not nearly enough blood, everyone gets finished off quickly with a single blow, no guts or brains leaking out on the ground … in sum: nah.
Perhaps the best swordplay in all of film is from Romeo & Juliet 1936, between Basil Rathbone and Tyrone Power. It is some of the purest french rapier technique you will ever see.
Sonny beating the mess out of Carlo in I.
Plus, they keep on hacking people with their swords - the Roman gladius was exclusively a stabbing weapon.
I have to say that the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy draws his revolver and shoots the swordsman who’s busting out his leet sword skillz seems pretty cromulent- I mean, if you’ve got a loaded .45 revolver and some guy with a Scimitar is threatening you in a way that suggests he means to slice you up, of course you’re simply going to shoot him without further ado.
Of course, that’s after he gets into a fistfight with a bunch of guys armed with swords, so perhaps not quite that realistic. But a classic scene nonetheless.
Stranger
I’ve never witnessed an actual fight to the death so what the hell do I know
buuuut…
If I were to imagine what one might look like I would have to give props to the highschool hallway fight in Gross Pointe Blank.
It was John Cusak fighting the hitman who in real life is a world champion kick boxer and John’s kick boxing trainer.
Very short fight, deliberate hits, delivered with kill-or-be-killed force.
Well, there’s the bar fight scene in Foxy Brown. A woman takes offense at something Foxy’s done and picks a fight, saying she’s got her black belt in karate. Instead of going all martial arts, flying kicks in the air as expected, Pam Grier just picks up a barstool and bashes the hell out of her opponent. The fight that follows is pretty standard, but I always thought that was fairly realistic, for a 70s exploitation flick.
Do you have a cite for this? I have heard that it could be usedfor both stabbing and slicing.
Yes! I’m still feeling like I’m missing something though. My brother got sucker punched by his drunk friend and had to have surgery to fix his broken broken face bones. Danny from the MTV Real World had a similar drunken fight injury. Surely there’s a movie that depicts the severe consequences of real life fights?
GF1