Be Excellent To Each Other

Just what is it that makes one great sword and sandal adventure sing and another plod? We must look to the key ingredients of what is a deceptively demanding recipe. Because to be honest, it looks as if Hollywood has completely lost the plot as to what makes a good epic. Now let Uncle Pete take you by the hand and carefully explain why films with swords are broken, and how they can be fixed.

First off there’s the old adage – ‘brevity is the art of wit’. Now, I accept that brevity is not something you get with most old epics, but the swashbuckler such as Captain Blood, Sea Hawk and Robin Hood all clocked in under a hundred
minutes. It helps, it does. Then there’s a certain dash. Historical accuracy is all very well, but it mustn’t get in the way of a cracking tale. If we want true history, then for God’s sake read a book. History is confused and muddied – you
don’t want a film being so. If a film deals with a clear-cut event with a big pay-off, such as the breaching of the Ruhr Dams, the assassination of Julius Caesar, Hitler in his bunker or the battle at Thermopylae then you can afford to
stick close to the facts. This is why WWII films (not covered in this) on the whole work better than films based on older events. Most of all you want your historical epic big on clear-cut, memorable visuals. The more epic the more you keep it simple and gutsy, don’t immerse yourself in the minutiae of historical life unless you’re a genius at making social history work, like Peter Weir is. Move fast, keep it at an acceptable lenght. Louis B. Meyer's judgement of if a film should be cut or not would be if his ass cheeks began hurting. He was a bastard, but he had a point.

Now they say that a film is only as good as its villain. If the quality of the big-bad is even a little off, you’ve got to have a hell of a lead man to fill the gap. With Westerns this isn't so much a problem. A Western spends much of its time following one man who rarely sees the dude he’s up against until the final reel. To counter this he has a buddy, usually one not quite as smart and more hot-headed, allowing the main hero someone to play off with - be it in a comedy routine or a grim trial of survival against the elements. These films don’t have a problem. In older historical adventures of the sword and sandal vein this becomes trickier. As opposed to the character fuelled western with its strong angle on individualism and survival-of-the-fittest, a historical epic throws the hero up against a system with a villain at its head. This stems from the Hollywood trend of the old Roman movies. Americans have oft claimed a hatred of empire, and while Britain had the dreams of Pax Romana to model its empire on, America portrayed the reign of the Emperors as a villainous, decadent, aristocratic cabal for a revolutionary hero to pit himself against. Amusingly this led to the fallacy that the Roman Republic was honest, democratic and against slavery, while in fact the Roman Emperors were usually at most only equally as corrupt and under whose reign slavery actually became somewhat more human. This was the model that Hollywood set in place for all historical epics, starting with the great works of Cecile B. DeMille. They all revolve around the underdog rousing the downtrodden against an oppressor, from Robin Hood to Spartacus.

It’s a clever system with a lot of drive and one that affords some grand villainy. They usually came in four flavours. There was the effeminate, corrupt, weakling who got his cronies to do the dirty work. Claude Rains as Prince John
was the best early example, but Peter Ustinov made a cracking Nero later on. Joaquin Phoenix’s Emperor Commodus was another stab in this direction, but the humour and intelligence wasn’t there to temper the irritation and thus we were given someone to pity, rather than hiss. This template later came to an unfortunately ludicrous and somewhat uncomfortably homophobic manifestation in Frank Miller and Zack Snyder’s ‘300’.


The second variant is in the form of the angry God. Harryhausen’s laudable epics make full use of this, with the God figure in effect being the story-teller placing the monsters and challenges in the path of the hero. Usually booming of
voice and more callous and bullying than outright evil, they tend to be less fun than the other two styles – though the monsters they deploy are frequently ace. At the end they are very rarely deposed, only a little humbled. They are usually played by fat Shakespearean actors with beards, or occasionally if it’s Hera or a ancient jungle Goddess-Queen someone who is Honour Blackman or Ursula Andress.


The third manner of villain is the charismatic bastard – played for our entertainment at seeing their patience fray, their bad temper manifest in delicious villainy and their being put in humiliating circumstances. These are usually the fare in swashbucklers such as Robin Hood and the odd pirate movie. Basil Rathbone made a decent cad in Robin Hood, but was merely a straight man for Flynn to play off. Geoffrey Rush entertained with thick slices of ham in the first Pirates of the Caribbean. The greatest example took the form of the 1990’s Robin Hood, where Alan Rickman (quoth another reviewer) ‘stole from the Costner and gave to the viewer.’ Rickman’s eye-rolling panto turn made a rather plodding film a semi-delight. It is legend in industry history that his scenes were mercilessly cut when Costner panicked that the man who cancelled Christmas was pegging over the hills and far away into the distance with his worthy film.

Then there’s the plain old authoritarian, humourless villain. A great example was Lawrence Olivier in Spartacus, with a fine line in cold eyed menace and frightening self-belief in his destiny to rule. Conrad Veidt was arguably the finest big-bad of all, playing an utterly evil Vizier in the glorious 30’s epic ‘The Thief of Baghdad’. His was a villain with literally no redeeming features, completely malevolent.

These are the star players of any historical adventure. With a strong enough actor and script, you can’t go far long – though the true greats rarely use the God as the villain, for obvious reasons. All feature the smug oppressor, confident of success and his ultimate humiliating discomfiture.

So why then has Hollywood of recent years turned its back on this golden goose tradition and its cranking out of bad eggs? Other films – the action film and the sci-fi and fantasy epic still have great villains to overcome. But Hollywood
for some baffling reason has ruined the historical action adventure. Let us see why, but first – a handy clue as to whether you a watching a fun sword and sandal or a boring sword and sandal.

This clue is in the music. Historical epics used to have music designed to thrill; closely hewing to the soaring heights of swashbuckling fanfares or the martial madness of Gustav Holst inspired orchestral battle-music. Erich Wolfgang
Korngold’s gleeful score for Robin Hood set the pace for the great swashbucklers. Alex North made a brutal mechanised parade of death for Spartacus. Hell, the opening of Gladiator is basically a massive rip of Holst’s
‘Mars’, something which the Holst estate rightfully deployed the lawyers. (Listen to them side by side, it’s pretty blatant.)


Ah, yes. Gladiator – we’ll be going into detail about this shortly, but the music of Gladiator is a teller. Zimmerman fitted the mood of the bulk of the film by inserting the most irritating aspect of new sword and sandal films – the
wailing Middle-Eastern woman. It’s an aural cliché now, as much as Lux Aterna’s score for Requiem for a Dream is used for You Tube edits of battle scenes. This terrible atonal music meant to evoke sadness and mourning is now used in virtually every scene involving either a city establishing shot, a massacre, a doomed romance, a man stubbing his toe… it’s awful, and it drags on and on without rhyme or reason. Which is the feeling evoked in the main by the modern epic. Thanks Zimmerman.


If your film has this wailing in it, it’s probably going to be long and boring.

First off, can you remember a truly memorable and exciting baddy in the last ten years of sword and sandal. Lord of the Rings doesn’t count, by the way, as it is pure fantasy. Keep trying. Consult the list above. Now, I can’t be sure why, but Hollywood decided to start writing its villains as if they were a cross between victims of a callous, uncaring and abusive aristocratic upbringing and the ineffectual bumbler - with some sexual deviancy thrown in as a vain attempt to spice them up a bit. This seemed to start with Gladiator, with Phoenix manfully struggling with the badly written character of a whiny, incestuous, whiney-whine whiner with the battle skills of a lemon. Why is this? Well, it’s all down to the Iraq war, really. Hollywood knee-jerked against it, forgot it was there to entertain with the awesome and saddled us with moping ciphers failing to secure ‘hearts and minds’ and bemoaning why everybody hates them and their regime. True villainy was out – no room for that in today’s morally troubled world. Instead we got victims of circumstance who really just want to have a bit of fun and be left alone. Consequently you’re left wondering if Phoenix is such a bad egg really, and couldn’t Crowe, y’know, learn to get along. Oh wait; he murdered his wife and child for some reason. Phew, good thing too or the film would fall apart from stultifying inertia.


Now before you all accuse me of being a bit too harsh on Gladiator, I don’t actually dislike the film. It’s a fun epic thanks to the focused grit of Crowe, a stellar battle scenes and some top notch gladiatorial fun. But does anyone
really revisit the film beyond the awesome opening battle and the fun bits with Oliver Reed? No. And this is because of the seeds of boring that would take root in Hollywood adventure. How did this happen? Well, Gladiator made a shit-ton of money, so Hollywood decided to maximise the maximus out of it. Whilst forgetting the bits that made it good. Oops.


That’s Hollywood’s new stable of villains discredited. What about the heroes? Um, can anybody remember them either, eh? How about Farrell’s Alexander or Bloom’s Paris, or any of the more recent mopers? Yep, it is now vogue to have the hero complain about his lot and be troubled and all ‘shades-of-gray’. Again, this works if you’re a great scriptwriter with something to say, but these guys are being shoehorned into old fashioned spectacle. Why is this? It’s not just the mire of Iraq that has made Hollywood lose faith in stand-up guys fighting for regime change. It’s the baleful influence of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Now, Watchmen is a great comic full of damaged goods. But it only works the way it does in how it kicks against the comic conventions as a gripping sci-fi satire that subverts all the tropes of the genre. Nite Owl is hilarious because he’s Batman having a midlife crisis. He does not make a good straight action hero in a sword and sandal unless you’re trying purposefully to subvert those topes too for darkly humorous effect. You simply have to have a hero in these films that you believe is worth following. You need someone with humour, intelligence, kindness and a big heaping of bad-ass hardness. This is why Kenneth Brannagh’s grim vision of Henry V works as well as the pageantry that is Olivier’s. His Henry V seems worth following. You want him to win.

Yes, Hollywood – shock bulletin. You need charismatic, well written, and most importantly driven heroes for your films to work. Charlton Heston may be fashionably derided nowadays, but he looked the noble part, had an easy charisma and seemed sculpted to fit those days. And we had the craggy, swarthy types such as Anthony Quinn and Kirk Douglas for the Roman tales, and the playboy adventurers Fairbanks and Flynn for the Robin Hood, Prisoner of Zenda and pirate films. Now, who’s more fun?

Fun you hear me, damn you! FUN. We need heroes with drive. They don’t have to hew close to the Joseph Campbell scripture – Flynn’s Robin Hood never refused any call, and had no trouble pursuing the lady – but they do have to have drive. Braveheart is credited as being the film that brought back the historical epic. Say what you will about Mel Gibson but there’s nothing woolly about him. You can’t get much more drive than he doles out in the film. And in featuring a top baddy in the form of Patrick McGoohan, a couple of cracking battles, a good score and lots of cries of ‘FREEDOM!’ you’ve got a rousing spectacle. No, it isn’t historically accurate. Shut up. You only care because you’re English and in truth they were all being Scotch bastards and invading us constantly until we got pissed off and gave ‘em what-for. Switch that chafing part of you off and enjoy. It’s the marriage of modern day battle-grit and mud with derring-do.

Or would you rather have the joyless and aimless abomination that was Ridley Scott and Crowe’s Robin Hood?

I wish I could stop here, but there’s more irritation. Because CGI can capture any battle scene imaginable, it tends to not only throw in one too many thus padding out an interminable run-time, but follow very predictable staples. Siege, cavalry charge and big slow-mo rugby scrum with spears. Now, I love this sort of stuff, but if I have to see a load of massive-generated little digital people running around a plain in front of a city I think I’ll scream. Because I don’t care about anyone involved. With all this big spectacle things tend to get a bit generic. Now Ridley Scott used to be a cracker at directing the old action, we’ll give Gladiator a pass – it’s a hugely memorable opening battle. Everything since then has been… well, rather boring. There’s no attention to detail, just a load of guys scrumming. It worked in Lord of the Rings because it mixed the epic scale with feature-laden skirmishes. You’d remember the guys getting inventively skewered. But epics these days just settle for jostling, stabbing and occasional plummeting. Not good enough. Where are the old great stunts like in Ben Hur? Eh? I mean, that chariot race is remembered for a reason. The 1930’s battles are more thrilling in Robin Hood, and there isn’t even any blood. Every moment is afforded attention – every sword fight isn’t there to make up the numbers but to look specifically cool. When guys get shot in the old Robin Hood, it looks really cool. There’s one bit where an arrow zips through a candle wick snuffing it out before embedding in the guy. And that stuntman’s wearing a padded chest and they’re firing real arrows into him – it looks awesome! I’m getting excited just remembering it! Let’s have more understated coolness, more fun. MORE FUN.

Nowadays in the epic film we’ve got this awful situation where we’ve got a big wok with a load of ingredients poured in with a tiny, meagre fire lit underneath and none of the special sauce. Admirable works of production in costume, set design and prop-work are lost in a bustle and a shrugging tone of direction. Nothing is shot with the painterly eye that Kubrick, Cardiff and Curtis brought to film. Composition is all to hell. Everything’s shown, little is hidden in darkness or modesty. The obsession is that every damn penny has to be seen. It’s all too much. There’s one shot in Robin Hood (that film again, but I love it so) that proves more worthy than an extensive CGI fly-by over some generic Arabic city. It’s a matte painting of the city of Nottingham with a plain and a wood and a hill, coming up the hill in the foreground is the live action element – the Bishop and his monks approaching the castle for Prince John’s coronation. But the monks are really Hood and his men! The entire thing looks like a beautiful moving fairytale storybook illustration. It’s over after a lovingly lingering ten seconds, but it sticks.

Cut to Middle Eastern city. Some woman wails. It is predictably shot in the Golden hour. Yes, everything nowadays seems to be a visual cliché as well. We get sunsets and sunrises everywhere and every fight degenerating into a slow-mo further-wailing scrum because it shows ‘teh’ futility.

Well to hell with them all.

Is there any hope you may ask? (If you’ve got this far, that is.) A guarded yes is my answer. There was a fair bit wrong with ‘300’, such as the baddy and the uneasy feeling that Miller was taking it seriously, but man… it moved along! Each encounter upped the ante, each encounter was memorable and it was all pompously hilarious. It seemed to be having fun. And though I have grown tired of the speed-ramp black-cyan stylised manner in other films such as Watchmen and the wretched, wretched, wretched The Spirit it really works for that film. Speed, fun, big hero, memorable battles – there you go. Beowulf had a cracking script by Neil Gaiman, if the direction was a little workmanlike. It was saying something new in a clever way and the battles, again, were exciting and the heroes were heroes and the villains were villains albeit either awesome-mental Crispin Glover or a slinky Angelina Jolie.

So here’s my prescription:

Watch and re-watch either Princess Bride and Robin Hood or Spartacus. Keep the running time under 100 minutes until you learn discipline. Look to the old film scores for the art of pacing your action, aimless wailing don’t cut it. Have a proper baddy. If your hero is a sparkling wit have a dour evil authoritarian. If your hero is an earnest square-jaw, have Alan Rickman. Set the thing in unlikely locations. Avoid for all love the desert, avoid the Crusades and avoid any scenes where it looks as if people don’t know where they’re going. Hire awesome stuntmen, treat ‘em as good as your actors.

Good luck out there. I’ll be waiting and first in queue for the next epic that I can fit in after tea and still have time for a few pints down the pub.

Flagged "Must read later".