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Romancing the sword (1)

Last year, I wrote a three-part piece on a most unlikely topic: fireplaces. The title, “Romancing the Fireplace,” had a nice medieval ring to it, even though my piece actually dwelt on mundane matters like the secrets of cooking fluffy rice and saving on LPG.

With the country in a deepening state of siege, I feel now is the right occasion to follow through with another multi-part column – this time a nasty medieval piece on war, especially on using swords and other bladed weapons designed for efficient human butchery. Sounds gory to you? Read on, dear friend.

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As I’ve said, I’m no film buff or professional critic who watches dozens of films in a month, speaks fondly of Truffaut and Kurosawa like they were college chums, and renders judgment on a film’s acting, direction and editing, with majestic finality.

I’m a plain street customer who knows what he likes: stories of historical conflict. And in my list, nothing beats real-life, well-researched, and gritty war stories, like A Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, and Platoon. Or at least war stories that follow their own surreal historicity, like the popular Lord of the Rings and Star Wars trilogies.

But let’s set aside the light sabers wielded by Jedi knights long ago in a galaxy far away, and look instead at real swords that killed real people on modern Earth not so long ago and not so far away. One way would be through movies that portray ancient and medieval battles.

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This sort of film – tagged “sword-and-sandal movie” by Hollywood pundits and as “peplum” by Italian filmmakers – dates back to the early days of cinema, when spectacles such as the nine-reel Quo Vadis (1912) and the 12-reel Cabiria (1914) showed how wars were waged by ancient Rome.

The genre remained very much alive up to the 1960’s, with countless movies on historical or legendary warriors such as The Robe (1952), Ivanhoe (1952), The Silver Chalice (1954), The Vikings (1958), Spartacus (1960, re-released 1991), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), the Hercules series, and so on. A few famous figures were even made into movies five times or more, such as Ben-Hur and Cleopatra.

The genre was so successful, in fact, that I now actually hate viewing these Hollywood favorites because, every Lenten season when we were young, they monopolized the only interesting but repetitive TV and movie fare for the family.

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For bad or good, Hollywood practically dropped the genre from the mid-1960’s onwards.

The last notable sword films of that period were Alfred the Great (1969) and Cromwell (1970). Unlike their 1950’s and early 1960’s predecessors, these two films already carried the characteristic grittiness of the hippie protest era. (They were also among the first films that I watched on the big screen on my own, as a gangling and wide-eyed teenage loner.)

A decade later, Hollywood had fully replaced history with high fantasy, with so-called “sword-and-sorcery movies” becoming box-office hits, such as the Conan the Barbarian series (1981 onwards – I never watched any), Highlander series (1986 onwards – only mildly interesting), and Excalibur (1981, a surreal rendering of the King Arthur legend). The only notable historical sword movie of this period, King David (1985), flopped. The sword-and-sorcery genre itself tapered off by the 1990’s.

Why did the history-based genre die out in the late 1960’s, to be replaced by 1980’s fantasy-based sword-and-sorcery? I don’t know. But I suspect the underlying causes had to do with the Vietnam War era and the post-Vietnam syndrome.

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Lately, however, history-based sword-and-sandal films are enjoying a resurgence. Some observers say the genre returned with Gladiators (2000), with Russell Crowe as Maximus – a Roman legion general who escapes a murderous imperial coup and makes a comeback as an avenging gladiator. (I watched the VCD three times until someone “borrowed” it without my permission. Grrr.)

The trend actually began several years earlier with Braveheart (1995) – a memorable, real-life story about Sir William Wallace (portrayed by Mel Gibson), Scotland’s most popular and revered national hero, a revolutionary mass leader who fought side by side with his troops on the frontlines.

The film ranks very high in my list, because it tells how, in the late 13th century, the son of a minor clan notable led and built up a peasant-based guerrilla army to liberate Scotland from cruel British rule, despite being weighed down by double-dealing native feudal lords. (I watched the movie three times and devoured all the details, flinching only at the final execution scene when Wallace is racked, disemboweled and quartered before a big London crowd.)

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Next came two Joan of Arc films (both in 1999), about another medieval war of liberation, led by the maiden warrior of Orleans – a French peasant girl guided by a foreign ideology. One was the full-feature The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc, the other was the CBS mini-series Joan of Arc. Despite criticism that they were full of inaccuracies, I loved both films because of its historical heroine – not to mention falling head over heels with Milla Jovovich.

After these films, and spurred by the success of Gladiators, came a Grecian double-treat that no sword-and-sandals aficionado could refuse: Troy (2004), a cinematic retelling of the timeless Homeric tale about the Trojan war and its superhuman heroes and gods, and Alexander (2004), a sweeping if somewhat exhausting account of how the Hellenic city-states grew into an empire through Alexandrian sword, fire, and intellect.

In these past few years came three other films with oddly similar twists about heroic swordsmen being sucked into civilizations about to fall: The Last Samurai (2003), set in the fading years of feudal Japan; King Arthur (2004), an attempt to historicize the Celtic legend, and set in the fading years of Roman Britain; and Kingdom of Heaven (2005), about the fall of Christian Jerusalem in the fading years of the Second Crusade.

You guessed right. I saw them all.

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At this point, Kabsat Kandu, who didn’t have the virtues of patience and subtlety but was able to follow me thus far, rattled off some surprisingly lucid questions:

First, what is the reason behind the recent revival of sword-and-sandal films? Is it of any social significance?

Second, how could you sit through all of these violent movies? Is it just some cult obsession, or is there perhaps some universal human appeal in watching scenes of bloody carnage, up close where steel blade meets sinewed flesh – if only theatrically through the eyes of the filmmaker?

And third, why are you telling your readers all these? Is it of any use in the current efforts to oust GMA – which is now the topic of perhaps 50% of all columnists throughout the land?

“Oh, but remember,” I lectured Kabsat Kandu as he peered at the PC screen over my shoulder, “this is a multi-part article.” And so, dear readers, like my pesky friend here, you will have to visit this page again next week for some answers. #

Romancing the sword (2)

(Email your feedback to jun@nordis.net)

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