In short: When Eight Bells Toll (1971)

British attempts at creating a new franchise in the spirit of James Bond have historically never fared too well. A nice example for this tradition is this attempt at bringing in French director Etienne Périer and turn to the ever popular Alistair MacLean for scripting duties to make a young Anthony Hopkins playing a permanently disgruntled treasury agent into “The New James Bond”.

Apparently, nobody involved in the production bothered to understand why the Bond movies were the smashes they were, so that series’ sense for POP and the popping eye candy is replaced by the more realistic and workaday charms of your typical Alistair MacLean hero and his world. Hopkins’s Calvert is still supremely competent, mind you, but like all MacLean heroes, he’s rather too down to Earth and focussed on solving the problems at hand to ever feel charismatic or cool like even the Roger Moore version of Bond does.

There is quite a bit of geographical hopping around here too, but where the Bond films show what tourists like to see – and typically set an outrageous action set piece there – When Eight Bells Toll prefers various, dramatically grey, coast lines, and lots of ships and boats (and helicopters, to be fair). There’s nothing wrong with that at all of course, but if you’re trying to beat the contemporary Bond movies at their own game, you might at least look as if you’re trying.

There are at least some direct if tepid attempts at copying the sexy/sleazy bits of the Bonds, but the film – after all written by the rather notoriously couth MacLean - feels faintly embarrassed by that instead of convinced, which obviously also turns it unconvincing.

All of this doesn’t mean there’s no fun to be had here. If you go into the film not asking for the Bond it doesn’t know how to deliver but for a more on-brand action/adventure Alistair MacLean style affair, there’s a lot to like here, particularly if you enjoy your action and adventure taking place on coastlines and boats (there is, thankfully, not too much interest in diving here), and featuring ultra-competent, slightly boring protagonists.

In short: Swordsman of Siena (1962)

Original title: La congiura dei dieci

Italy, in the second half of the 16th Century. British mercenary and charming rogue Thomas Stanswood (Stewart Granger) is moving (with quite a few horsemen trying to catch him in tow) from his former employ to work for the Spanish governor Don Carlos (Riccardo Garrone) of occupied Siena. As it turns out, Don Carlos is quite the fiend, as is his torture-loving (note to my American readers: in civilized countries, torturing people makes you the bad guy) cousin Hugo (Fausto Tozzi), chief of the guard aka main thug.

Don Carlos needs Stanswood as bodyguard for his fiancée, Orietta Arconti (Sylva Koscina), member of a renowned family of the city. Surprisingly enough, Orietta actually wants to marry Don Carlos, despite his responsibility for the death of her father, and the heavy patriotic misgivings of her younger sister Serenella (Christine Kaufmann). What Orietta doesn't want is a bodyguard, particularly not a charming and roguish bodyguard her sister falls for head over heels.

Soon, Stanswood finds himself entangled in the conflict between the Spaniards and Siena's very own band of terrorists/freedom fighters known as the Ten, and, having a chivalrous heart and a soft spot for Serenella, rather doubts his Spanish employers are the right side to work for in this conflict. Why, he might even end up joining the rebels, and winning a brutal horse race for them to incite a more large-scale rebellion.

Etienne Périer's (the IMDB lists one Baccio Bandini as co-director, but the film doesn't, and you know how notoriously trustworthy the site is in these things) Swordsman of Siena is a fine piece of swashbuckling adventure, the sort of film tailor-made to let Stewart Granger do the charming rogue bit he does so effortlessly and convincingly.

All too often, supposed charming rogues in movies really rather come over as smarmy, self-centred bastards, something Granger usually manages to avoid with natural charisma, unless he's in a film where him being a self-centred bastard is exactly the point. In Swordsman's case, Granger also has help by a script that knows the difference between being a rogue and being an asshole (there's a particularly great scene in which Stanswood refuses Serenella's teenage crush because he's "ten years too old or ten years too young"), a fact that makes Stanswood a particularly enjoyable hero.

As is more often than you'd expect the case in swashbucklers, the female characters have a bit more to do than just stare adoringly at Granger or do that bit where their particularly heavy dislike is meant to hide their attraction (something which actually makes logical sense for one of the female characters in this particular film), though they do get to do these things too, of course. It's as if the swashbuckler as a genre, unlike other genres working in the historical past, could actually accept that women, despite being constrained by the mores of their times, still were actual human beings and certainly were doing more with their time than just standing whimpering on the side-lines. Or I'm just particularly lucky with the swashbucklers I watch in this regard.

Everything else about Swordsman of Siena is very much like you'd expect of a good example of its form: it's fast paced, full of colourful costumes, rather exciting fencing, a smidgen of romance and some melodrama to properly prepare the finale. That's a good thing, mind you, particularly since Périer really does know how to keep things moving (and exciting) throughout, and how to transition from the film's light-hearted core to the more dramatic bits.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,french movies,in short,etienne périer,stewart granger,sylva koscina,christine kaufmann,riccardo garrone,alberto lupo,adventure