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The Mask of Zorro (1998): Comparable to the French Musketeer movies of recent years, Martin Campbell’s version of Zorro drapes the old swashbuckler/pulp saw into the form of a then-contemporary kind of blockbuster. Campbell does so with aplomb: everything is big and pretty (or ugly in a big and pretty way), the jokes are silly, the characters broad and fun, everyone is impossibly hot, and the action has a slick sheen. The film sets out to entertain and puts every single cent of its not inconsiderable budget in service of that single goal.

Campbell is very good at this sort of thing, so there’s never a feeling of this being a mechanical exercise in audience wishfulfilment, but rather one of being sucked into the genuine enjoyment of living through a thrilling tale.

Carousel aka Karusell (2023): This Swedish slasher by Simon Sandquist, on the other hand, doesn’t have much of a budget; worse still, it also lacks in spirit and cleverness, and so goes through its version of the usual slasher shenanigans with the kind of boring professionalism that’s the enemy of all fun, at least to my mind.

Personal pet peeve in this sort of project: a film wasting way too much time and energy on a background story so simple and straightforward, filmmakers with more of an understanding of their genre and craft would have left well enough alone after one expository flashback. Also, plot twists are not actually a necessary part of each and every damn screenplay.

MadS (2024): Not flashbacks, and only the barest minimum of exposition, is to be found in David Moreau’s one-shot outbreak movie. The film propels an audience and its shifting protagonists through a night of violence that always teeters on the edge of the surreal with such vigour and energy, perfectly fair complaints about a lack of substance are also perfectly beside the point.

This is all about momentum and creating a very specific mood of ever-increasing insanity, like the most perfectly choregraphed St. Vitus’s Dance you’d never expect to actually encounter on screen.

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The Dead Pit (1989): Half hokey supernatural slasher, half pocket zombie apocalypse movie, Brett “The Lawnmower Man” Leonard’s feature debut never adds up too much. Between attempts at the nightmare logic of a Fulci and the cheesy one-liners of A Nightmare on Elm Street style slashers at their worst, the film never finds any personality of its own.

The acting is dire, the effects undistinguished, and for every single effective shot, there are three whole scenes that look and feel amateurish. It is a film easy to point and laugh at, if you’re of a mind to, but I never found myself interested enough in The Dead Pit to find much actual joy in doing this.

The Cloned Tyrone (2023): If you can make it through the much too broad first twenty minutes or so, you might find that Juel Taylor’s conspiracy thriller weird pulp comedy has rather more to offer than a handful of obvious jokes – hell, there’s even a good reason why these jokes start off as obvious as they do. The movie manages to apply methods and a comedically heightened version of the style of 70s conspiracy thrillers to the feeling of being black and poor in America, and that role’s truly horrifying and individuality-eating aspects. While it’s at it, it then turns this into the kind of existentialist horror that can make one’s laughter get stuck in one’s throat.

Taylor’s direction is intelligent as well as just clever as a meta-game, increasingly putting emotional weight on characters and situations you wouldn’t have expected to be meant to carry them. That John Boyega, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris make one hell of a core cast doesn’t need mentioning; nor Kiefer Sutherland’s effectiveness as a villain.

The Three Musketeers – Part I: D’Artagnan aka Les trois mousquetaires: D’Artagnan (2023): When in doubt, go back to the classics, as does this umpteenth adaptation of Dumas. This is an update clearly meant for the blockbuster franchise era, so the second half of the film follows in December, there’s a scene in the end credits, and the score is as generically 2023 as you can imagine.

Director Martin Bourboulon is fortunately very good at what he does, mixing modern and original sensibilities effortlessly, keeping close to the same points film adaptations of the Musketeers prefer, while modernising and sexing up the margins. It’s a fun, energetic kind of blockbuster, with a great cast – Eva Green as the Milady, Vicky Krieps as Queen Anne, Vincent Cassel as Athos, and so on – a sense of play as well as one of drama.

Will this be the start of the Musketeeromatic Universe? Will someone eventually adapt “Twenty Years Later/After”? We can only hope/fear.

The Black Castle (1952)

Sometime in the 18th (17th?) Century. Sir Ronald Burton (Richard Greene), just returned from the business of imperialism in Africa, learns that two of his closest friends have disappeared in the Black Forest.

The place they were last seen is suspiciously close to the estate of one Count Karl von Bruno (Stephen McNally). Von Bruno is an enemy of Burton and his friends from their colonial adventures, and would have good reason to want to take vengeance on them; he certainly has the lack of scruples to make any such vengeance very cruel indeed. He has, however, never laid eyes on Burton, so Burton decides to pull political strings to go undercover as a hunting guest at the Count’s castle, in the hopes of finding out what happened to his friends, and to hopefully save them from a dire fate.

He gets into rather more trouble than he initially expected, but is helped by his rather egalitarian ways with the lower classes as well as his quick fencing arm. Burton will need all the help he can get, for his motivations are quickly shifting from those of the investigator and possible revenger to a man very much in love with von Bruno’s wife, Elga (Paula Corday). Elga reciprocates very much, for she was married off to her hated husband for political reasons – one can’t help but assume blackmail to have been involved given how much of a villain the guy is. Other complications involve a mute strongman who hates all Englishmen (Lon Chaney Jr.), the mysterious and somewhat sinister Dr Meissen (Boris Karloff), as well as a (non-metaphorical) pit full of crocodiles.

Nathan Juran’s mix of swashbuckling adventure and gothic non-supernatural horror tropes The Black Castle is rather a lot of fun even eighty years later. The script by Jerry Sackheim builds a highly enjoyable castle of tropes that provides opportunity for physical derring-do as well as for gothic melodrama (there’s even some Romeo and Juliet style coma draught business) while Juran – not always the most exciting director – puts a lot of effort into finding the point where the lighter style of the historical adventure movie and gothic horror in the Universal manner meet visually. His use of light and shadow certainly often creates a pleasantly creepy mood that’s very effectively intercut with the handful of scenes where Burton demonstrates his physical abilities. Some very fine sets add to the effect.

The cast is in fine fettle, as well. Greene makes for a believable, rather human, hero, while McNally, Michael Pate as his main henchman and Chaney Jr. milk the possibilities of the gothic swashbuckler villain for all it is worth.

Another of the film’s strengths is its willingness to give its character a second dimension, so von Bruno’s hatred of Burton isn’t completely without reason, and some characters who would usually just do what their evil boss says are allowed to have agency and moral complexity of their own. I was particularly taken with Karloff’s first sinister but increasingly troubled Dr Meissen. Karloff was always able to do sympathetic villains particularly well, and does wonders when he is allowed to play an actual human being like here.

So The Black Castle ends up being a rather wonderful mix of two related but seldom mixed genres that turn out to be as close to my heart in blended form as they are separated.

In short: Star of India (1954)

After five years of war in India, French country squire Pierre St. Laurent (Cornel Wilde) returns to his home only to now find it the property of a widowed Dutch countess named Katrina (Jean Wallace). Governor Narbonne, the man responsible (and clearly evil because he is played by Herbert Lom) took Pierre’s home and estates for unpaid back taxes and sold them off, or so he says. He also offers no recourse (and certainly no apologies) to the rather incensed soldier.

Katrina, on the other hand, does. Apparently, another bit of bad business instigated by the Governor not only left her husband dead in a duel with the man, but also put the villain’s grubby hands on a family jewel that means rather a lot to her. Right now, it is hidden in a pretty tacky looking “Indian” statuette in Narbonne’s office. If Pierre would agree to, ahem, reacquire the jewel for Katrina, she’d pay him by giving him back everything that belonged to him. Obviously, the good lady might by leaving out some pertinent facts Pierre will learn in due course while swashbuckling, and sometimes scheming his way back to his proper home and hearth, and of course into Katrina’s heart.

While not a top tier swashbuckler, this Cornel Wilde vehicle directed by Arthur Lubin is often very good fun, featuring very satisfying amounts of fencing and intrigue, though not quite enough romance, for Katrina is basically non-existent for much of the plot between the first act and the finale.

The plot is mostly a somewhat obvious developed series of moves, feints, and reversals of exactly the kind you’d expect from a genre in which the plotting does quite appropriately tend to take on the quality of a fencing match. Yet despite being obvious, it’s also nearly always fun and develops in a good pace.

Rather more surprising is that this is a movie about a swashbuckling hero acquiring foreign loot to put it in the hand of a group that wants to put it back where it belongs (apparently to guarantee peace in India), not at all a move typical for this sort of thing, and certainly rather likeable.

As is much of the film, really. Wilde, despite generally getting a bit stiff in the intrigue and dialogue bits (as usual), was the kind of actor at least putting extra effort into those parts of his performances that didn’t come natural, and always did some convincing swashbuckling, too. Lom is always a delightful villain, in this particular case a guy who always seems completely outraged by the idea that anyone could try to pull any of the sort of dirty tricks he enjoys on him, which is the sort thing that makes a villain fun.

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La Funeraria aka The Funeral Home aka The Undertaker’s Home (2020): Mauro Iván Ojeda’s Argentinean horror film is about a mortuary business that’s haunted by ghosts the undertaker and his family just have to arrange themselves with as parts of their normal life, until they can’t anymore. It is an interesting mixture of Weird family drama, with relatively typical horror movie beats but also a handful of genuinely original ideas about the nature of life, death and love; a film that takes some very un-generic decisions on what to show and what not to; and a bleak film whose friendlier elements in the climax make it feel even bleaker.

La Tulipe noire aka The Black Tulip (1964): Based on Dumas in title only, Christian-Jaque’s French Revolution-set swashbuckler with Alain Delon playing two very different brothers manages to be a fun blast of a film as befits an entry into its genre on-screen, but also has undertones of surprising bleakness (one can argue, also perfectly in keeping with the genre as it should be) that seem to mirror the nature of its main characters, as well as that of the French Revolution itself. Of course, the old order as represented by the sadistic clowns ruling over the part of the French countryside the film takes place in is the main enemy here, and the film knows what its genre is for and what not too well to be too critical of the Revolution. But thanks to the bitter and cynical of the two twins, there’s also the shade of the bitter and cynical turn the revolution itself would take visible.

Special Delivery (1976): In this film by the often great Paul Wendkos, the plot about a war vet robber’s (Bo Svenson) attempt to get at the loot he had to deposit in a mailbox while on the run from the police, encountering a young divorcee looking for herself (Cybill Shepherd) and finding quite a talent for crime and love, really isn’t the point of the film. Instead, Wendkos uses the single street in LA and a couple of places outside of it to create a microcosm of the nightly side of the city and the encounters our leads have in it, with characters like the would-be motorcycle gang of rapist thugs of a young Jeff Goldblum(!), the local crime boss (Robert Ito), and so on and so forth. It’s rather a lot like a road movie that takes place in only one stop on the way.

Apart from Wendkos direction that makes a lot out of people watching other people from unexpected angles, the film also recommends itself by the great actors. Svenson – not always a favourite of mine – turns a character personable and interesting who could be a simple thug, and Shepherd creates a woman who is at once driven by doubt and insecurity and capable, courageous and determined, while also being charming as hell.

At Sword’s Point (1952)

Twenty years (supposedly, for the ages of most of our heroes suggest thirty-five or so) after the original adventures of the Three Musketeers, France is in turmoil. Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu are both dead, and the kid who will become Louis XIV still has some years to go to come of age. Queen Anne (Gladys Cooper) does her best to keep the country together as best as she can, but she’s old and ill, and fighting the ruthless Duc de Lavalle (Robert Douglas) for the fate of the kingdom.

Lavalle uses his increasing power and barely hidden violence to push for a marriage with Anne’s daughter Henriette (Nancy Gates), clearly planning to do away with Louis once he is nicely positioned as the only throne candidate standing. By now, the Queen has become quite desperate, hiding Louis away at a secret spot somewhere in the country, and repeatedly attempting to ask the King of Spain for help in keeping the situation stable. All of her couriers to Spain, however, have found themselves on the pointy ends of Lavalle’s men.

In desperation, the Queen remembers the men who served their country so well twenty years past, and sends for the former Musketeers.

Because time works a bit strangely in this France, all four are now either dead or too old for action (damn that gout!). Fortunately, they have children at just the right age who all happen to share their fathers’ character traits and abilities perfectly. Who’d have thunk!

So now it is up to D’Artagnan Jr. (Cornel Wilde), Aramis Jr. (Dan O’Herlihy), Porthos Jr. (Alan Hale Jr,), and Athos Jr. to save the day. Did I say Athos Jr.? In fact, it’s his daughter Claire (Maureen O’Hara) taking up her old man’s banner!

Swashbucklers often tended to have somewhat meatier roles for actresses even outside of the villainess roles and the melodramas where they were allowed to have personalities at the time when this was made. So it’s not a complete surprise that Lewis Allen’s very free (so free the original novel isn’t “Three Musketeers: The Next Generation” at all) adaptation of Dumas’s Musketeer Sequel “Twenty Years Later”, provides O’Hara with so prominent a role even when it comes to the fights, but it’s still a joy to watch.

Interestingly, the film does so while still using some of the standard tropes a woman goes through in adventure fiction, so she still is the romantic objective of the main character, and there’s a lot of flirting; it’s just that Allen, or the handful of scriptwriters, never uses this to diminish Claire. She’s just your standard adventure movie heroine who also happens to have the courage and conviction usually left to the male heroes, and the fencing skills to back it up.

This does of course also practically automatically turn her into the most complex and rounded character on screen. Of course, it does help that the script doesn’t go the route where the badass woman is suddenly turned incompetent once she’s fallen for the hero; nor do the other three, once Claire has demonstrated her fighting prowess, try to keep her away from the action or ever doubt her capabilities. The film and its characters simply accept that being deeply romanceable and being deeply capable aren’t mutually exclusive.

O’Hara seems to relish this role, too, providing Claire with the same kind of swagger and humour the other musketeers are supposed to have. She’s really throwing herself into the fencing sequences, too.

The other musketeers aren’t quite as awesome. Wilde is certainly fine in the fights, but he’s not quite as youthful and charming as the script pretends he is, ending up a bit too stolid, O’Herlihy doesn’t get a lot to do, and Hale Jr. seems to have difficulty enough with the little he is supposed to do already. The thing is, O’Hara’s good enough to make that a matter of little to no import.

The film’s plot, while certainly not brilliant, does help there also. Things never stand still for too long, the plot is always providing opportunities for scenes of men doing hearty belly-laughs while fighting, desperate acrobatic feats, a bit of pathos and romance, and a lot of intrigue. All of it is presented in an expertly timed manner, and really never lets a boring minute come to pass, using RKO’s not titanic purse strings to their technicoloured fullest.

Speaking of intrigue, even though Douglas’s performance is more solid than truly memorable, the script does provide him with a series of somewhat sensible plots, turning him memorable and interesting as a villain simply by virtue of his plans actually making logical sense in a swashbuckling world, therefor providing the heroes with actual odds and stakes to fight against and for, respectively.

All of which only improves At Sword’s Point, a film that could have gotten away with being the Maureen O’Hara show, even more.

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On the Rocks (2020): This is another one of those films where I seem to have seen a very different movie than most other people. After comparisons with classic screwball comedies, praises for its New York-ness and with Rashida Jones and Bill Murray in front of the camera and Sofia Coppola behind it, I was pumped for a bit of light yet fun entertainment. What I actually got was a rich people’s problems film where poor people only exist as waiters, waitresses and drivers to serve as a background for some of the least interesting marital and daddy issues imaginable. Most of the film may take place in New York, but it’s certainly no part of New York anyone but the upper class twats inhabiting it would ever want to see. It’s all just very dull to look at, and that dullness runs through most of the film – it’s slow, the emotional stakes for this viewer are very low, and when it comes to light charm, humour and hidden depths, you won’t want to throw out your Nora Ephron movies.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938): So let’s get back eight decades into the past to find something more lively. Michael Curtiz’s Hollywood version of elements of British folklore is of course one of the best swashbucklers every made, and a film that still plays rather wonderfully. Sure, as always, there are elements very much of its time especially when it comes to characterisation, and I’m always flabbergasted by the Richard the Lionheart love (a guy who clearly didn’t give a crap about the country he was supposed to rule, what with him always gallivanting off to a crusade or two, or finding other business to be away on), but otherwise, this is a flawless movie, from Errol Flynn’s ability to play a smug bastard but still make him charming and likeable, over the eye-popping colour palette, to an astonishing amount of clever and playful little touches and ideas in the script. There’s never a dull moment here, that’s for sure.

The Green Room aka La chambre verte (1978): I have to admit that I’ve never been a particular admirer of Henry James, not even of his visits in the realms of the supernatural and the borderline weird, but the man’s body of work certainly has resulted in quite a few great movies. Case in point is this one, where François Truffaut mixes James’s story “The Altar of the Dead” with elements of a couple of other short stories that apparently connected with the director’s own haunted thoughts about the people in his life he lost. The result is an emotionally and intellectually complex meditation on what we owe the dead, how the memory of the dead can dramatically overshadow the ability to live life itself.

So it is very much a ghost story, though one without any ghosts but the ones the protagonist, as well played by Truffaut in his last stint as an actor, creates through his inability to let go of the love as well as his grudges against the dead. I don’t really want to pretend it’s a horror film in anything but the broadest sense, yet it does at the very least tell of a haunted man and incorporates some finely wrought gothic imagery. Beside being brilliant.

In short: Pirates of the Coast (1960)

Original title: I pirati della costa

On the Spanish Main, when the pirates of the Tortugas ruled the waves. Poor Spanish Commander Luis Monterrey (Lex Barker)! Commissioned by the crown to finally get a load of silver from Santa Cruz back to Spain – none of the other deliveries ever reached their goal – he finds himself outwitted and outgunned by the Tortuga-based pirates of evil Captain Olonese (Livio Lorenzon) who for some reason knows quite well the cotton the good commander has supposedly loaded is actually silver. Also add to our hero’s trouble his puzzling infatuation with Isabela (Estalla Blain), the unpleasant, classist and generally unkind niece of Santa Cruz’s governor who’d never get together with a peasant like him anyway.

During a hilarious process, Monterrey is sentenced for losing the gold as a traitor to a life of hard labour. While on the way to the penal colony, Monterrey and a few of his fellow prisoners manage to take control of their prison ship. What’s a man to do than to grab himself an eye patch, dub himself Captain Nobody, and sail off to Tortuga to become a pirate too?

Domenico Paolella’s Pirates of the Coast isn’t one of the treasures of Italian pirate films, for it is a bit lacking in charisma to be truly riveting. Lex Barker is a bit too wooden to make for a proper swashbuckling hero, and Luis’s character lacks any of the larger than life elements a good swashbuckling hero needs. Well, he’s certainly honourable enough but that’s it as far as his character traits go. The rest of the characters suffer from the same problem too, with nary anything distinctive between them. I’m not necessarily talking about character depth, mind you – what the film really needs is more character colour. Only Olonese is appropriately slimy and evil, Lorenzon consequently having a hard time to liven things up a bit when the rest of the cast isn’t playing.

On the plus side, this one seems to have had a bit more of a budget than usual in Italian swashbucklers, so we get some mildly exciting sea battles, mass battles that have more then three participants and some okay fencing duels (though I’ve seen much better, and not just in US movies). At least, the film’s certainly not shirking its duty of providing the audience with most of the mandatory types of action one can expect from a pirate movie.

Which, all in all, makes Pirates of the Coast a perfectly serviceable quick fix for your pirate movie needs, if, unfortunately, nothing more.

The Mark of Zorro (1940)

When young Diego Vega (Tyrone Power) is called back by his father from a life of duelling, making merry and a bit of soldiering in Spain to Spanish California, he finds out his Dad Don Alejandro (Montagu Love) isn’t the governor of the province around beautiful Los Angeles anymore. The just, fair and incredibly law abiding Don Alejandro has been replaced by the cruel, greedy, snivelling and all-around unpleasant Don Luis Quintero (J. Edward Bromberg) who shares the spoils of oppressing the peasantry with his not exactly beloved partner in crime and captain of the local soldiery, Esteban Pasquale (Basil Rathbone).

Diego is not at all happy with this sort of thing but he knows his father won’t approve of any extra-legal attempts to get rid of Quintero, Pasquale and their minions, so he decides to pretend to be the wimpiest fop ever to have spent time in Spain and secretly fight them under the guise of the masked rider Zorro in a campaign of finely placed needle pricks. If all goes to plan Zorro’s activities should bring Quintero to resignation, and get him to name Don Alejandro as his replacement to avoid having one bad apple replaced by another one. While he’s at it, Diego also finds the time to romance Quintero’s niece, the extremely virginal Lolita Quintero (Linda Darnell) out of love, as well as Quintero’s wife Inez (Gale Sondergaard) as part of his plans.

Rouben Mamoulian’s movie version of Johnston McCulley’s pulp character Zorro is pretty much the epitome of a great old-style Hollywood swashbuckling film. It’s crisply paced – having already established its characters and situation and started its hero on his mission by minute twenty-one – going from sharp, genuinely funny dialogue scenes to still exciting action to a cute romance and back again with aplomb and a generous spirit that should put a smile on everyone’s face.

Power is the perfect Zorro as well as the perfect Don Diego, diving in the pretend-foppishness with the same verve he shows when he (well, or his fencing double) is donning his costume, milking every fun little barb the script gives him for the best effect and – obviously, giving the sort of film this is and the time it comes from – cutting the appropriately dashing figure. I also find him genuinely likeable because he gets the rather difficult balancing act between charming and rogue just right and therefore never comes over as a self-loving prick. And we all know how Basil Rathbone excelled at being the villain in this kind of piece, as well as at the fencing.

Mamoulian is a director I really more connected with musicals, and wouldn’t have expected to be quite this good at letting the swash buckle. Though swashbucklers and musicals do of course share an emphasis on elegant movement, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised by how perfectly Mamoulian handles the material here. There’s a joyfulness of movement (and therefore physicality) not only to the action scenes but also to much of the dialogue sequences, with little in Mamoulian’s direction that seems routine or in the least bit willing to ever look boring or bland. The director’s hand is so strong, he even gets away with a central fencing match between Diego and Pasquale that doesn’t take place in an open space or very large room but in what amounts to a somewhat larger office room. The strong choreography by Fred Cavens - responsible for a lot of the more impressive looking fencing you’ll see in classic Hollywood films – for that decisive duel is pretty remarkable, too, using the cramped space brilliantly and inventively.

The whole thing’s also beautiful to look at, with sets that are certainly not authentic to the time and place they are supposed to belong to but which feel like the proper environments for the story taking place in them.  Arthur C. Miller’s photography is shadow-rich and atmospheric, never looking anything less than perfect for any given moment.

If all this sounds as if I enjoyed The Mark of Zorro a lot, and think it’s one of the best swashbucklers and adventure movies ever to have come out of classic sound film Hollywood, then I’ve done my job here exactly right.

Fury At Smugglers' Bay (1961)

The 18th century. An area of the Cornish coast under the dominion of country squire Trevenyan (Peter Cushing) has been invaded by the band of shipwreckers of Black John (Bernard Lee), who are sending many a ship to its doom.

The local honest smugglers - your usual poor bastards trying to survive over-taxation by breaking the law - under the leadership of Francois Lejeune (George Coulouris) are quite disturbed by the development, chiefly because smuggling's one thing, but murdering people quite another one. Yet there's also a - quite correct - fear the 'wreckers' activities will provoke Trevenyan into an aggressive response against crime that'll hit the smugglers just as hard as the wreckers.

In fact, Trevenyan's response will only hit the wreckers, for Black John turns out to be a former servant of the man carrying around a bagful of documents to blackmail Trevenyan with. Trevenyan's son Christopher (John Fraser), also the lover of Lejeune's daughter Louise (Michele Mercier), is quite distraught by his father's curious concentration on the smugglers instead of Black John's gang, distraught enough to get into a bit of violence that ends with the death of one of Black John's men.

That's a good enough reason for the squire to send his boy away "for his own safety". And once the boy's away, it's a good time to round up a few of the smugglers (I'm sure Lejeune being among them has nothing at all to do with Trevenyan's obvious dislike for his son's love for the man's daughter; it's a classist thing) and sentence them to deportation.

Fortunately, Lejeune has a good friend in the local honourable highwayman only known as The Captain (William Franklyn) who will move heaven and earth to help his friend and get rid of the wreckers in the process, too. Perhaps with the help of a returning Christopher, or even a late repentant squire?

Hammer-regular John Gilling - later to be director of the excellent The Reptile and The Plague of the Zombies, among others - was working under his own production company's name when he was making Fury at Smugglers' Bay.

As is probably clear, this is an adventure movie/swashbuckler of that particular British sub-genre concerning the exploits of smugglers and pirates who never seem to actually leave the land. Curiously, films of this sub-genre (for which there should be a better descriptor than "landlocked pirate movies") tend to be among my favourite adventure movies. Fury will, unfortunately, not become part of that exclusive club, not because there's much that would be particularly wrong with the movie, but because there's too little that's particularly right with it.

Although the script has its interesting moments (there's for example a somewhat complicated - very typical of UK cinema - argument about class and the dangers of a classist society running through it), Gilling's direction is solid with moments of actual class, and the acting's perfectly alright, Fury suffers from a lack of playfulness and passion that would not necessarily be as much of a problem in a film of a different genre as it is in a swashbuckler, but that leaves a film is this genre feeling somewhat lifeless and slightly bland.

I think this lack of charm is all too well embodied by William Franklyn's character, who is supposed to be a charming rogue, but never feels all that charming or rogue-ish, going through all the motions of his job description, yet never actually convincing me of being more than a guy who grins a lot and knows how to rob people. Bland Franklyn's casting is quite typical for a film that's too professionally made to be bad, yet lacking in feeling and a sense of excitement, the things that actual make an adventure movie an adventure movie instead of a movie about people discussing the weather.

Fury at Smugglers' Cove suffers from taking characters and situations that should be (at least slightly) larger than life, but treats them as if it all were just visits to a tea party.

 

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