Written and directed by two professionals -- Waldo Salt and Jacques Tourneur -- this movie about Hessians occupying and exploiting one of the city-states of northern Italy moves along at a pretty good clip. There's not very much that's original in the plot. The evil Hessian King Ulrich is known as "The Hawk." He has a saucy daughter, Anne (Virginia Mayo) who is kidnapped from her father's castle by the brigand Dardo (Burt Lancaster) and his merry men. The merry men dress like slobs and they eat and drink with gusto, while the castle Hessians mope around with icy and disdainful expressions. There's wise, old Papa Pietro (Francis Pierlot) and the scolding woman who seems to lead the townspeople, Nonna Bartoli (Aline McMahon). It's a little known fact that her family, the Bartolis, went on to found the greatest olive oil empire the world has ever known. The reason that fact is so little known is that I just made it up. There's a greedy traitor (Robert Douglas) who rats on Dardo's plan to put the snatch on Dardo's own son in order to raise him as a MAN, not just some effete snob mincing around inside the stone walls. Lots of royal intrigue. (Does any of this sound familiar yet?) There's a climactic sword fight between Lancaster and Douglas, which Douglas loses, just as he lost the climactic sword fight with Errol Flynn in "The Adventures of Don Juan" a few years earlier. In the final brawl, men fight with furniture. They dump over candelabras or torchieres. There is a comic figure (Norman Lloyd), a poetic type, who dances around bopping enemies on the head from behind. Virginia Mayo, who has fallen in love with Dardo and is sympathetic to his cause, swoons over him in the background. Tourneur missed one cliché, though -- the shadows of fiercely dueling men on the castle walls.
The most striking thing about the film, at least for me, was Burt Lancaster as action/adventure hero in a period flick. Previously, he'd passed for a rather ordinary, sometimes kind of dumb, fatalistic protagonist of films noir -- "I Walk Alone," "The Killers", "Criss Cross." And then -- whammo -- he's out of his suits and ties and into the colorful garb of 13th-century Italy, or what was construed as such by Hollywood in the early 1950s. I doubt that the Italians had skin-tight Spandex leotards. And -- not only that -- but suddenly Lancaster is doing all the acrobatic stunts that he and his partner, Nick Cravat, had done ten years earlier, as well as during their stint in the Army's Special Services road shows. And he's a big guy for an acrobat, with a lot of weight to heft around. At one point he holds his body horizontally out from a pole, a difficult stunt that gymnasts call "the flag" -- and then he removes one of the hands propping him up.
I think his later "acrobatic" films were better, especially "The Crimson Pirate", which had a far better, more amusing script, and "His Majesty O'Keefe," which provoked some serious sub rosa thought, in people given to serious thought. He kept fit for the rest of his life, even doing some clearly dangerous stunt work as late as "The Professionals" in 1968. Like some other tall, sinewy actors -- Clint Eastwood, for instance -- Lancaster seemed to have such delicate hands and fingers. What one character says of Leopold Bloom in Joyce's "Ulysses" could as easily be said about Lancaster -- "He'd have a soft hand under a hen." If this film gave a boost to his career, and it probably did, he certainly hit the ground running.
Bonus points to whoever dreamed up Dardo's line, "All wives leave their husbands sooner or later, but they don't always take their bodies with them."
The most striking thing about the film, at least for me, was Burt Lancaster as action/adventure hero in a period flick. Previously, he'd passed for a rather ordinary, sometimes kind of dumb, fatalistic protagonist of films noir -- "I Walk Alone," "The Killers", "Criss Cross." And then -- whammo -- he's out of his suits and ties and into the colorful garb of 13th-century Italy, or what was construed as such by Hollywood in the early 1950s. I doubt that the Italians had skin-tight Spandex leotards. And -- not only that -- but suddenly Lancaster is doing all the acrobatic stunts that he and his partner, Nick Cravat, had done ten years earlier, as well as during their stint in the Army's Special Services road shows. And he's a big guy for an acrobat, with a lot of weight to heft around. At one point he holds his body horizontally out from a pole, a difficult stunt that gymnasts call "the flag" -- and then he removes one of the hands propping him up.
I think his later "acrobatic" films were better, especially "The Crimson Pirate", which had a far better, more amusing script, and "His Majesty O'Keefe," which provoked some serious sub rosa thought, in people given to serious thought. He kept fit for the rest of his life, even doing some clearly dangerous stunt work as late as "The Professionals" in 1968. Like some other tall, sinewy actors -- Clint Eastwood, for instance -- Lancaster seemed to have such delicate hands and fingers. What one character says of Leopold Bloom in Joyce's "Ulysses" could as easily be said about Lancaster -- "He'd have a soft hand under a hen." If this film gave a boost to his career, and it probably did, he certainly hit the ground running.
Bonus points to whoever dreamed up Dardo's line, "All wives leave their husbands sooner or later, but they don't always take their bodies with them."