The Flame and the Arrow is a classic Saturday matinée swashbuckler that doesn't try or pretend to be anything else, and as such it's one of the best of its genre. This 1950 technicolor feature rises above B status because of its incisive direction by Jacques Tourneur, a veteran Hollywood genre film maker best remembered for the noir classic Out of the Past and the horror classic Cat People, and also because of the spectacular athletics of an astonishingly youthful Burt Lancaster.
There's also an effective sound track by major film composers Max Steiner; Virginia Mayo as the love interest stands around very prettily, which is about all you expect the female love interest in a movie like this to do. It's the sort of film you might have thought was the best movie ever made when you were fifteen years old, and can still enjoy fifty years later. It's available in various DVD releases; I saw it on the Turner Classics DVD, which was an OK transfer of a rather muddy print; this film should really be remastered and put on Blu-Ray.
There's also an effective sound track by major film composers Max Steiner; Virginia Mayo as the love interest stands around very prettily, which is about all you expect the female love interest in a movie like this to do. It's the sort of film you might have thought was the best movie ever made when you were fifteen years old, and can still enjoy fifty years later. It's available in various DVD releases; I saw it on the Turner Classics DVD, which was an OK transfer of a rather muddy print; this film should really be remastered and put on Blu-Ray.