The Flame and the Arrow (1950)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Blistering performances.

Burt Lancaster and his real-life trapeze partner Nick Cravat perform some pretty astonishing acrobatic stunts in "Out of the Past" director Jacques Tourneur's nimble Technicolor swashbuckler "The Flame and the Arrow" as they tangle with the villains and rescue gorgeous damsel-in-distress Virginia Mayo. Two-time Oscar winning scenarist Waldo Salt, who won his statuettes for "Midnight Cowboy" and "Coming Home," penned the screenplay for this frisky "Robin Hood" style adventure yarn that rarely takes itself seriously. This colorful twelfth-century tale takes place in medieval Italy in a province known as Lombardy. Dardo Bartoli (Burt Lancaster of "The Killers") is an agile huntsman whose unfaithful wife has abandoned him for the arms of Hessian nobleman Count 'The Hawk' Ullrich (Frank Allenby), but Dardo knows that he is better off without the dame. Indeed, he enjoys the companionship of his son Rudi (Gordon Gebert of "The Narrow Margin"), and he refuses to become involved with the local rebels who want to oust 'The Hawk.' Dardo's non-participatory attitude changes after 'The Hawk' abducts his son at the request of Dardo's wayward wife, Francesca (Lynn Baggett of "D.O.A.") wants her son to enjoy the privileges of a nobleman. Ernst Haller's cinematography is a bonus that got an Oscar nomination along with Max Steiner's orchestral score. Although the plot is predictable from fade-in to fade-out, Lancaster displays gusto galore as the heroic mountaineer who is adept with a bow and arrow. If you're a Burt Lancaster fan, this Warner Brothers costumer should keep you enthralled.

There may be swashbuckling galore but the story line is so convoluted.Burt Lancaster shows his trapeze skills which would serve him well years later in a film with that very name-Trapeze. He does this after the film comes to a resolution.The problem here is the writing as the film's plot is ridiculous. Hessian conquerors of Lombardy have the head leader of the former running off with Lancaster's wife in the film. They had had a child together and the boy grows up with his father until the mother returns with the Hawk to claim the child.From that point on, it becomes tit for tat. Virginia Mayo, niece of the hawk, is kidnapped by Lancaster's band and of course she falls for the Lancaster character during this nonsense. Her uncle had sent the Marchese to marry her, only to imprison him when he refuses to pay his taxes. Of course, there is treachery on the part of the Marchese in this very ridiculous, inane film.

"The Flame & The Arrow" (1950)was one of the last of the great Warner Bros. swashbucklers. From a screenplay by Waldo Salt this hugely enjoyable romp was directed with great flair by Jacques Tourneur. It was originally planned as a vehicle for Errol Flynn but by the time the picture went into production the erstwhile heroic Flynn was past his sell-by date and would be unable for the knockabout antics the part demanded (he had barely got through "The Adventures Of Don Juan" two years previously thanks to many short takes and having doubles perform a lot of his action scenes). Instead, a young and stunningly acrobatic Burt Lancaster was cast as Dardo, a sort of Robin Hood in medieval Italy fighting the oppression of the occupying Hessions.Produced by Lancaster's Norma Productions (named after his wife) it was fully fleshed out with a splendid cast. Playing Dardo's mute friend Piccolo was Nick Cravat - Lancaster's friend and fellow performer from their circus days.The lovely Virginia Mayo played the love interest Anne of Hess. Robert Douglas is a likable rogue through most of the picture until he gets a taste of power and turns bad and Frank Allenby, looking remarkably like the Great Profile John Barrymore, played the villainous Hawk (the original title of the movie was "The Hawk & The Arrow").Lancaster is marvellous to watch! Performing all his own stunts his high flying antics are a joy to behold. No other actor, before or since, would prove to be so agile and provide such a spirited performance! His athletic prowess is outstanding and little wonder he was Warner's first choice to play the great native American athlete Jim Thorpe in their biographical "Jim Thorpe-All American" (aka "Man Of Bronz") in 1952. Although he did a kind of follow-up to "The Flame & The Arrow" two years later with the more comical "The Crimson Pirate" it is a shame he then ceased doing this type of movie as we could have tolerated him in quite a few more of them.Beautifully photographed in colour by the great Ernest Haller the movie has all the hallmarks of Warner's high production values. Adding greatly to the picture's proceedings is the wonderful Italianate score by Max Steiner! His ebullient music, like the picture, is a total delight especially his infectious and hum inducing main theme for Dardo scored for mandolins and orchestra and the gorgeous love theme for the scenes with Dardo & the lady Anne. There's a splendid driving battle theme too! Steiner's music was nominated for an Acadamy Award but lost out to Franz Waxman's darker "Sunset Boulevard".The picture has transferred extremely well to disc with sharp images and fine colour resolution but quite dispensable are a Merrie Melodies cartoon and a tired Joe McDoakes short. It is also a pity that a documentary of Lancaster was not included.

"The Flame and the Arrow" takes the story of Robin Hood and transfers it from England to Italy. The scene is set in twelfth-century Lombardy, at a time when that area was subject to the rule of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. The villain of the piece is Count Ulrich the Hawk, the cruel German overlord of Lombardy. The Robin Hood figure is Dardo Bartoli, a hunter and skilled archer who leads a group of rebels against Ulrich after being outlawed, with the mute Piccolo the equivalent of Little John. There is also another villain, the Marchese Alessandro di Granazia, and a Maid Marian figure in Anne of Hesse, a beautiful German aristocrat who takes the side of the Italian rebels and falls in love with Dardo. The film which obviously inspired this one was the Errol Flynn version of "The Adventures of Robin Hood", made twelve years earlier. Burt Lancaster, who had previously been a gymnast and a circus acrobat, was an obvious choice to play Dardo, the sort of swashbuckling role which Flynn had made his own in the late thirties and forties. (Lancaster was to go on to play similar roles in other films such as "The Crimson Pirate"). Here, he gets plenty of opportunity to display his athletic talents, doing all his own stunts, many of which (such as the scene where he swings from the chandelier) were clearly inspired by "Robin Hood". Unlike Robin Hood, who is normally portrayed as a Saxon nobleman leading his people against their Norman oppressors, Dardo has a personal reason for resenting the German rulers of Lombardy. His wife Francesca has left him in order to become Count Ulrich's mistress, and much of the plot concerns Dardo's attempts to rescue his son Rudy, whom Ulrich has kidnapped. I felt, however, that the film did not make enough of the Dardo/Francesca/Ulrich triangle. Francesca is a minor figure who plays little part in the action, and Dardo's climactic duel at the end of the film (paralleling the one between Flynn and Basil Rathbone in "Robin Hood) is with the secondary villain Granazia, not with Ulrich, who is portrayed as being too cowardly to face his rival man-to-man. Burt Lancaster was a much more versatile actor than Errol Flynn; I could not, for example, imagine Flynn in "The Birdman of Alcatraz" or "Lawman" or "The Train". (Or if he had made a version of "The Train", it would have had had Labiche leaping from carriage to carriage across the roof of the train, fighting hand-to-hand duels against the Nazis in a desperate attempt to rescue the priceless artworks). Within his relatively narrow range, however, Flynn ruled supreme, and for all his athleticism Lancaster never quite brings to his role the panache and charisma that Flynn brought to his in "Robin Hood" and similar films. Unlike some reviewers, I did not see the film as a "spoof" of the swashbuckling genre, a type of film which was always characterised by a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek tone. It was, however, a genre with its own conventions, and "The Flame and the Arrow" was clearly intended to fall squarely within those conventions, not mock or parody them as, for example, Mel Brooks did in "Robin Hood- Men in Tights". Although it is enjoyable enough it is not, however, among the best of the genre- certainly not when compared with films like "The Adventures of Robin Hood". 6/10