The Swashbucklers by Jeffrey Richards

Jeffrey Richards is Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University and author of Swordsmen of the Screen and Films and British National Identity.

He has written and presented three series on The Radio Detectives for Radio 4 and Archive Hour features on railway stations and on cinemas and cinema-going.

The following is an edited transcript that was previously available on the BBC website.

He fights for King and Country, believes in truth and justice, protects the weak from oppression and defends the honour of a lady. This week on BBC Radio 4,   Professor Jeffrey Richards begins a new series examining the attraction of the swashbuckler.

If there's one kind of film that I love more than any other it is the swashbuckler. The last golden age of the swashbuckling film was in the 1950s. It was also the last era of pure chivalry.

Chivalry had been given a significant boost by World War Two when Winston Churchill compared the pilots of the R.A.F. to the knights of the round table and it was given cinematic expression in the 1950s by a succession of handsomely mounted medieval epics produced by Hollywood companies often on location in Britain, films such as Ivanhoe, Prince Valiant and Knights of the Round Table. I went to see them all and loved them at once. They decisively shaped my youthful values and world-view.

Their success at the box office inspired the companies producing programmes for the new ITV network and from 1955 to 1961 a succession of swashbuckling adventure series dominated British children's television.

A whole generation of boys like me growing up in Britain in the 1950s were inspired and enthralled by the series. We dashed home from school so as not to miss the latest episode. For that brief moment, our heroes were not cowboys or spacemen or cops but swashbucklers.

For Radio 4's new series I revisit four of the most popular of those television programmes: The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Adventures of William Tell, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and Ivanhoe. Making the series has allowed me to relive the best years of my boyhood. The series blends extracts, interviews with experts and above all, interviews with the surviving stars of the programmes.

It has been a particular joy to me to talk to my boyhood heroes and heroines: Patricia Driscoll (Maid Marian), Conrad Phillips (William Tell), William Russell (Sir Lancelot) and Robert Brown (Gurth, Ivanhoe's squire.) They talk enthusiastically about their filming experiences, their co-stars, the staging of the action scenes and the enormous popularity of the programmes both at home and abroad.

2.

For me the swashbuckler is the most graceful and exciting of all cinematic genres. At its best it is an exhilarating excursion into pure style, a heady blend of male beauty and agility, the grace and colour of historical costume, the opulence and splendour of period sets and the spellbinding legedermain of horseback chases, chandelier swinging and dazzling swordplay.

The word 'swashbuckler', first recorded in 1560, originally meant a swaggering ruffian but over the years it has been converted into a term of approval generally implying bravery, style and reckless good humour.

The term is particularly associated with the films and personalities of Douglas Fairbanks (Senior and Junior) and Errol Flynn. Seen at a formative time of your youth, the love of these films and these stars never leaves you.

It is in its form and its ethos that the swashbuckler is distinctive. Swashbucklers are set in the past, feature gentleman heroes and involve lots of swordplay. Costumes, settings, stories, action, all are stylized, so that a swordfight is more like a ballet than a single combat and a castle a building out of a fairytale rather than the historic past.

Everything that happens in a swashbuckler is built around an exposition of the code of chivalry - honour, duty, loyalty to the crown and noblesse oblige. So the typical swashbuckling hero is a gentleman, a man of breeding and polish, daring and humour, gallantry and charm.

He fights for King and Country, believes in truth and justice, protects the weak from oppression and defends the honour of a lady. Even if he is an outlaw, as he sometimes is, he still incarnates the chivalric virtues.

3.

The swashbuckling film as we know it was largely the creation of one man - Douglas Fairbanks Sr. During the heyday of silent pictures in Hollywood, the great tales of costume adventure - Robin Hood, Zorro, The Three Musketeers - were refashioned to fit the bright and breezy personality of Douglas Fairbanks.

The essential ingredients of the swashbuckler - the character archetypes, the elaborate sets, the acrobatic techniques and stylized content - were definitively established by Doug's films in an unforgettable series that began with The Mark of Zorro in 1920 and ended with The Iron Mask nine years later.

Before Doug, there had been adaptations of the old heroic stories of Scott, Dumas and Baroness Orczy but adaptations that had been literal and literary in concept. After Doug, the swashbuckler took off as a cinematic genre in which physical movement and visual style predominated.

The swashbuckler entered a second golden age in 1935 and it continued until America entered the war in 1941 when it was eclipsed by westerns and combat films. No star devoted himself full-time to the genre as Doug had done but Errol Flynn starred for Warner Bros. in three of the most notable swashbucklers of all time (The Adventures of Robin Hood, Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk). The other studios sought to emulate them with their own stars (Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro, Louis Hayward in The Man in the Iron Mask and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in The Corsican Brothers.)

1961 saw the chivalric cycle of Hollywood films end with the release of El Cid and ITV's swashbuckling series terminate with Sir Francis Drake. The 1960s then saw a profound cultural and social revolution which repudiated the code of chivalry and the concept of gentleman hero.

It was rejected by the Left as class-bound, by feminists as patriarchal and patronizing and by the new barbarians of popular culture as inhibiting. It was none of these things but it was decisively eclipsed. In my view the world is poorer for its loss.

There have been swashbuckling film revivals since then in the 1970s and 1990s but because the chivalric ethic is out of fashion, they have been jokey send-ups (like Dick Lester's Three Musketeers) or desperate attempts to be politically correct (like Kevin Costner's Robin Hood with its feminist Maid Marian and wise black sidekick.)

But for me they remain unsatisfying because the true swashbuckler crucially depends on a belief in the values of duty, honour and romance and until these values come back into fashion, the genre will live on only as a memory.