Cinema of Swords
A Popular Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Samurai, and Vikings (And Barbarians, Musketeers, Gladiators, and Outlaw Heroes)
By Lawrence Ellsworth
Welcome to the Cinema of Swords Substack! This series is a companion and expansion to the Cinema of Swords hardcover (Applause Books, 2023), which collects over 400 tasty mini-reviews of screen swashbucklers from the Silent Era through The Princess Bride.
This Substack builds on that foundation, continuing forward with reviews of swordplay movies and TV shows from the ‘90s to the present. Every week I’ll present two to four illustrated reviews on a common theme written both to inform and to entertain.
If you enjoyed the contents of the book, this weekly series will give you plenty more of the same. (And if you haven’t seen the book, do us both a favor and ask about it wherever you do your book shopping.)
Charged with Two Counts of Monte Cristo
There are two typical ways to film Alexandre Dumas’ great novel The Count of Monte Cristo (1844): either the way Dumas wrote it, as a revenge story and protracted indictment of everything the author despised about French society (and a love letter to all that he desired from it), or by adding action and swordplay and making it a swashbuckler like The Three Musketeers. The novel’s melodramatic story has great bones and stands up to either approach, as shown by its long history of cinematic adaptation, dating back to the Silent Era. And it isn’t over, as there’s a sumptuous new French production doe to hit the screens later this year. (I can’t wait.)
Here, at any event, are examples of both approaches—and if in this case the swashbuckler is the better of the two, that’s just a tribute to the skills and passion of its makers.
The Count of Monte Cristo (1998 miniseries)
Rating: ***
Origin: France/Italy, 1998
Director: Josée Dayan
Source: Arrow Films DVD
Though Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo is often filmed as a swashbuckler, with swordplay and pistol duels adding the kind of action associated with Dumas’ other greatest tale, The Three Musketeers, in fact Monte Cristo is more of a mystery and romantic melodrama than a cloak-and-sword actioner. This French TV miniseries, well over six hours long, is a fairly faithful adaptation emphasizing the novel’s psychological revenge drama—perhaps partly because Gérard Depardieu, in the starring role as Edmond Dantès/Monte Cristo, was age 50 when it was filmed, with his years as an action hero firmly behind him.
Indeed, screen adaptations typically cast a younger actor as Edmond Dantès, who starts the story as a 19-year-old merchant marine officer who is unjustly imprisoned in the dungeon of the Château d’If before escaping at age 36 to take his revenge upon his betrayers. Here, young Edmond is played by Gérard’s son, Guillaume Depardieu, and we only see Gérard as the older Edmond starting late in his period of imprisonment. This is a fine solution, but it has the unhappy result of curtailing Edmond’s time in durance vile, where he meets the saintly Abbé Faria (Georges Moustaki), the man who instructs him mentally and morally, a sequence that here is reduced to little more than a training montage.
But this adaptation is less interested in Edmond’s transformation than it is in his protracted revenge, which takes nearly five hours of complex interaction between Dantès and over two dozen other characters who make up his betrayers and their extended families. There are three or even four romantic subplots, and Edmond’s vengeance on Villefort (Pierre Arditi), Fernand Mondego (Jean Rochefort), and Danglars (Michel Aumont) often fades into the background as the youthful romances of their adult children assume the foreground.
There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but if you’re an action-oriented Cinema of Swords watcher, it may not be what you’re looking for. This is an elegantly staged production, with solid performances by the entire cast, striking period costumes, and a wonderfully sentimental soundtrack by Bruno Coulais, but the pacing is often rather slow, and the story can lose its momentum for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. If you don’t mind that, this may be the historical melodrama for you.
The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)
Rating: *****
Origin: Ireland/UK/USA, 2002
Director: Kevin Reynolds
Source: Touchstone DVD
The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), Alexandre Dumas’ great revenge novel, got its most faithful screen adaptation in the lengthy 1964 BBC TV miniseries, but this streamlined affair is far and away the best English-language version for a modern audience. The basic plot is familiar: in Marseilles, courageous but naïve ship’s officer Edmond Dantès (Jim Caviezel) is entangled an intrigue by treasonous pro-Napoleon sympathizers, and on the eve of his wedding to the love of his life, Mercédès (Dagmara Dominczyk), he is arrested. His betrayers are an envious enemy, Danglars (Albie Woodington), an ambitious politician, Villefort (James Frain), and his best friend, Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce), who wants Mercédès for himself. Dantès is imprisoned in the horrific dungeon of the Château d’If for thirteen years, where he meets and is befriended by another captive, the Abbé Faria (Richard Harris, almost unrecognizable), a scholarly priest and former soldier who teaches Dantès languages, economics, mathematics, morals, and—because this is a swashbuckler—swordplay. He also gives Dantès a map to a fabulous buried treasure that the saintly Faria had denied to Napoleon, the reason for his incarceration.
Spoiler: Dantès escapes. He falls in with some smugglers, one of whom, Jacopo (Luis Guzmán, excellent) becomes his loyal aide as he recovers the vast treasure and returns to France. Dantès reinvents himself as the charming and urbane Count of Monte Cristo and sets out for Paris to gain his poetic and belated vengeance on Mondego, Danglars, Villefort, and even Mercédès, because she married Mondego.
To get to the crowd-pleasing revenge scenes, most screen versions of Monte Cristo rush quickly through Dantès’ imprisonment in Château d’If, treating it as a sort of training montage, but this one, adapted by veteran screenwriter Jay Wolpert, recognizes that the scenes with the Abbé Faria are the real heart and soul of the story. They’re the crucible in which Edmond Dantès is forged into the indomitable Monte Cristo, and Harris’ performance as the serene but stern Faria gets the tone exactly right. If one takes the dungeon chapter too quickly, Dantès’ transformation isn’t convincing, and the priest’s lessons, as much morality as scholarship, don’t provide the touchstone for Dantès’ redemption and renunciation of vengeance in the end.
Spending time in the prison means the final act, Dantès’ revenge, so long and drawn-out in the novel, must be compressed and focused to fit into a two-hour movie, but that’s the other place where this film really shines. Monte Cristo’s introduction into Parisian society, an extended campaign in the book, is accomplished here at a single grand fête, where the count arrives spectacularly at his lavish new estate on an ornate hot-air balloon. Danglars and Villefort are quickly set up and taken down so the end of the movie can focus on Fernand and Mercédès, the Count and Countess Mondego. Here Guy Pearce as the heartless and entitled Fernand comes to the fore, oozing contempt and wickedness and stealing most of his scenes from Caviezel. Naturally, Fernand is a duelist as well, and the succinct final fight between Mondego and Monte Cristo, memorably staged in the green fields of Ireland’s County Meath, is one of the late-career gems of the film’s swordmaster, the great William Hobbs. The ending, though changed from the novel, makes perfect sense in context and is emotionally, and cinematically, correct. Highly recommended.
Next Week: Mutiny on the Renown, more swashbuckling with young Horatio Hornblower. Don’t miss it!
About Lawrence Ellsworth
Lawrence Ellsworth is the historical fiction nom de plume of Lawrence Schick, author of The Rose Knight’s Crucifixion and editor of The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure. See my website at swashbucklingadventure.net.
My current ongoing project is compiling and translating new, contemporary editions of all the books in Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle, a series that when complete will fill nine volumes. Book 8, Shadow of the Bastille, is currently being published in serial form on the Substack platform, and Book 9, The Man in the Iron Mask, is forthcoming. Check out the series at musketeerscycle.substack.com.
As Lawrence Schick, I’m a writer and game designer primarily associated with narrative or role-playing games, a career I’ve pursued for over forty years, starting in the late 1970s working for Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, moving into video games in the ‘80s and then online role-playing games in the ‘90s. I was lead writer and “loremaster” for The Elder Scrolls Online for over nine years, and recently I returned to D&D as Principal Narrative Designer for Larian Studios’ smash hit Baldur’s Gate 3.