On Doubling in Movie Sword Fights
by John Aquino on 07/09/13
A short time ago I wrote an article on this blog on voice doubling in movie musicals, using the recent example of Les Miserables as a starting point, and some have suggested the similarities to doubling in movie sword fight scenes.
There are similarities in that singing and sword fighting are skills that some people have and some people don’t. You could argue that more people can sing than can use a sword, and that may be true. I had mentioned as to voice dubbing that non-singers often make vocal tracks and some of those can end up on the soundtrack, blended with the singing of the dubber. And the same thing happens in movie sword fights, with the actors doubled in part of the fight—sometimes in large parts.
In silent films, there was not much concentration on sword fights. Actors who had stage training often knew how to hold a sword and some basic moves. Mostly, the actors appear to wave the swords around.
As movies grew older, film sword fights grew bolder. In Warners’ 1926 Don Juan, known as the first movie with a synchronized musical score, John Barrymore as the title character fights an elaborate sword due with Montagu Love as the villain. Barrymore leaps from a balcony to face Love and they fight up the stairs, into the bedroom, and then back down the stairs. There are shots from the perspective of each fighter as the camera pans. It’s an elaborate scene. But a good deal of the time Barrymore and Love are still just waving their swords around. In the long shots, they are clearly doubled, and the doubles are not good matches for the actors. (Barrymore was quoted as saying he had learned that waving his sword around wildly got attention and he didn’t care what his style looked like. He followed this maxim ten years later as Mercutio in M-G-M’s Romeo and Juliet, much to the dismay and disgust of Basil Rathbone playing Tybalt.
But the pattern was set: close-ups of the actors interspersed with long shots of doubles and reaction shots of alarmed heroines.
But things continued to change. One major reason for this was the emergence in Hollywood of Belgium-born fencing master Fred Cavens who later teamed with his son Albert. Cavens was the fencing master for Douglas Fairbanks’ The Mark of Zorro (1920) and The Black Pirate (1925), but when sound came in at first the primitive sound technology made jumping around with a sword difficult to follow and there was also a focus on contemporary stories.
In the 1935 Warners’ movie Captain Blood, which had Errol Flynn in his first starring role, Cavens as fencing master teamed with fight coordinator Ralph Faulkner and director Michael Curtis, who later directed such classics as Yankee Doodle Dandy, Casablanca, and Mildred Pierce. Curtis liked to move the camera, Accompanied by a rousing musical score by Wolfgang Korngold, Flynn and Rathbone start to flight on the beach under palm trees, then move across the sand in long shot to the rocks, where they duel to the death, with Rathbone falling into the water and lying there with his eyes open as the water washes over him. The actors are clearly doing their own fighting in two-shots, were likely doubled in the long shot in which they move across the sand to the rocks, and Flynn seems to be doubled with his back to the camera as he forces Rathbone to climb onto the rocks. They are not doubled in the final shots in which Flynn dispatches Rathbone. The entire fight lasts just over two minutes.
This was something new. Cavens continued to be fencing master and sometimes fight double for some of the best remembered movie duels for the next 20 years. (There is a continuity in Hollywood stunt work. Dick Green, the stunt man who doubled for Barrymore in leaping from the balcony in Don Juan, was doing stunts in 1965 for The Great Race, a Blake Edwards comedy that did homage to classic slapstick comedy and sword duels.).
In 1938, Warners’ The Adventures of Robin Hood reunited Curtis, Flynn, Rathbone, Cavens, and Korngold and ends with an elaborate sword fight between Flynn as Robin Hood and Rathbone as Sir Guy of Guisbourne. Rathbone had taken an interest in sword fighting and had become quiet proficient. Flynn didn’t have the same discipline, but he was a natural athlete who looked good with a sword. Using modified broadswords held with one hand rather than two, they fight down the stairs into an open area, knock over an elaborate candle holder, and then the camera switches to an overhead long shot, with the actors likely doubled, and the two men’s shadows cast against the stone walls. Then they fight over a table and stool and move into another area where Flynn skewers Rathbone, who falls over a balcony and is shown lying dead, his eyes again open. This fight too takes just over two minutes. Except for the long shot and probably where Flynn leaps over the table with his back to the camera, the actors do not appear to be doubled.
In 1940, Cavens staged two elaborate duels for two different studios. In Twentieth Century Fox’s The Mark of Zorro, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, Cavens returned to a story for which he had choreographed the sword fights 20 years earlier for Douglas Fairbanks. Rathbone is pitted against Tyrone Power in a one-room duel with sabers. It is staged furiously. Rathbone appears to be in every shot, Power in most, doubled when Don Diego has his back to the camera and rams his sword into the glass of a bookcase next to Rathbone and when Don Diego kills the Commandant. Rathbone dies with his back to the wall, the sword entering his chest and a small red dot growing bigger (from a squibb under his shirt) before he falls. Power is later joined by Montagu Love, once John Barrymore’s adversary in Don Juan, in a mass fight taking over the city. Love still appears to be just waving his sword around.
Power was more diminutive than Flynn and is clearly doubled in some shots, but, as far as his ability with a sword, Rathbone later said Power could mop up the floor with Flynn. A sad side-note is that in 1942 Power dueled with George Sanders as staged by Cavens in the pirate movie The Black Swan. Power was 28, Sanders 36. Sixteen years, Power, who had developed a heart condition, insisted on doing his own stunts in a duel with Sanders in Solomon and Sheba. He should have been doubled. Sanders disliked the exertion and following the choreography and complained and complained. They had to do it over and over until Power experienced chest pains. He was taken to the hospital and died at the age of 44.
For Warners’ The Sea Hawk, made the same year as Zorro, Curtis, Flynn, Faukner, and Korngold were joined by Henry Daniel as the villain. Daniel, while praised for his acting in the film, has been widely criticized as no Rathbone with a sword, with rumors that he refused to do more than move his head back and forth in close-ups and left the entire duel to his double. In watching the scene, this turns out not to be true. Daniel is in some two-shots with Flynn as well as the close-ups. Actually, Flynn is doubled as much as Daniel, with the duel mostly done in long shot, with a shadows-on-the-wall segment that is more elaborate than Robin Hood. It could have been a question of discipline, with Flynn rather than Daniel objecting to the need to train and choreograph the sequence, or perhaps over-scheduling Flynn with other projects.
The Sea Hawk example actually became the norm, with exceptions like Robin Hood and Captain Blood. Even well-done fight scenes in films like The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) follow this blueprint: the actors circle each other and strike a few blows, then there are a series of long shots in which the actors are doubled, interspersed with close-ups of the actors seemingly fighting and with two-shots of the actors with their swords tight together and offering witty repartee. The smaller and less well-financed studios paid even less attention to how well the doubles matched the height and width of the actors.
Rathbone suffered a doubling humiliation when in 1956 he appeared as the villain in Paramount’s Robin-Hood spoof The Court Jester starring Danny Kaye. Kaye was no fencer but he was taught how to use a sword. Rathbone, even at age 63, could handle a sword well. But Kaye had a mind like a camera and once he learned the choreography he became too fast for Rathbone and Faulkner had to double Rathbone with his back to the camera.
An interesting side-note is the story of Cornell Wilde. He was a trained fencer and was reportedly part of the team for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin until he gave it up to be in a play. He did a number of film duels and not surprisingly looks good with a sword. Surprisingly, his duels are usually lackluster, with Wilde and the double for the villain alternating advancing and retreating, back and forth and back again, which is more faithful to actual fencing techniques but less exciting. There is little jumping on tables or hacking at giant candleholders. Wilde is never doubled in A Thousand and One Nights, the Bandit of Sherwood Forest, At Sword’s Point, and the Scarlet Cloak, but maybe he should have been, just a little.
Cavens staged the longest sword duel ever filmed in MGM’s Scaramouche in 1952. It runs just over six minutes and carries Stewart Granger and Mel Ferrer throughout a theatre—in the boxes, on the railings around the boxes, over banisters, down stairs, backstage. Granger and Ferrer are in a good many shots but are also clearly doubled in the long shots with them on the railings outside the boxes and jumping over banisters and treating a couch like a trampoline.
Cavens also worked with actresses for movie sword fights, most notably jean Peters for in Anne of the Indies (1951) and Maureen O’Hara for At Sword’s Point (1952).
Perhaps the best movie sword duel, to my taste, is the one in Warners’ The Adventures of Don Juan (1948) starring Errol Flynn. Flynn, turning 40 and doing his first swashbuckler since Sea Hawk, appeared to have taken it seriously. He plays his age, appeared strained at times, struggling to keep up, but finding the strength that comes with experience. Cavens staged it on a gigantic staircase in the royal palace and doubled in a number of shots for the villain Robert Douglas. The only doubling I see for Flynn is when he leaps onto Douglas after the latter is pushed down the staircase. The leap was probably done by Jock Mahoney, who had doubled for Flynn in an earlier leap in the prison scene. It appears to have been modeled on the one in the silent Don Juan with Barrymore and Love. Mahoney was the stepfather of actress Sally Fields, star of the late 1950s tv series Yancey Derringer, both Tarzan and a Tarzan villain in the 1960s, and stunt coordinator for Tarzan the Ape Man in 1981.
Sword fight movies fell out of fashion in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. When sword duels were staged in the 1970s, as in Richard Lester’s Three Musketeer movies, they were more mixed arts affairs, with punching, kneeing, eye poking, and shoving added in, which may have been the way such things were done. Any doubling was usually in the long shots and for falls and such, since the skill that was needed had been minimized.
The lightsaber duels between Darth Vader and Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies were, however, extensively doubled.
The issue of doubling in movie sword fights has been so prevalent that when director Rob Reiner began The Princess Bride (1987), he told Cary Elwes and Mandy Patikin that he wanted it done without any doubling. The actors trained for six weeks and filmed the fight scene themselves, with the only doubling being for a back flip to be done by Patikin.
