CROSSED SWORDS
aka The Prince and the Pauper
1977 UK/1978 USA
Directed by Richard Fleischer
Written by Berta Dominguez, Pierre Spengler, and George MacDonald Fraser (based on the novel by Mark Twain)
Evidently, the sole thing Richard Fleischer found interesting about the movie he made in 1977, released in the United States in 1978 as Crossed Swords—his autobiography doesn't spend two whole pages on it—was that during the Eastern European phase of its production (it was a British film, partially-shot in Hungary) an imaginary syphilis epidemic threatened the entire cast and crew with getting locked up on the other side of the Iron Curtain. That's probably the most interesting part of Crossed Swords for the people who lived it (especially considering the vivid manner in which Fleischer describes their brush with medical horror). But besides the mere fact that he was around in Britain to make his previous film, the Sarah Bernhardt biopic The Incredible Sarah, it doesn't offer the slightest clue why or how Fleischer fell in with the father-and-son producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind to make Crossed Swords. For that matter, I don't know why he made The Incredible Sarah, since I don't think he actually got chased out of the United States for Mandingo. Of course, this is largely to repeat what I've said before—that Fleischer's book is often not useful, and that, somehow, the director's fascination with his own movies can bear an irritatingly inverse relationship to how good they are.
For the Salkinds, it was the follow-up to their neo-swashbuckler hits, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, and when Crossed Swords was previously released in the United Kingdom, it was indeed under the name of the novel upon which it's based, The Prince and the Pauper,* so if Mark Twain really had a higher name recognition in Britain, I think we can rightfully deem that an irony, though we can probably also concede that Crossed Swords simply sounds cooler (and, I might suggest, less like "pooper" or "diaper"). The Salkinds' pursuit of the Twain novel had, in fact, predated The Three Musketeers: they'd been in talks with George Cukor to direct it in the 1960s, but reached an impasse over the big change the Salkinds wanted, namely a teenaged lead, which Cukor rejected, particularly because he was keen on casting as prince and pauper the child actor Mark Lester, then hot off Oliver! Funny how things work out: when Crossed Swords was made almost a decade on it was with a number of Musketeers repertory players, but starring Mark Lester after all (sort of, as he's third-billed, after Raquel Welch, who's in the movie for about eight minutes). I would suspect they intended it to have been directed by the Musketeers' Richard Lester (no relation), with Fleischer just the name that rose to the top when R. Lester wandered off, doing a couple of other swashbuckling adventures, including, amusingly enough, The Royal Flash, featuring George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman and a screenplay by Fraser himself, adapting his novel which was, I understand, patterned on The Prisoner of Zenda, which is a bit patterned on, well. Meanwhile, Fleischer's one major ask of the Salkinds for Crossed Swords was a new screenplay, dutifully delivered by... George MacDonald Fraser.
It's unclear what deficiency Fleischer identified in the original screenplay by Berta Dominguez (Mrs. A. Salkind, so he told his boss that his wife's script was terrible) and Pierre Spengler, but Fraser's replacement retains that innovation of teen protagonists, while (so far as I recall Twain's novel) tilting things much more towards action-adventure, still serving up sour social discursion but striving to package that inside burly spectacle. We begin with Twain's epigram ("it may have happened"—it definitely didn't, and at least one of the real-life teen characters here was beheaded, and wasn't a teen yet in this timeframe either, but there's probably something about a tale that purports to establish the parameters of a "Good King" that sites the concept within a boy who barely reigned and was succeeded by Bloody Mary), and following a "Victorian illustration" opening that fades imperceptibly into a street scene in the London slums, we're in 1547. Here we find young Tom Canty and his beastly father (Ernest Borgnine), who lives off his son's skills as a pickpocket. Though initially quite successful in the day's "work," a chase through the mazelike streets unintentionally deposits Tom into the garden at Whitehall, where Henry VIII (Charlton Heston), sneering at this scum—without, also, getting a very good look at the scum's face—decides to be sporting and give him a very slight head start before his guards hunt him down like a dog. Tom flees this way and that, and comes out a chimney before Edward, Prince of Wales. Upon realizing they look exactly alike, their only distinctions being class (and hairstyle), Edward conceives the lark whose basic shape you presumably know.
Tom has little choice but to consent, and they trade attire, and Edward makes it about fifteen seconds before the Duke of Norfolk (Rex Harrison), identifying him as the dirty intruder, has him thrown out onto the street. Protestations avail Edward naught, and though bearing the jeweled seal of the prince, he's about to be set upon by the mob of bums that apparently live on Whitehall's steps until his savior, recently-returned gentleman-mercenary Miles Hendon (Oliver Reed), intervenes. Miles isn't having any of this lunatic's "Prince of Wales" nonsense either, but returns Edward to his double's family, which goes terribly, Edward effectively kidnapped by his double's father after almost killing Miles who is, nonetheless, now obliged to rescue Edward again. Tom is having his own troubles convincing anybody that he's who he says he is, and things get worse when Henry dies, because now they want to crown Tom king.
Now, this is a box in which to put the vignettes that shape Edward into a less peremptory and dipshitty kind of prince, something Fraser's screenplay does, happily, with the understanding that its pleasures as a screenplay rest heavily upon the peremptory, dipshitty attitude that constitutes the prince's entire original personality, so very little of that winds up sacrificed on the altar of an arc (Fraser also drops Twain's go at archaic English in favor of a merely more curlicued kind of speech). Even so, as Edward makes his odyssey across the England he's been raised to rule, he discovers that his father's kingdom is injustice and misery, as illustrated by novel's most exciting episodes, like a Court of Miracles run by a king of outcasts (George C. Scott) prone to self-amused commentary, and the revelation that Miles's own home and identity, and even his babe (that's Welch), have been usurped by his venal brother (David Hemmings), who declares, get this, Miles to be a lookalike impostor. It's a fairytale, essentially, asking to be met at that level: even spotting the movie its implausibility, by the very end Edward's barely realized "screeching the truth louder" isn't the winning strategy to get his identity back. (The primary cut of the film is gallingly reckless about it: the mystery I wished Fleischer would've resolved is why that primary cut was required to be 113 minutes long, for, you see, there's also an eleven minute longer "international cut," which we can determine is something close to a director's cut, even if "international" is confusing in this context already, with the balance of those minutes devoted to meeting the audience halfway about the premise. The removal of the footage is savagely artless, obviously the work of executives—just smashing right into Heston declaring "welp, guess my son's mad!" with Reed's audio from the previous scene even accidentally bleeding into the new one—and it messes with a few other things, too, leaving out the entire set-up for Miles's funny denouement, and slicing up a mordant one-take tableau of Henry on his deathbed that Fleischer's put together that's much better as a one-take. So I'm probably awarding the film a modicum of extra grace because I've seen what's "supposed" to be in it. Pretty oddly, the most obvious superfluity remains: Elizabeth's (Lalla Ward's) consequence to this story is outrun, considerably, by the screentime Elizabeth gets.)
It isn't, anyway, a movie much about interiority, or emotional complication, and to the extent it is, it's because it's sent its characters in inconsistent directions and asked its cast to bridge the gaps, most impressively with Heston (the movie accords remarkable humanity to Henry, considering it introduced him tormenting a teen and declaring that Norfolk must be destroyed for no reason, and next had him laugh like a moron at the only thing in the movie that isn't funny, "Edward's" one-man Derelicte fashion show—but hey, that's Heston**). It does have the advantage of one crackerjack cast: my supposition going in (and even coming out, before I researched it) was that this was a more Fleischer-driven project than it was (than they ever were, really), because that cast reunites Fleischer with so many faces from across his career. That's barely half-true, thanks to most the cast's preexisting association with the Salkinds' neo-swashbuckling enterprise, but here they are anyway, Fleischer's stars from Fantastic Voyage, Doctor Dolittle, The Last Run, Soylent Green, and even The Vikings from way back. Their presence makes it feel magisterial, like Fleischer taking stock of his career and the relationships he'd built across it. (Plus, I enjoy the reversal of The Agony and the Ecstasy's dynamic between Heston and Harrison, even when that has nothing to do with Fleischer.)
We'll get back to "feeling magisterial" shortly, but Reed was new to Fleischer, as was Lester; and Lester's simultaneously the biggest driver of and beneficiary of that "fairytale" baseline, "good" within the narrow channels the movie provides for being good, propounding two distinctive ways of being callow between his two characters, and effectively differentiating Edward and Tom even when Tom's "playing" Edward (Edward never "plays" Tom), though always starkly limited by the one thing that does really bother me about the movie. It distracts you from it pretty well, and it isn't even that Crossed Swords doesn't give very much of a shit about Tom, who has nothing but talking in rooms in a movie with diametric opposite concerns; it's that it declines to give a shit in a way that gets wonky if you think about it too much, for not only does the movie start off with a different protagonist than the one it wants, when it starts off with Tom it's with a noticeably different Tom than the one we get once he's ensconced in Whitehall, a streetwise (yet even comparatively booksmart) smooth operator who devolves into a bit of a dumbass once he's in his princely robes, acquiring a romance with Jane Grey (Felicity Dean) that occupies a fraction (not even a majority!) of a single scene, that itself is plainly just the set-up for an American Graffiti/Animal House coda that, admittedly, does get a big laugh. (Not as big as Norfolk's part of the coda, mind you, though the movie's sarcastic salting of all the utopian promises it's made about Edward VI is terrific every which way.) On the other hand, the Lester-on-Lester action here is astonishing—it's not just splitscreen—and I had no idea they could do these special effects yet in 1977, so if to some degree they still can't (there's a momentary translucence that gives the game away in their first meeting) it just primes you for being floored when they do anyway (there's a handshake later that boggled my little mind).
But the movie's first priority, obviously, is Reed—and who could blame it? Miles isn't so fascinating a character either (even then, Reed gets some nice heated emotions over Welch's seeming-traitress of a lover), but Reed's weary decency and tested charisma is one bedrock of the film's consistently strong comedy, and beyond that, this is an action movie above all, and man, Reed was fucking game. The lede I've buried is that Crossed Swords has some just outstanding fight choreography, designed by B.H. Barry with the intention to feel like Reed's designing these fights right there in the moment. The first is the worst (it's the only one that allows the sense to linger that Miles's opponents might be "taking turns"), and even that one's good; the rest are great. This is neo-swashbuckling with downright Bondian flavor, utilizing the spaces and the props, giving us all the spontaneity of a chaotic brawl (at one point Reed throws an innocent extra at an attacker!) without losing the moments of perfect cool, especially in the setpiece aboard a moving carriage (and by God, that's what it is, managing a camera inside the action anyway) where in between wallops Reed takes a split-second to give Welch a gentlemanly kiss on the hand. To every appearance, too, it is Reed (and his poor thrashed-about co-stars); there is literally only one stunt that I'd say he definitely didn't do, him and three other guys crashing through a railing and dropping eight feet onto a floor—and even if Reed didn't, somebody did. It's gloriously, deceptively messy, and full of the same humor, enough so that Edward's best line in the film is reminding Miles that of their three battles to date, they've lost two and ran away from the other.
Fleischer was, probably, staying out of Barry's way for these (but then, that would be correct), though even then the climax depends on some wonderfully-jagged cross-cutting between a coronation (at an intoxicatingly storybook-style Westminister) and a violent ingress; but man, this is possibly the most "Richard Fleischer movie" Richard Fleischer ever made, in some respects a culmination of a style that was more forceful in his contemporaneously-set (or sci-fi) movies, but perhaps becomes more obvious in a period piece. There's legitimate mastery here; the only piece of direction qua direction I think sucks (though it truly does) is the dithering with the first shots of Edward, like Fleischer was aiming for a reveal that the figure mostly seen from behind was Lester, but giving up while still handing editor Ernest Walter footage that couldn't help but betray the abortive and apparently half-assed effort.
Nothing else about Crossed Swords is half-assed.*** It brought him back together with cinematographer legend Jack Cardiff (they'd done The Vikings together), whom we find disinclined towards naturalistic or in many cases even dramatic lighting (the exception is a sequence with woozy hell-red "lantern" light that's very likely being pumped in from off-camera, that's deliberate but I'm not sure is "good"), but all the better to almost-overlight the enormous Pinewood sets and capture Anthony Pratt's production design and Judy Moorcroft's costumes as essentially planes of color, not even necessarily always appealing color (lots of sickly pastels mixed with more saturated hues) but suited to the gaudy overbearing of the reign of Henry VIII, contrasted against the blasted beiges of commoner life. It's something of a survival of a 50s epic into the late 70s, in its splendid bigness, but Fleischer was a very mid-century guy who kept evolving into at least the late 60s, and there's a countervailing modernism that's terribly exciting in this milieu—those fight scenes are pushing it right up to the cusp of the 80s—with Fleischer meticulously constructing his movie by way of his own aesthetic priors. It bears as many "Fleischer compositions" as I've ever seen in one place: the vertical and diagonal lines and interleaving movements that bisect (or even trisect) those deeply-staged Panavision shots; the anchoring foreground objects (almost over-relying on them when the foreground object is a person shoved into the rightmost corner of the frame, since Fleischer trots that one out maybe thirty times); and relatedly, the superlative use of negative space, starting off about as soon as the movie does with all the fun Fleischer's having with that chase through holes in walls, climaxing with this gonzo doozy of a shot giving us King Henry—
—and continuing throughout, with our introduction to Hugh somehow looming inside a frame-within-a-frame that's maybe 5% of the available visual real estate, coming by way of a camera movement portentous in its showy modesty, all belying Miles's blithe assumption that he can pick his life up where he left off. It's lively and stately all at once, which is the Fleischer of it all (the least Fleischer thing about it is that it's too fast-paced to indulge any of his more meditative instincts; not usual for Fleischer, but still totally fun, is that knowingly ridiculous introduction of Welch from below that'll be what I associate the phrase "heaving bosom" with for the rest of my life).
For all that, Crossed Swords was a big flop (we could also consider it as the gateway to the final and least-loved phase of a career not as loved as it should be overall). My reflex would be to just say "Star Wars," which is presumably the reason it waited nine more months for an American release, though it didn't have to compete with it in Britain. Still: it inevitably suffers in that comparison, and it certainly would explain why the Musketeers movies weren't going to be the new formula for adventure, while emphasizing how both this film and its maker were perhaps too ready to straddle the line between, well, the previous decade and the truly old-fashioned. But coming to it almost fifty years on, Crossed Swords pleased this viewer.
Score: 9/10
*And in 1954, Errol Flynn, star of the 1937 adaptation, was in... Crossed Swords? Jesus, what's even happening.
**I'm annoyed, however, that his last three words are "monks, monks, monks," simply because Henry's were.
***Okay, one more: I'd like to think the abortive use of Edward's seal as a maguffin in the climax was a victim of its primary cut, but it isn't.
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