Seven Seas to Calais (1962) Since childhood, we've never grown out of our love for swashbuckling adventures with dashing swordsmen clashing steel with dastardly villains to rescue fair maidens.
And to this day, we still can't get our fill of 'em. We can't be the only ones......our 1/17/18 review of "Swordsman Of Sienna" (also produced in '62) racked up the highest amount of views we've ever had.
BQ thinks of costume swordplay spectacles as similar to pizza and sex......even when swashbucklers aren't so great in execution, they're still fun to experience......
So how come this lushly appointed Italian take on the genre, left us bored and unmoved?
All the ingredients are on display. Gorgeous color and widescreen. Everyone dressed up in beautifully rendered Elizabethan costumes....(especially Queen Liz herself, played to imperious perfection by Irene Worth and decked out like a walking Mardi Gras float.)
And who better to play Lizzie's favorite pirate than hunk-of-the-era Rod Taylor, adding the right amounts of bravado, steely resolve and even a bit of humor. Joining him as co-swashbuckler and sometime comic relief was fellow Australian actor Keith Michell.
Beyond, Taylor, Michell and Worth, the rest of the cast is mostly comprised of dubbed-into-English Italians (including future Spaghetti western star Terence Hill)
So everything's in place for a rollicking good time. Taylor and Michell sail off to wreak havoc on the Spanish Armada, plundering ships and swiping lots of treasure, to the secret delight of Worth, who fends off the Spanish Ambassador with royal doubletalk.
Sorry to report, a rollicking good time was not had by us. The film plays out like a slow turgid pageant. The elaborate sets and set-pieces arrive with scheduled regularity - swordplay, colossal naval battles, fancy balls....even a cornball excursion to a coastal village of Halloween shop ugga-ugga Indians, who gift Michell with his very own personal Pocahontas.
Some truly clumsy, amateurish editing took us out of even enjoying the movie as a guilty pleasure. Abrupt scene transitions occur as if the film editor used a machete.....evidently this hamhanded editor never heard of dissolves, wipes, or fade in-fade outs. The film looks like it was glued together after the machete chopper finished his work. And that's not a good look.....
As much as we love swords 'n battles 'n devil-may-care pirates saving the day, this is one unbuckled swashbuckler we'll not return to again. Even fans of the genre could skip it and not miss anything.
2 stars (**).
No comments:
Post a Comment