Foster on Film

The queen of France has twin sons, later named Louis XIV and Philippe. The second is kept secret and sent off to be raised by the musketeer D’Artagnan (Warren William), with the aid of three godfathers: Parthos (Alan Hale), Aramis (Miles Mander), and Athos (Bert Roach). The young prince grows to be an evil king

Edward (half of the Mauch Twins), Prince of England, encounters Tom Canty (the other half of the Mauch Twins), a look-a-like begger child, and the two switch places a short time before the king dies. The Earl of Hertford (Claude Rains), discovering the truth, plans to control Tom as king, and have Edward assassinated. But

General Gurko Lanen (George Sanders) controls Lichtenburg with an iron fist, holding the Grand Duchess Zona (Joan Bennett) as his prisonser. Edmund Dantes Jr. (Louis Hayward), son of the famous Count of Monte Cristo, masquerading as a foppish banker, comes to free the beautiful Zona and lead a revolution. A second tier Swashbuckler, The Son

A feud between two powerful families results in the Franchi’s being wiped out except for the just-born Siamese twin sons of the Franchi patriarch. The twins are separated, and to keep them safe one is raised in the woods as a bandit while the other is raised in Paris. Twenty years later Lucien and Mario

Scaramouche is a gasp from a dying genre.  The simplistic moral structure that was so uplifting in the films of the 30s and 40s was beginning to look silly in the post war world.  Add in that most everything that could be done with the genre in that form had been done, and it’s not

Upper-class Dona St. Columb (Joan Fontaine) has had enough of her cloddish, uncarring husband (Ralph Forbes) and his cad of a friend (Basil Rathbone), so takes off to Cornwall with her two children. There she is taken care of by William (Cecil Kellaway), a servant who’s cleverer than expected and has a secret. She also

One of the standard Swashbuckler plots has the hero masquerading as a fop so his real self can right wrongs and win the maiden, and no film did it better than The Mark of Zorro. Leslie Howard recited doggerel poems as the The Scarlet Pimpernel and Louis Hayward dithered on about banking as The Son of Monte Cristo, but Tyrone Power is on

An aging Don Juan (Douglas Fairbanks) returns to Seville with his servant (Melville Cooper) where he is threatened with jail by his loving wife Dolores (Benita Hume). He visits a few ladies, including a dancer, Antonita (Merle Oberon) and all the town is excited by his return. A young man pretending to be Don Juan

If there is a literary king of the Swashbuckler it would have to be Alexandre Dumas.  His fast-paced historical fiction (which held only a winking acquaintance with actual history) was serialized in French papers in the mid 1800s and was extremely popular.  His stories contained many of the elements that make a good film, so they have

In a time of conflict between Queen Elizabeth I of England (Flora Robson) and King Philip II of Spain (Raymond Massey), an English privateer ship is captured, resulting in young Michael Ingolby (Laurence Olivier) recovering in secret with a Spanish friend of his father’s and that man’s daughter Elena (Tamara Desni). He returns to England,

I’ve always thought of the The Prisoner of Zenda as a “smart” Swashbuckler, and it is, in dialog, character, and structure, if not in story.  The action is first rate, but secondary to the film, for in this case, it is all about words—superbly crafted words—and the voices that pronounce them.  While fun to watch, the true joy

Charismatic but foolish Fanfan (Gérard Philipe) is on his way to a shotgun wedding when a gypsy girl (Gina Lollobrigida, dubbed by Claire Guibert) tells him he is fated to become a great soldier and marry the princess. He escapes and joins the army, only to learn that the gypsy was really the daughter of