Last week I watched the very old movie Fire Over England starring the GODDESS Vivien Leigh (in fact it was her first major role). The movie takes place during the naval wars between England and Spain. During a ship battle early in the film, a Spanish battleship boards into an English one and a chaotic melee occurs where sailors from both sides are using their swords. I was surprised to see kicks, punches, and wrestling shown on screen and even people shoved off the both into the water.
Later in the movie the protagonist is sent on a secret mission as a spy to Spain as a pretending doublecrosser committing treason but his true allegiance was discovered. While he's being escorted to the palace's prison, out of nowhere he throws a double backfist that hits the palace guards briefly fazed as he begins to flee. He finds a rapier and fends off some soldiers with speed that surprised me (to the level of modern action movie). But what surprised me the most more than anything was the English spy finds a dagger and than fights with dual wielding. He does basic moves like using the dagger to aid in disarming an enemy's rapier and other stuff. I was so mindblown at how some HEMA techniques were shown.
Couple of days ago I watched the 1952 Ivanhoe, the one with one of my fav actresses of all time Elizabeth Taylor. Well I'll just link the castle fight scene which absolutely flabbergasted me because I was not expecting to see anything like it at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQYfkBydEns
And thats just one scene. The whole movie is full of stuff that shows varying degree of accurate weapons use like joust scenes and so on.
I also watched the Lester Three Musketers last night, and well I'll just share Youtube vid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj_DmO9jC3U
The absolute best part? Yes this scene is intentionally supposed to be comedic and the musketeers are just playing around with the Cardinal's grunts because they really were just having a game! Yet stuff like kneeing, use of cloak and sword as an offense and defense combination, dual wielding, and so much more are used. Just wait till you get to the serious stuff later in the movie and esp n the sequel The Four Musketeers if you chose to watch the whole thing...........
During my lunchbreak I began a rewatch of The Lion In Winter and after the opening overture, the first scene shows Peter O'Toole as King Henry teaching his youngest how to use a sword. His son manages to overpower him and knock O'Toole to the ground but just as he's throwing the finishing blow........... O'Toole does a scissor legs that knocks his son to the ground! The scene ends with O'Toole praising his son's improvement with a sword. It was followed by a scene shortly afterwards where Anthony Hopkins wins a duel in a jousting match and than goes to a bunch of spearmen marching in solid formation on the beach only to be ambushed by heavy cavalry. They fend off the first charge but out of nowhere another cavalry appears and hits the spearwall from behind which was completely unprotected and the battle is decided. I had to stop because lunch break ended but I am so excited about rewatching the rest of the film because I am blown away at how much HEMA and accurate Medieval warfare was shown so far!
But this all reminds me of a question I seen back in 2009 at yahoo answers. The poster was stating his excitement that HEMA was finally being given proper treatment and movies are portraying accurate swordsmanship starting from Kingdom of Heaven and so on to 300 all the way up to the year that question was posted. He was asking if other martial artists are appreciate that movie makers are finally showing accurate fencing and other European sword styles.
However one poster responded that this stuff is nothing new and has been around since as early as the era Talkies began to dominate Hollywood just as The Great Depression was coming out, even pointing out even Silent films do have authentic displays of HEMA from time to time.
Indeed just like the Yahoo Answers poster, cinema and to a much lesser extent TV gets bashed for creating popular myths on European warfare such as battles being fought without organized formation, and being disorganized brawls, European knights in heavy armor being clumsy rigid and slow as they swing their swords with brute strength, European sword systems being simplistic and lacking in complex precise parries and attacks as well as lacking any unarmed moves such as punches and kicks, and so much more.................
But just from four movies, I have to wonder just how much is Hollywood responsible for promoting the myth of undeveloped sword systems and martial arts in Europe and creating the Asian superiority myth?
I mean Fire Over England was released in 1937........ Yet the simple fact disarms are featured as well as knife and rapier dual wielding is shown onscreen already makes doubt the perception that movies created the notion of undeveloped fighting systems in Europe and other myths! And don't even get me commented on Ivanhoe and Michael York's Musketeer movie!
I mean scissor legs to successfully take out an enemy who's gonna bash your face while your knocked on the ground with his sword? In a 1960s movie taking place in Medieval France? As well as distracting a formation squareblock of spearmen armed with shield in a wall of pokey objects and metal rectangles with a cavalry charge so you can hit their unprotected flanks with another surprise cavalry attack from an unseen angle?!!!!!!
It really makes me question the blame the movie and TV industry gets! Whats your take?
There a few factors that affect how TV and movies get their reputation for historical accuracy, so let's consider each in turn.
The "tone" of the fight
The "tone" of the fight refers to the feelings the director is hoping to evoke in the audience. Is this an adventure movie that requires exciting stuntwork performed with a dash of humour, an historical epic that should convey grit and realism, or high fantasy that calls for glamorous arms and armour with a splash of the supernatural?
Early cinema leaned heavily on adventure movies and historical epics, especially adaptations of classic and romantic novels. This skewed the fight scenes toward moderately realistic stunt work, with some concessions made for keeping the violence family-friendly. But as Hollywood transitioned out of the old studio system in the 1960s and 1970s, that style of historical adventure fell out of fashion. It was replaced by a much heavier focus on fantasy. The biggest sword fighting movie of the 1970s was probably Star Wars, and it was surprisingly influential as sword fight choreography goes.
It helps if fantasy sword fights look substantively different from what we might call classical fight choreography, in order to help transport the audience to a different world. Fight directors accomplished this by leaning heavily on asian sword fighting styles. Star Wars lightsaber fights were based off of kendo, for instance, despite being choreographed by Bob Anderson, a trained fencer. Even the movie Highlander made its late medieval Scottish protagonist (and his Spanish mentor, too!) fight in a Japanese style. (Hmm, this film was also done by Bob Anderson.) Kung-fu, arnis and other martial arts also provided a wealth of exotic weapon styles that could be adapted into something fantastically twirly. Realism was not the goal, here. They wanted a fantastical spectacle.
Even when New Hollywood looked back affectionately at old-timey adventure cinema, such as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, their treatment of sword fighting was a goofy send up. The Princess Bride has some excellent sword fight choreography in the classical vein (also done by Bob Anderson!) but realism is so far from their objective, that it is best understood as a parody of golden age swashbuckling cinema.
Skill level of the talent
Fencing was one of the core skills of the classically trained actor. Many of the swashbuckling stars of Old Hollywood had extensive stage fighting experience that could be relied on to shorten the choreography and rehearsal cycle. Fencing schools of that era often included Escrime Artistique programs that were the HEMA of the day - classical fencing disciplines that focussed on historical weapons and techniques that were no longer used in sport fencing, but still had application in theater and spectacle. So your fight directors, and possibly even your actors, were often real experts in the subject at hand. For example, I've mentioned fight director Bob Anderson a few times; in addition to his exceptional career as a movie sword master, he was also the senior national fencing coach for Great Britain, and the technical director of the Canadian Fencing Association.
Strict historical accuracy was actually not a high priority; indeed strict accuracy was felt to lead to short, dull, and unconvincing fights. But take some tips on stance and grip from old drawings, use weapons of appropriate size (ie. not modern fencing blades with theatrical grips), combine with an expert fencer's sense of movement and phrasing, and you can generally work out something that seems to work and looks good. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is similar to HEMA's general approach.)
When you hired an action and adventure actor, he (or she) came with a robust skill set that made it a lot easier to put together creative fight scenes this way on a budget. But classical actors were increasingly difficult to come by in the New Hollywood, especially if you wanted your action star to be a younger man, and not an aging relic of the old studio system. That meant that if you had a major fight scene in your script, the actors often had to be trained from scratch, which is expensive and time-consuming, even if they are fighting fit to begin with. Which brings me to:
Fight direction budget
The fight director does not set the budget and time constraints for their fight scenes, but rather are given their budget and have to make do. With sufficient advance planning and the care and interest of the director and producers, they might get the luxury of extensive fight rehearsal time. But distressingly often, they were simply told to make do with untrained performers and insufficient rehearsal time. This leads to a number of shortcuts that are sadly quite common in modern fight cinema:
close-cropped framing (hides a lot of technique and action out of frame where you can't spot its flaws)
rapid cuts and jittery camera work (used to hide bad technique, stitch together unconnected moves into a coherent sequence, and make it easier to substitute stunt doubles)
and, of course, clumsy hacking techniques (because there's really no time to teach your performers how to move with finesse)
Today, we have other tricks, too, such as getting stuntmen to do all the work, then just pasting the actors' faces on using CGI. But that at least in theory could give the filmmaker access to skills that are quite beyond their actors' capabilities.