Swashbuckler (1976) (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Apr 29, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
James GoldstoneRelease Date(s)
1976 (February 26, 2025)Studio(s)
Universal Pictures (Imprint Films/Via Vision Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: C+
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: D-
Review
[Editor’s Note: This is a Region-Free Australian import.]
Many today remember 1970s Hollywood cinema as a golden period of great films from emerging directors like Scorsese, Friedkin, and Bogdanovich, and of blockbusters like The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars. The reality was a little different. In 1976, the year of Universal’s Swashbuckler, the studio’s output was anything but innovative and bloated with a nostalgia for the past. Besides this old-fashioned pirate re-do, the company released Gable and Lombard and W.C. Fields and Me, biopics of 1930s stars; Midway, an old-fashioned war epic built around stock footage from World War II and overaged stars; The Slipper and the Rose, a musical retelling of Cinderella; Mustang Country, an old-timey Western with Joel McCrea in his final film appearance; and Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot, a revisiting of suspense movie tropes and his final film. Even those pictures that were good harkened to the past: The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings was set in the 1930s, while The Seven-Per-Cent Solution revisits Sherlock Holmes in Edwardian times. Only Car Wash was set in a vibrant present.
The pirate swashbuckler was pretty well kaput as a thriving movie genre by the early-1950s, though England’s Hammer Films and a few others later dabbled in it. Spurred by the success of Richard Lester’s rollicking Three Musketeers diptych, comparatively speaking, Swashbuckler is all-thumbs, though it’s a bit better than its mostly terrible reputation, and it tries hard. It’s beautifully photographed in Panavision by Philip H. Lathrop (Touch of Evil, Lonely Are the Brave), the $8 million production looks nice, augmented by good visual effects by master matte painter Albert Whitlock, and some of the performances are appropriately lusty. However, the screenplay, by Jeffrey Bloom (11 Harrowhouse, Flowers in the Attic) is quite poor; the characters are cardboard-thin, and Bloom’s single twist on the overworked genre is tasteless and completely out of place in a movie like this. Further, some key roles are badly miscast.
In 1718 Jamaica, pirates led by Captain “Red” Ned Lynch (Robert Shaw) rescue Ned’s first mate, Nick Derbrett (James Earl Jones) from the gallows, Ned a thorn in the side of acting Governor Lord Durant (Peter Boyle) and his aide, Major Folly (Beau Bridges). Durant has imprisoned the Lord High Justice, Sir James Barnet (Bernard Behrens), prompting his daughter, Jane (Geneviève Bujold), to eventually form an uneasy alliance with Ned and his band of thievin’ pirates to free him.
That’s pretty much all the plot there is in this 101-minute film, rife with action scenes, including a few impressive stunts (the doubling throughout unusually obvious) and big-scale chases, including one impressively covered from above, via helicopter camera. Ned and Jane, predictably, have a stormy, love-hate relationship, with little doubt there’ll be a romantic clinch at the fade-out. Generally, though, there’s an almost complete lack of characterization. Other than Ned obviously enjoying his pirating antics, the audience learns nothing more about the character by the end of the movie than it did the first minute he was introduced. Likewise, Jane and Nick have no backstory, no dreams or ambitions, or meaningful conflicts or anything else.
The supporting characters come off even worse, and are treated more like extras, with little or no dialogue. Sid Haig, Avery Schreiber, and legendary stuntman (minus one leg by this time) Bob Morgan are among Ned’s crew but have virtually no discernible dialogue, and most don’t even have names, listed in the credits as “Bald Pirate,” “Peg-Legged Pirate,” etc. They’re a near-constant presence yet shoved into the background of most every scene. (Yet, one suspects Sid Haig made more money shooting this for months than all his Filipino exploitation films put together.) Anjelica Huston, billed as “Woman of Dark Visage,” has no lines at all. She beat out stiff competition from Martine Beswicke and Barbara Steele, but it wasn’t worth her effort; she has a better role in her two minutes in The Last Tycoon that same year than all her screentime in Swashbuckler put together.
Robert Shaw, James Earl Jones, and Geneviève Bujold get into the spirit of things (Shaw works in a couple of dirty limericks, as he did in Jaws), but several key roles are wildly miscast. Classical pirate movies jumbled American and British talent, but Shaw seems to be the only Englishman here (and with any experience, he having starred in TV’s The Buccaneers), and the balance is way off, with people like Universal contract player Kip Niven in supporting parts. Major Folly, as his name suggests, is an excitable, forever frustrated British officer, a Dennis Hoey-type of yore, but Beau Bridges is too emphatically American to be believed, as are the awful accents attempted by some in the cast.
Coming off worst is Peter Boyle and his entourage. Costume designer Burton Miller decided to forego period verisimilitude and based their wardrobes on “what groupies and rock stars wear today.” Miller’s costumes serve only to showcase Boyle’s considerable gut, visually approximating end-stage Elvis. With his black wig he doesn’t suggest Basil Rathbone so much as Rosie O’Donnell. The only new wrinkle Bloom’s script adds is horribly misguided and tasteless: for a PG-rated film marketed to family audiences, it vaguely hints that Boyle’s Durant is some kind of gay sadist, perhaps having an affair with the (naturally unnamed, non-speaking and non-lute-playing) “Lute Player” (Mark Baker). There’s a mildly racy scene of Bujold’s Jane swimming nude, but twice as much footage of pot-bellied Boyle in a bathtub.
Imprint’s Region-Free Blu-ray of Swashbuckler looks stupendous. Everything about the video transfer impresses: sharpness, color, contrast—it looks great, allowing bored viewers to enjoy the pretty images, if nothing else. The LPCM 2.0 mono is also excellent for what it is; unfortunately, not stereo, but mono audio rarely sounds this good. Optional English subtitles are provided.
The lone extra is a raggedy trailer, painfully trying to sell it as old-fashioned fun.
The makers of Swashbuckler deserve credit for obviously trying hard to resurrect the once-popular pirate movie genre; it’s nothing if not sincere. The few attempts since then have all been comedies (Polanski’s Pirates), spoofs (Yellowbeard), or high-concept neo-pirate fantasies (the Pirates of the Caribbean series), with the exception, maybe, of Cutthroat Island (1995), an even bigger financial/critical disaster than this was.
- Stuart Galbraith IV