DVR Alerts - Yes, Plural

Clear some space on the DVR - it's a good week for swashbucklers!

On Tuesday, 9 July, TCM airs The Spanish Main, starring Paul Henreid, Maureen O'Hara, and Walter Selzak. Binnie Barnes, as Anne Bonney, steals every scene she's in.

On Wednesday, 10 July, TCM follows up with King Vidor's Bardelys the Magnificent, based on the Rafael Sabatini novel of the same name. It's funny, chastely erotic, and swashbuckling by turns - not to be missed.

Thursday, 11 July, features no less than three swashbucklers: Return to Treasure Island, with Tab Hunter, and two great Ray Harryhausen (RIP) Sinbad movies, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, with John Phillip Law and the incredibly sexy Caroline Munro, and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, with Patrick Wayne and the stunning Jane Seymour.

Finally, Friday, 12 July, TCM shows The Warriors, with Errol Flynn as the Black Prince and Joanne Dru as the damsel in distress - not strictly a swashbuckler, it's good inspiration for gamers running swashbuckling campaigns nonetheless.

Check local listings for times.

DVR Alert

If Monday night's The Adventures of Don Juan whetted your appetite for more Errol Flynn, on Thursday Friday see him in his prime when TCM shows The Adventures of Robin Hood and Captain Blood back-to-back.

Local listings, yadda yadda

DVR Alert

Clear some space on the DVR - Monday night's Turner Classic Movies schedule, titled, "Sword Play," features five excellent swashbucklers: Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro, Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Don Juan, Jose Ferrer - in a rare Oscar-winning cape-and-sword performance! - in Cyrano de Bergerac, Raiders of the Seven Seas, and Cornel Wilde and Maureen O'Hara - as the daughter of Athos! - in At Sword's Point.

Check your local listings for times, as always - and seriously, isn't it well past time for you to delete Dungeons & Dragons: Book of Vile Darkness?

DVR Alert

Turner Classic Movies offers three reasons to wake from a food coma this weekend. On Saturday, 24 November, TCM is showing Michael Curtiz's unforgettable The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Basil Rathbone. On Sunday, 25 November, they follow up with two great Ray Harryhausen movies, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. Golden Voyage, with John Phillip Law and Caroline Munro, is by far the better of the two, in my humble opinion, but Jane Seymour makes Eye of the Tiger worth watching.

Check your local listings for times, as always.

Cinematic: The Adventures of Robin Hood

DVR Alert

On Tuesday, 3 July, Turner Classic Movies airs The Adventures of Don Juan, starring Errol Flynn.

The past-his-prime Flynn makes a convincingly world-weary Don Juan caught up in the intrigues of the Spanish court. The final duel with the duque de Lorca is a great stage-fight.

As always, check you local listings for times.

Cinematic: Captain Blood

DVR Alert

Tuesday, Turner Classic Movies is featuring three pirate movies back-to-back-to-back: The Pirate, starring Gene Kelly and Judy Garland; The Spanish Main, starring Paul Henreid and Maureen O'Hara; and Captain Blood, directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Basil Rathbone.

Sounds like a serviceable lineup for September 19th, actually.

Sunday at the Movies

I spent Sunday afternoon taking apart a futon and clearing out our computer desk as we prepare to move our desktop computer from the spare bedroom - slated to become my son's room in a few months - into the master bedroom. Fortunately it turned out to be a good day for Errol Flynn movies - no, I don't watch the Super Bowl - with The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk on TCM.

Among gamers of a certain age, The Adventures of Robin Hood is akin to a sort of sacrament. It was Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone battling in Nottingham Castle that Gary Gygax wanted to emulate with the hit point rules in OD&D, to capture the back-and-forth of the duelists on the castle steps.

The Sea Hawk is less well-known. Peripherally drawn from the Rafael Sabatini novel of the same name, Errol Flynn plays Captain Thorpe, one of Queen Elizabeth's "Sea Hawks" and a thorn in the side of the Spanish. Thorpe believes the Spanish are preparing to attack England with a great Armada and sets out to expose and foil their plans. The movie concludes with a dramatically-lit duel in the throne room of Winchester Palace.

The Sea Hawk is a fun movie, but it's an even more fascinating book. Mr Sabatini's novel takes place after the Armada and features the exploits of an English sailor and an Algerian pirate. It's an engrossing portrait of the lives of the Barbary corsairs at the turn of the 17th century, of slaves captured in England and held in the banios of Algiers, of renegadoes - Europeans who engaged in piracy under the flags of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli - of 'turning Turk,' adopting the Muslim religion, and of the politics of ransom.

An earlier silent version was filmed in 1924, directed by Frank Lloyd; the Errol Flynn movie, filmed sixteen years later, used footage from the earlier film, including full-sized replica ships in action off Santa Catalina Island, just off the California coast (and not far from where the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels would be filmed some eighty years later). I've not seen the Lloyd version of The Sea Hawk, but it sounds like it was much closer to Mr Sabatini's tale.

I would love to see a remake of The Sea Hawk, one that hews closer to the Sabatini book. In addition to swashbuckling action among the galleys and corsairs of the Mediterranean, it's a remarkable tale about a largely forgotten period of contact and conflict between Christian Europe and Muslim Africa.