Page 26 - Fencing Booklet

Sword fighting in the movies has been a The next wave of movies to feature fencing
primary source of the modern public’s awareness of fencing. In 1920 Douglas Fairbanks’s silent film The Mark of Zorro
gave the world a fresh image of the heroic swordsman. From this moment on, fencing was associated with swashbuckling adventure. Before Zorro, movie fencing consisted of some fairly primitive blade whacking. Fairbanks
was the first to ask a fencing master to advise on a production, creating the first movie swordplay that actually resembled fencing. Fairbanks’s best fencing films include The Three Musketeers (1921), Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), The Black Pirate (1926), and The Iron Mask (1929). Other silent-film actors who fenced in their films with varying degrees of success included Ramon Novarro, Rudolph Valentino, and John Barrymore. The leading fencing masters working in films of this period were Henry Uttenhove and Fred Cavens.
came in 1935, spurred on by Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood. In Captain Blood the fencing was more intricate and expertly staged than in earlier, silent films. Some of the most popular swashbuckling films of this era—and the actors who starred in them—included Ronald Colman in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937); Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Sea Hawk (1940), and The Adventures of Don Juan (1949); Tyrone Power in a remake of The Mark of Zorro (1940) and The Black Swan (1942); and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in The Corsican Brothers (1941). The most successful fencing masters working in Hollywood at this time were Fred Cavens, Ralph Faulkner, and Jean Heremans.
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