Sometime in the 1600s, France and Spain are engaged in a lengthy border dispute focusing on the fortress of Vandremond in the Pyrenees. The royal lady Dona Isabella is taken prisoner by the French and held at the castle of St. Dennis under a plan masterminded by Cardinal Richelieu. The masked Spanish hero Zorro (Gordon Scott), who, under his mask is the somewhat foppish Count Teruel, vows to free her. He also has to deal with the Three Musketeers (actually four, since D'Artagnan is a full-fledged member now) who are first against him and later fight on his side. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is about as much of the plot of this mess that I could follow. To be fair, the plot is not the point—the point is swordfights, damsels in distress, and handsome heroes. All those are delivered, though in conspicuously low-budget versions, but the overriding tone here is comedy. Instead of comic relief, the action scenes function as relief for the rather mild comic antics. This is really a costume version of the Italian muscleman movies, with elaborate period garb instead of bare chests and loincloths. The history is, as near as I can tell, totally bogus—the narrator is deliberately vague about the year and says that history has ignored this little war, but I still had problems keeping the sides separate and figuring out just what Richelieu had in mind with his kidnapping plot. Gordon Scott is nicely heroic. Tony Zamperla makes a handsome D'Artagnan, but unfortunately the Musketeers are not developed at all as individual characters, being mostly just a lump of swashbucklers. Franco Fantasia is a solid villain. The dubbing is terrible, not so much in terms of matching mouth movements, but the voices themselves are often unpleasant. The print I saw on Amazon Prime steaming is presented widescreen but is distorted, with the picture squeezed, so I had to adjust my TV set to get an undistorted widescreen image, albeit one with the sides cut off. A so-so novelty which might help you pass a boring Saturday afternoon. [Amazon]
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
ZORRO VS. THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1963)
Sometime in the 1600s, France and Spain are engaged in a lengthy border dispute focusing on the fortress of Vandremond in the Pyrenees. The royal lady Dona Isabella is taken prisoner by the French and held at the castle of St. Dennis under a plan masterminded by Cardinal Richelieu. The masked Spanish hero Zorro (Gordon Scott), who, under his mask is the somewhat foppish Count Teruel, vows to free her. He also has to deal with the Three Musketeers (actually four, since D'Artagnan is a full-fledged member now) who are first against him and later fight on his side. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is about as much of the plot of this mess that I could follow. To be fair, the plot is not the point—the point is swordfights, damsels in distress, and handsome heroes. All those are delivered, though in conspicuously low-budget versions, but the overriding tone here is comedy. Instead of comic relief, the action scenes function as relief for the rather mild comic antics. This is really a costume version of the Italian muscleman movies, with elaborate period garb instead of bare chests and loincloths. The history is, as near as I can tell, totally bogus—the narrator is deliberately vague about the year and says that history has ignored this little war, but I still had problems keeping the sides separate and figuring out just what Richelieu had in mind with his kidnapping plot. Gordon Scott is nicely heroic. Tony Zamperla makes a handsome D'Artagnan, but unfortunately the Musketeers are not developed at all as individual characters, being mostly just a lump of swashbucklers. Franco Fantasia is a solid villain. The dubbing is terrible, not so much in terms of matching mouth movements, but the voices themselves are often unpleasant. The print I saw on Amazon Prime steaming is presented widescreen but is distorted, with the picture squeezed, so I had to adjust my TV set to get an undistorted widescreen image, albeit one with the sides cut off. A so-so novelty which might help you pass a boring Saturday afternoon. [Amazon]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment