Quote Originally Posted by Gawain of Orkeny
The Willian Tell one was The Flame and the Arrow . Both also featured a deaf mute who also did spectacular stunts and in real life was Burts parnter in his circus act billed as "Lang & Cravat"). Flynn alos performed most of his own stunts and swordplay. Does anyone know who was considered the finest fencer as an actor?

I don't know if he was the best, but Basil Rathbone is always mentioned as an excellent fencer. He was much more proficient than Flynn, but being the villian in both Captain Blood and Robin Hood, he was destined to lose.

If you want to see one of the later swashbuckler movies with a lot of fantastic fencing, find a DVD of Scaramouche. Like Captain Blood, It was another Rafael Sabatini story put to film and it starred Stuart Granger and Mel Ferrer plus a very young Janet Leigh (later wife of Tony Curtiss and mother of Jamie Lee Curtiss )

It has the distinction of having one of longest, if not the longest, fencing scenes ever put in a movie. It goes on for like 20 minutes or so. It is a really beautiful period costume movie filmed in Techicolor.

The Aventures of Robin Hood with Flynn, DeHaviland, Raines, and Rathbone has to be one of my all time favorites and it still holds up quite well today. The old Technicolor process gave films a classic painted picture look that is missing in today's films. I have the two disc collectors edition, and watch it over and over again on a regular basis.

As several have said, I would probably go with Tyrone Power as my second swashbuckler choice.

Bandaras carried off the modern Zorro movies quite well, and I guess those two Bandalero movies could be considered swashbucklers with guns.

I would love to see a good remake of Captain Blood, but I don't think any actor alive today could ever live up to Flynn in the role. Maybe Mel Gibson when he was much younger, and Crowe might just be the only other big name actor that could carry it off. Master & Commander is probably the best age of sail movie made in the last 40 years.

And please do not mention Johnny Depp. IMHO his portrayal of the Jack Sparrow character in PTOC as perpetually drunk was stupid to the point that it distracted from the movie.

Cheers