The Flame and the Arrow

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Ron W Aug 12, 2018 Pelicula de aventuras Naif y de buenas intenciones.

Ron R Feb 23, 2018 Fun swashbuckler with Burt Lancaster in the Robin Hood-styled role (presumably meant for then broken-down Errol Flynn) demonstrating his real acrobatic talents after a few years in films noir at the start of his career. Here, he is an Italian rascal drawn into fighting the Hessians after his wife leaves him for the evil Ulrich the Hawk and they kidnap his son. Virginia Mayo plays the Hawk's niece who inevitably falls for Dardo (Lancaster). Naturally, there are lots of fight scenes in the castle including some swordfighting and Lancaster's partner from his days as an acrobat (Nick Cravat) plays a key role as mute (apparently because his Brooklyn accent was too thick for period pieces). The director was Jacques Tourneur who worked across many genres (starting with Val Lewton in horror but making excellent westerns and war pictures as well as Night of the Demon, an all time great, later in his career) and doesn't miss a trick in this one. In the end, we have nothing more than a rip-snorting genre picture that knows its audience, winks a few times, and offers a lot of cheeky and bravado entertainment -- and often that's enough. See more

Anakin S Nov 10, 2017 The Flame and the Arrow is a classic Saturday matinee swashbuckler that doesn't try or pretend to be anything else, and as such it's one of the best of its genre. This 1950 technicolor feature rises above B status because of its incisive direction by Jacques Tourneur, a veteran Hollywood genre film maker best remembered for the noir classic Out of the Past and the horror classic Cat People, and also because of the spectacular athletics of an astonishingly youthful Burt Lancaster. There's also an effective sound track by major film composers Max Steiner; Virginia Mayo as the love interest stands around very prettily, which is about all you expect the female love interest in a movie like this to do. It's the sort of film you might have thought was the best movie ever made when you were fifteen years old, and can still enjoy fifty years later. See more

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The Flame and the Arrow

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