Adventure

Vintage Cinema presents

Adventure film

Adventure film is a genre that revolves around the conquests and explorations of a protagonist. The purpose of the conquest can be to retrieve a person or treasure, but often the main focus is simply the pursuit of the unknown. These films generally take place in exotic locations and play on historical myths. Adventure films incorporate suspenseful puzzles and intricate obstacles that the protagonist must overcome in order to achieve the end goal.

Adventure films are very similar to the action film genre, in that they are designed to provide an action-filled, energetic experience for the film viewer. Rather than the predominant emphasis on violence and fighting that is found in action films, however, the viewer of adventure films can live vicariously through the travels, conquests, explorations, creation of empires, struggles and situations that confront the main characters, actual historical figures or protagonists.

Cyrano de Bergerac (1900) Clement Maurice - Edmond Rostand

Adventure films share many elements with other genres - there are numerous examples of sci-fi, fantasy, and war films with characteristics of this genre. Adventure films, in a broader context, could include boxing movies, motor racing films, and films adapted from literary novels (i.e., King Solomon's Mines (1937 and 1950), The Thief of Bagdad (1924 and 1940), The Three Musketeers (1916, 1921, 1933, 1935, 1948, 1973, and 1993), and The Prisoner of Zenda (1937, 1952)).

The first major form of adventure film was the swashbuckler. Swashbucklers included lavish sets, costumes, and weapons of the past, and were often built upon action scenes of sea battles, castle duels, sword and cutlass fighting, etc., and the romancing of damsels in distress.

The first successful swashbuckler star of the 1920s was the charming, actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who performed most of his own stunts and daring swordplay in a wide range of costume adventures, starring as Zorro, Robin Hood, and the acrobatic D'Artagnan in the film adaptation of Dumas' adventure classic The Three Musketeers (1921). Fairbanks starred in director Fred Niblo's silent The Mark of Zorro (1920), adapted from Johnson McCulley's novel The Curse of Capistrano. He starred in the dual role of Don Diego and the dashing young swordsman Zorro - the hero of the oppressed poor by tyrants ruling in California in the 1830s. This portrayal established Fairbanks as the predominant dueling swashbuckler in the silent era, in a duel against Noah Beery.In the first of four film versions of The Thief of Bagdad (1924), this one directed by Raoul Walsh, Fairbanks played the role of a roguish thief who used a giant genie's magic to outwit Bagdad's evil Caliph, and win the heart of princess Julanne Johnson. His most typical starring role was represented by The Black Pirate (1926), in which he played a shipwrecked mariner who sought revenge against bloodthirsty pirates - the adventure swashbuckler was the first full-length blockbuster color film. The exciting film included a cutlass duel, an underwater swimming raid on the pirate ship, and Fairbanks' most famous stunt - riding down a ship's sail on the point of his knife.

An Australian actor Errol Flynn was the major swashbuckling male star of the 30s and early 40s adventure films in the sound era. His first of many historical, costume adventure films was director Michael Curtiz' Captain Blood (1935) about an Irish surgeon named Dr. Peter Blood who was charged with treason, sold into slavery, and ultimately became a buccaneer in the Caribbean. This was Flynn's first film  with a young and lovely 19 year-old Olivia de Havilland, and the film featured the first original film score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Flynn played a 19th century British army officer stationed in India in the military swashbuckler The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), and he portrayed Sherwood Forest's 12th century legendary outlaw in the three Oscar-winning  The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). The latter was his most popular film and the quintessential adventure-tale swashbuckler about the Robin Hood legend. The Technicolor film was noted for the lengthy swordfight in Nottingham Castle between Flynn and Basil Rathbone, and Flynn's love for leading lady Olivia de Havilland.

Later, Flynn also appeared in Michael Curtiz' swashbuckler The Sea Hawk (1940) as an English privateer  who aided Queen Elizabeth I  with plundering and attacks on the Spanish Armada. The film featured superior monochromatic cinematography by Sol Polito. One of Flynn's last romantic epic swashbuckling appearances was in The Adventures of Don Juan (1949) as the famous 16th century swordsman who fought for Queen Margaret of Spain. He also starred in Against All Flags (1952) with Maureen O'Hara (as a female buccaneer) and Anthony Quinn (as the head of a pirate band), by portraying Brian Hawke - a British naval officer who spied for the English by infiltrating a pirate haven.

Errol Flynn appeared in William Keighley's The Master of Ballantrae (1953) - based on Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, as a former Scottish clan leader who fled England after a failed rebellion and became a pirate ship commander in the Caribbean. And then an aging Flynn appeared in his final swashbuckler - The Warriors (1955) as British Prince Edward in a tale set at the end of the Hundred Years War between England and France.

After Errol Flynn, another swashbuckling hero was Stewart Granger, who starred as an avenging swordsman in director George Sidney's lavish Scaramouche (1952), a 50s swashbuckler set during the French Revolution that featured a six and a half minute sword fight between Mel Ferrer and the hero. Granger also appeared in a remake of The Prisoner of Zenda (1952). There have been only a few female swashbuckler heroines - one was portrayed by Jean Peters in Anne of the Indies (1951).

Early in their careers, Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas were major adventure heroes. Lancaster, a circus acrobat who was able to do his own stunts, starred as Dardo the Arrow (a 12th century Robin Hood-like outlaw) who battled an evil German count in the rousing, comic bookish tale The Flame and the Arrow (1950). A young Burt Lancaster also starred as an 18th century buccaneer captain in one of the best swashbucklers ever made - The Crimson Pirate (1952). Gregory Peck appeared in Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951) as the famous British sea captain (replacing Errol Flynn who was originally cast in the role) and naval hero of the Napoleonic wars.

And Kirk Douglas starred as a Viking with a deformed eye in the rousing action-adventure epic The Vikings (1958), and he also played the title role of Spartacus, the leader of a slave rebellion in Stanley Kubrick's swords-and-sand epic Spartacus (1960), with screenwriting credits for previously-blacklisted Dalton Trumbo.

In the 80s and 90s, the pirate-themed film was revived again and again. There was one major exception to the multiple financial disasters - director Gore Verbinski's updated, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), with Oscar-nominated Johnny Depp as tipsy, vilified scalawag Captain Jack Sparrow.

Water-related or sea-faring adventure films include Walt Disney's production of Jules Verne's adventure 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) - with James Mason as Captain Nemo of the 19th century submarine Nautilus and a spectacular battle with a giant squid, and John Huston's re-telling of Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby Dick (1956) with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab searching for the elusive great white whale on the Pequod. James Cameron's fantasy-adventure, close-encounter thriller The Abyss (1989) told about an underwater team of divers retrieving nuclear warheads. The film adaptation of Tom Clancy's novel The Hunt for Red October (1990) was about a threatening, high-tech Soviet nuclear submarine. And similarly, Crimson Tide (1995), starring Denzel Washington  and Gene Hackman, captured the tense confrontations during an hour-long countdown aboard the nuclear ballistic submarine USS Alabama after it received an interrupted transmission.

Adventure films in outdoor and/or foreign Locales include Ice Station Zebra (1968) that featured a Cold War race toward a downed Russian satellite between a US/British nuclear submarine under a polar ice cap and Soviet paratroopers, the devastating weekend canoeing adventure of four Atlanta businessmen in Deliverance (1972), the climbing adventure K2: The Ultimate High (1992) as two men scale the world's 2nd largest mountain in the world, an exciting climbing and hostage-rescue action film starring Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger (1993), and Meryl Streep leading a family river-rafting trip and criminals through dangerous rapids in The River Wild (1994).

Aviation-related adventure films include: director Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings (1939) with Cary Grant as the head pilot of a broken-down Peruvian air mail service, John Wayne as an ace fighter pilot flying against the Japanese before the US entered the war in the low-budget Flying Tigers (1942), Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St. Louis (1957) with James Stewart as the famous solo flyer Charles Lindbergh, Robert Aldrich's survival-adventure drama The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) about a North African desert plane crash with a plane full of stars, and Top Gun (1986) with Tom Cruise as one of the young competitive Navy fighter pilots in the elite Fighter Weapons School. The suspenseful Apollo 13 (1995) chronicled NASA's crisis-filled lunar mission in 1970.