1964 - THE BLACK TULIP, entertaining update of a traditional swashbucker

French star Alain Delon does the Errol Flynn swashbuckler thing in this entertaining throwback to one of Flynn's 1930's or 1940's sword fighting films.  Delon's in a dual role as Guillaume de Saint Preux, The Black Tulip sort of a Robin Hood type of role.  Delon also plays his look alike brother brother Julien de Saint Preux who has to step into the role of The Black Tulip after Guillaume is injured.

This film is set just before the French Revolution and it's a handsome production filmed in 70mm by Henri Decaë who had an extensive list of credits working for directors Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Claude Charbol, Jean Pierre Melville, Roger Vadim, Robert Wise and Wim Wenders, a very impressive resume.

 

The film also stars Italian actor Virna Lisi an attractive woman who as it turns out could act.  Also showing up in this film is perennial ham actor Akim Tamiroff who as usual just plays the same character from film to film.  Tamiroff was a favorite actor of Orson Welles and showed up in a couple of his films.

 

The director Christin-Jaque keeps the film moving with some very entertaining action scenes and the whole film has a very fast moving light touch to it.  It takes a lot of skill to pull off this kind of a fun film.

The film was written by Henri Jeanson and Christian-Jaque, the running time is 110 minutes.