Rupert of Hentzau


Right now I’m watching the 1937 version of The Prisoner of Zenda, one of the greatest adventure films of all time. The picture really has everything. An incredibly dashing hero played by Ronald Coleman at his very peak. A great plot (“Fate doesn’t always make the right men kings”). Two of the screen’s great beauties, Madeleine Carroll and Mary Astor. Very different from the horse-faced, surgically altered clothes hangers that pass for leading ladies in today’s films. One of the screen’s great villains, Raymond Massey. Technicolor fans may wonder why the picture wasn’t made in Technicolor? It was: the 1952 version with Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr, the actress for whom Technicolor must have been invented, is a shot-for-shot remake.

And perhaps the finest performance ever given by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as the the charming, roguish villain, Rupert of Hentzau. Here’s a snippet of his dialogue:

Rupert of Hentzau: I see you want to let the drawbridge down. I just killed a man for that.
Rudolph Rassendyll: An unarmed man, of course.
Rupert of Hentzau: Of course!

The swordfight between Rassendyll and Hentzau in which those lines occur is not only such a beautifully choreographed duel that it’s been imitated again and again but it’s just chock full of wisecracks like those above by a couple of masters.

Why, oh why, wasn’t this cast and, particularly, Fairbanks, cast in a film version of the sequel that the author of the book, Anthony Hope, wrote for it?

3 comments… add one
  • sam Link

    It’s amazing how many screen adaptations of that book there were. Check out the Wiki article on it. My two favorite sendups of the story are the one that takes place in The Great Race (1965) (Best line in the movie: The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) escapes from a prison cell aided by Peter Falk, who is dressed as a monk. Prof. Fate (Jack Lemmon), who is impersonating the prince is told, “Leslie escaped from the prison with a small friar”.
    Lemmon: “Leslie escaped with a chicken?!!!”) and George MacDonald Fraser’s Royal Flash, with the inimitable Flashy doing his turn as the fake prince.

  • That’s true of all of the really great stories, sam. The story of the birth of Moses is the story of the birth of Sargon the Great and pre-dates any conceivable birth of Moses by at least a thousand years. The story of Jesus (which itself echoes the story of David) has hundreds of literary and film derivates. The Lord of the Rings and Pay It Forward are two recent examples.

    Pretty Woman (as well as My Fair Lady) is Pygmalion. Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella are used over and over again.

    Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the list goes on and on.

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