There are two sorts of people, those who believe that Humphrey Bogart says "Play it again, Sam" in "Casablanca", and those who realise that he never uses those exact words in the film. They are, however, not so very different to what he actually does say, but "The Black Shield of Falworth" has become the centre of an even more curious misconception. There is a widespread belief that in it Tony Curtis utters the line "Yonda lies da castle of my fodda", but in fact he never says these words or anything like them, and the castle of his father never features in the film.
I think that this misconception has arisen because many critics, mostly British, feel that there is something inappropriate in Hollywood making films about "our" history, and something particularly inappropriate about casting an American actor, especially a Hungarian-American New Yorker with a working-class accent, as a fifteenth-century English nobleman. Now it is certainly true that people in fifteenth-century England did not speak with twentieth-century American accents. On the other hand, they did not speak with twentieth-century British accents either. The only linguistically accurate way of making a film like this one would be to translate all the dialogue into Chaucerian English and to coach the actors in the correct way to pronounce it, a process which would render the film largely incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with Middle English. Moreover, although Curtis's character Myles Falworth is an aristocrat by birth, he has been brought up among the peasantry and would have spoken a rustic working-class dialect, even more incomprehensible to modern ears than the courtly, literary language of the middle-class Londoner Chaucer.
When the film begins, Myles is to all intents and purposes a young peasant living on a farm in with his adoptive father Diccon Bowman and his sister Meg. One day he intervenes to prevent Meg from being molested by a band of noblemen. Realising that Myles has put his life in danger by his rash intervention, Diccon sends Myles and Meg to live at the castle of the Earl of Mackworth, where Myles is trained as a man-at-arms. The Earl is a close friend of the heir to the throne, the future Henry V, and Myles finds himself caught up in a treasonable political intrigue. Myles needs to foil this plot and to discover the truth about his real father, a mystery to which the "black shield" of the title may provide a clue.
For all the controversy about Curtis's accent, this is actually a pretty good film. The handsome, athletic Curtis makes a dashing action hero in the tradition of Errol Flynn and Burt Lancaster, and other good contributions come from David Farrar as his antagonist, the villainous Earl of Alban, and Janet Leigh as his love-interest, Mackworth's daughter Lady Anne. (This was the second of five films which Curtis and Leigh, then husband and wife, made together). One performance which particularly stands out is that of Torin Thatcher as the one-eyed Sir James, the mediaeval equivalent of a strict-but-fair sergeant major, who tutors Myles in the arts of war.
The film is visually attractive, being shot in a vivid Technicolor appropriate to the era in which it is set. The Middle Ages were a period which loved bright colours and display; pre-Reformation churches, for example, were often brilliantly- even by modern standards gaudily- painted. Another attractive feature is Hans Salter's stirring musical score. Although the screenplay was adapted from a late Victorian novel, Howard Pyle's "Men of Iron", it has something of the feel of a mediaeval romance, and not only in its straightforward good-versus-evil morality. Several of the Arthurian legends, such as the Tale of Sir Gareth, tell of an obscure young man who turns out to be not only of noble blood but also a knight of great prowess. There may be a couple of factual errors, but one feels that in its spirit "The Black Shield of Falworth" is true to its period. 7/10
A goof. We are told that Myles's father was unjustly condemned by King Henry "fifteen years ago"; Henry IV, in fact, reigned for less than fourteen years. (September 1399 to March 1413). Some may claim as a goof the fact that the design of the Falworth family coat-of-arms, a red griffin on a black shield, violates the heraldic Rule of Tincture, which states that only the "metals" gold and silver may appear against a background of a "colour" such as black or red. This may, however, not be a goof as there are certain coats-of-arms, albeit only a small proportion of the total number, which do not comply with the Rule.
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