Zoro the gay blade

Zorro, The Gay Blade is a American swashbuckling comedy film from 20th Century Fox, produced by C.O. Erickson and George Hamilton, directed by Peter Medak, that stars Hamilton, Lauren Hutton, Ron Leibman, and Brenda Vaccaro.

zorro, the gay blade review

Zorro, the legendary swordsman, has passed on his weapon and his sense of duty to his noble son, Diego, a dashing swashbuckler like his father. But after an injury sidelines Diego, he is forced to hand the mask over to his twin, Ramon. When the new Spanish Governor begins to grind the peasants under his heel, wealthy landowner Don Diego Vega follows in his late father's footsteps and becomes Zorro, the masked man in black with a sword who rights wrongs and becomes a folk hero to the people of Mexico.

A funnier comedy might have been made out of a more genuinely satirical examination of the Zorro character. Instead, this one provides Zorro with a gay brother who’s a screamingly limp-wristed stereotype, and then goes for jokes that are disappointingly predictable. Florinda climbs up a ladder to Diego's bedroom and wants him to make love to her.

Don Esteban arrives, and Diego makes Florinda hide in the casket that contained his Zorro disguise. It is hard to reconstruct these fragments from the memories of childhood but as nearly as I can remember, the Zorro craze came after the Davy Crockett craze and before Elvis. Kids made Z marks everywhere — on walls, fences, blackboards, and with ballpoints on the shirts of the kids sitting in front of them — and my personal notion is that Datsun sells half of their Z-cars to guys harboring sublimated Zorro fantasies.

I remember a lot about Zorro. I even remember that he was once played by Clayton Moore, who got to keep wearing his Lone Ranger mask. But I cannot remember if the Zorro movies were ever supposed to be funny.

I assume that the Zorros, played by Douglas Fairbanks, Tyrone Power, and John Carroll, were more or less serious, within the broad outlines of the adventure genre. Were we laughing at him, or with him? The brother was originally a Vega, too, but after enlisting in the British Navy he changed his name to Bunny Wigglesworth. This movie is, of course, intended as a comedy, and it has some funny moments. We could laugh at the previous movie Zorros because they were so serious about their ridiculous codes and vows and pledges of loyalty and chivalric passions.

They were funny as long as they played it straight. By playing every scene for laughs, Hamilton has nothing to play against. Hamilton demonstrated in that movie, and demonstrates again in this one, that he is a gifted comic actor. But … should Zorro be funny because of his puffed-up self-importance, or because his role in life is inescapably ridiculous any way you look at it?

A funnier comedy might have been made out of a more genuinely satirical examination of the Zorro character. It also gives him a leading lady Lauren Hutton who has all she can do to play her role at all, much less play it satirically. And it never provides a comprehensive story to hold the jokes together. Too bad. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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