Cinema of Swords

Cinema of Swords is a history, guide, and love letter to over four hundred movies and television shows featuring swashbucklers: knights, pirates, samurai, Vikings, gladiators, outlaw heroes like Zorro and Robin Hood, and anyone else who lives by the blade and solves their problems with the point of a sword.

Though swordplay thrives as a mainstay of current pop culture—whether Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings or Star Wars—swashbuckling was if anything even more ubiquitous during Hollywood’s classic period, from its foundations in the Silent Era up through the savage bursts of fantasy films in the ‘80s. With this huge cinematic backlist of classics now available online and on-demand, Cinema of Swords traces the roots and branches of this unruly genre, highlighting classics of the form and pointing fans toward thrilling new gems they never knew existed. With wry summaries and criticism from swordplay expert Lawrence Ellsworth, this comprehensive guidebook is perfect as a reference work or as a dazzling Hollywood history to be read end-to-end.

Lawrence Ellsworth is a writer, editor, and translator of historical fiction and an acknowledged expert on the history of swashbuckling in literature and film. In addition to his new translations of Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers cycle—which have brought contemporary English editions of these classics into print for the first time in over a century—he is the editor of The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure and author of historical adventure pieces for The Huffington Post and Literary Hub.