Scaramouche (1952) keeps popping up on cable channels. I mean to see it again. It’s the first movie I liked enough to see twice. A friend and I, both 11, went to see another movie at the Pix Theater in White Plains, New York, and the other movie wasn’t playing; Scaramouche was. “I’ve seen it,” I said. The ticket lady said she’d let us in for free, because of the mistaken newspaper ad, which made my choice easy.Scaramouche is lots of fun and sword fighting. I get it mixed up with King Solomon’s Mines (1950), another movie starring Stewart Granger. There’s a scene in one of the pictures where the hero, the girl, and you are in an underground river in a cave, and you have to swim under the rock roof, not knowing how far the roof runs, not knowing if it lets you come up for air before you drown. But you have to chance it because there’s death coming up behind you. When I read about Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, I knew what he meant, only for me it was a dive.
I think of the girl as Rhonda Fleming, who turns out not to be in either movie. I see her arching her head back to let fall her cascade of fiery hair, which is brilliantly clean and untangled despite her having been underwater, in the jungle, and on horseback riding through the woods. Needless to say, she is less a protagonist in the action than the prize the hero takes along to enjoy when the battle’s won.
Stewart Granger, I see now, I’ve undersold. I had thought that, like all suburban boys of the 1950s, I took my selves from rebellious Marlon Brando and James Dean. But no. There’s a lot in me of the Henry Fonda of Twelve Angry Men (1957) and Gregory Peck of To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962)—the quiet fellow in glasses who can be counted on to do his duty. But I realize I was on my way to becoming that fellow before either of those movies, thanks to unflappable Stewart Granger, who, I just now found out, hated playing the upright hero and was married for a decade (1950-60) to the sexiest and most infuriating girl in all cinema, Jean Simmons of Great Expectations (1946). “I don’t know which I chose worse,” Granger was to remark late in life, “my roles or my wives.” Say it ain’t so, Stew; your roles were ideal.
