Sunken Galleon

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SWASHBUCKLER

Directed by JAMES GOLDSTONE

Screenplay by JEFFERY BLOOM

The swashbuckler is essentially a lyric form. The pleasure lies in watching lithe and graceful men defeat villains whom wickedness has rendered ineluctably clumsy. What was fun about an Errol Flynn or a Douglas Fairbanks Sr. movie was not their inevitable triumph but the innumerable ways they found to demonstrate the true nature of their foes by making them trip over their own outsized feet.

Fighting Spirit. This new film, which dares to appropriate the generic word for its title, makes a bad miscalculation. It does not -- be grateful for small favors -- attempt to parody the ancient conventions of the pirate picture, but it does try to update them for modern audiences, which are supposed to have a taste for greater "realism" than those of 30 or 40 years ago.

Thus the tin-pot tyrant of the Carib bean island the buccaneers desire to free is shown to be a homosexual with decided S-M leanings. But psychopathology runs against the grain of a free, open form that numbers among its prime attractions the promise of not bothering to delve into such dark and irrelevant mat ters. Genevieve Bujold, as the high-spirited, high-born maiden with whom Rob ert Shaw, as the pirate leader, is naturally expected to carry on a fighting romance, is required to get into a duel with him. Presumably, that is something the athletic and liberated modern wom an can identify with, but it is a silly business. Olivia de Havilland could prove her fighting spirit with a word or a glance and not suffer even the tiniest rip in her bodice. Poor Bujold, on the other hand, must come close to being stripped to the waist by Shaw's rapier -- a dishonorable dueling tactic that his gallant screen forebears would never have indulged in.

Worse than all this is the movie's at tempt to make the audience accept such heavy, not to say klutzy, actors as Shaw and James Earl Jones as light-leaping, far-darting heroes. They work earnestly at trying to dance on air, but the strain shows. All that can be said is that their clumsiness matches that of the film's writing and direction. Swashbuckler sinks under its own weight like an over loaded galleon.

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