I cavalieri del diavolo

With a title like "The Devil's Cavaliers", you'd THINK the film would be exciting. Maybe not good--but exciting. Well, you'd be wrong as the film is about as exciting as watching your grandma knit! And, to top it off, it's very poorly dubbed and horribly faded. What more could you ask for in a film?! As far as the plot goes, it's about the rich nobles abusing their power and well, after that the film lost my attention! The bottom line is that the dubbing sounded awful and the voices coming out of the mostly Italian actors sounded silly--and rather cartoony. But, to make it much worse, the dialog was just god-awful. With lines like "They were set upon by brigands!", it's no wonder I eventually turned the thing off and stopped wasting my time.

Now I am not saying it's a bad film if you can find it in its original language and with a print that isn't so faded. Then, it might only be a bit dull. But as is, there just isn't much to recommend this snoozer.

The dashing Captain Richard Stiller falls in love with Countless Louise – but the pair find themselves up against a group of roguish plotters and swordsmen who'll do anything to destroy the union.

This is a lacklustre and frankly boring entry in the run of swashbucklers that came out in Italy around 1960 – they were never as big or popular as the peplum films that ran alongside them (which is perhaps why THE DEVIL's CAVALIERS is virtually forgotten today) and they were inspired by the likes of Zorro and the Three Musketeers.

I have to say that the swashbuckler genre isn't one of my favourites – I enjoy classics like THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD of course, but the rest of the B-grade flicks are all too much of a kind for me to like. That's exactly the problem I had with this movie, too, and there's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary or indeed interesting enough to recommend..

Frank Latimore stars in this over-scripted, bloated, silly and tedious terrestrial swashbuckler. Latimore's Captain Richard Stiller is one of three characters in the film endowed with a personality, but his amazingly monotone delivery and remarkably subtle facial expressions help the camera-crew to beat back any sort of character development. The cinematography – though helped by beautiful and very rich period sets and costuming – is generally awful. The cameras give us a plethora of landscape, set and context shots and virtually no close-ups or dyads. Even when Stiller and the love of his life - the lovely Louise (Emma Danieli) - are speaking hopefully of their possible future, they are positioned in the middle of a shot with room for at least five more people.

Set in France – possibly late Renaissance – The Devil's Cavaliers is the story of Captain Richard Stiller, a war weary man who may be a rogue, a rake, or an honorable hero (even at the end of the story, his personality is still a bit ambiguous), his seemingly doomed love affair with Countess Louise (though it is not entirely clear whether this is a matter of class, ethnic/national prejudice or simply bad attitudes), and his numerous sword-fights. He also has a number of amusing cronies whose main task seems to be comic relief (which will be greatly appreciated by confused and bored viewers), and there are some intrigues and subplots among his opponents (though the elaborate nature of these is never fully justified by the intended ends, and these plot devices end up looking remarkably silly).

Again, the sets and costumes are great. However, the directing, cinematography and the acting detract considerably from the experience. The script attempts to pack too much dialog into every scene, and the actors are forced to speed-read at times, which is especially problematic for the monotone and emotion-resistant Latimore. Still, some of the sword-fighting scenes are entertaining (the fight choreography is pretty good) and the sets alone may be worth the effort for some.

Recommended only for sword fight enthusiasts and southern European castle obsessives.

Everyone is nicely dressed--but the characters wearing them are curiously empty. I gave up trying to tell some of the bad guys apart. It's very hard to tell why people are in a particular place together--are they all just crashing at Louise's castle, or is she crashing at theirs?

I could not decide what time period this story was supposed to be part of. They spoke of heretics, which places it in the middle ages during the time of the Cathars (early 1200s) but the swords are clearly not broadswords and the costumes are from a later period. Perhaps no one thought anyone would notice.

The characters are incredibly bland. The supposed hero is in a lot of scenes, but after watching the whole moving, I have no idea what he was about. The heroine mostly seems breathless.

The castles are nice, but the real allure is the English dialogue. I wish I had taken notes. Much of it is wildly stilted, as if translated literally by someone who was not an English speaker, and the effect is funny to the point of being distracting. It is stuffed full of howlers akin to "Tell me the meaning of the thing you have done." Like many Italian films of the period, dialogue and sound effects were dubbed in later. The sound of faux hoofbeats is particularly unconvincing here.