Most Realistic Sword-Fights.

The climactic fight between Tim Roth and Liam Neeson at the end of ROB ROY is a nice mix of brutal AND dazzling.

All the sword fights in The Twilight Samurai. There arent that many, and they're very brief, but I take it that sword fights in real life are over very quickly also. Hiroyuki Sanada is amazing as usual.

I don't know about realistic, but I've always loved the wonderfully acrobatic sword fights in the Curtiz/Keighley The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Seconded on the Neeson/Roth duel in Rob Roy.

It's not a very long fight, but I'd like to add the Aragorn vs. Lurtz battle at the end of FoTR. It owes a lot of it's emotional payoff to Sean Bean's pincushion impression granted, but I have never seen a theater erupt like when he took that orc's head off.

Inigo Montoya v. Six-Fingered Man. Decent swordfights in the Princess Bride despite the fact that it's a comedy. Again, it's the climax of this duel that really sells it.

I can't remember the title, but a sword-freak friend of mine showed me a japanese samurai film where the climactic sword battle ended with one guy getting his neck sliced. He falls to his knees and starts to monologue about how he always wanted to make a perfect cut, such that the blood rushing from the wound made the sound of wind through the branches of a bamboo tree... blah blah blah. This goes on for like 15 minutes, and keep in mind the guy is just absolutely geysering that wierd orangey-red cinema blood they use in japanese films the whole time. By the end of it me and my friend were screaming "DIE ALREADY!" at the screen and laughing our asses off.

,,,

Thirded. My favourite ever. Tim Roth gives a masterclass in how LUDICROUS ham acting isn't always a bad thing. Love that character.


I prefer the Man In Black Vs Indigo but they're both wonderful.

Great Action Scene but silly from a realistic point of view. Using rapier moves with a Broadsword: Give me a break. And we are discussing realism.
The sword fight in "Die Another Day" is one of the few good things about that film but it is so over the top as to be ridiculous.Great Scene but not very realistic.
The final combat in "Robin and Marion" between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw is pretty accurate.
And the final duel in "Rob Roy " is great. It actually shows both combantants stopping to catch their breath.
And it is aslo a duel of techniques since Roth is using a rapier, a sword designed to be used as a thrusting weapon, and Neeson is using a Claymore,the classic sword designed to be used as a hack and slash weapon.

Ridley Scott did a very good job from a realism viewpoint in "The Duellists".
One fun bit about the Indigo.Wesley duel in "Princess Bride" is that the names they through around in the dialogue during the duel are actually famous fencing master through history.
I have been fencing since High School (so has my wife), and have done mock medieval combat in the SCA for a number of years, so I tend to view swordplay on screen with a critical eye.

Poor, poor, pitiful you. That's a classic fight from the Lone Wolf and Cub series of Chambara films. Six films in a series that all feature quick and deadly sword fights. You were laughing at a very emotional scene between the lone wolf Ogami Itto and the last defeated foe known as on of the Three Masters fo Death, the greatest fighters of their time. It was a last contemplative look from the final defeated Master to his victor, Ogami. That particular film is Baby Cart at the River Styx, one of the best entries in the series.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0068816/

The flat-out brawling in Richard Lester's "Three Musketeers" films strikes me as particularly realistic-- at least when they're not referencing the Keystone Kops. If you haven't seen these films, check 'em out-- that's not as incongruous as it sounds.

I also like Charlton Heston's trial-by-combat in "El Cid", especially the part where he gets unhorsed and uses his saddle as an improvised shield.

I prefer the fight in Seven Samurai between the dude who kind of looks like a Native American--it has been a while since I saw the film and my mind can only contain so many Japanese names--and another potnetial recruit of Kambei Shimada's. They're fighting with bamboo sticks and, at first, it looks like they give each other a fatal strike at the exact same time. The NA-looking dude basically tells the other guy that he owned him and, obviously, this pisses him off ... to the point that he wants to do a rematch with actual swords. The other guy gets into this badass stance and eveybody winces because they know the challenger is going to get it bad. It's a quick but very graceful fight.

What I liked best about the climactic battle between Liam Neeson and Tim Roth was the sheer exhaustion you saw in MacGregor by the end. It really dramatized the difference between fighting with a saber and a heavy Claymore.

I may get shot down for this, but I also liked the ninja raid sequence in The Last Samurai. It wasn't over the top, and you got to see ninja weapons like the shuriken used in a realistic manner. Of course Hiroyuki Sanada proved once again how cool he is with a sword. Speaking of Sanada, my friends and I all thought it was cool how his character in The Last Samurai is almost like a vague extension of his character in Tasogare Seibei (Twilight Samurai). If you recall, his daughter in Twilight Samurai says in the closing voiceover that her father was eventually killed in battle during the Meiji Restoration, the same period as The Last Samurai.

Second the love for Lester's "The Three Musketeers".

Okay...the fighting isn't all *that* realistic. But it's pretty kick-ass and it's a fun flick. And Charlton Heston as Pope Richilieu is just the bomb.

If memory serves, Richilieu was a cardinal. If he had been Pope there wouldn't have been much of an incentive to scheme for control of France since the papacy had its hand in all of the cookie jars in Europe. Complete control over one country would add more responsibilities than power and wouldn't have been worth the effort.

While the over-all movie was pretty wild, the sparring scene in Kitano's Zatoichi seemed pretty realistic, I thought. The movie as a whole stuck pretty closely to lightning fast, one or two-cut fights, and the sparring scene between the badass and the various samurais looked like it was using some real samurai swordfighting tactics. I don't know anything about that stuff, really, but it looked authentic.

Both the training sequence and the actual duel in Hidden Blade are very well done, with realism as well as excitement (I would LOVE to have seen a similar training scene in Star Wars).

And although I'm not an expert, I'm pretty sure that any swordfight where the protaginists continuously whack their swords together (such as in LOTR) is NOT realistic. The swords would break, and the guys wielding them would have very sore hands and arms from the impact. Thats why I like samurai duels - its all about technique, outsmarting the opponent rather than outmuscling them. Like the afore-mentioned duel in Seven Samurai, which is an undeniable classic.

Scaramouche takes a little patience to get into, but there's some very good training and practice on display in the middle section. And damn Janet Leigh was a hottie in the day.

I second - or whatever number we're on - Hammerhead's mentions of The Three (and The Four) Musketeers and Scaramouche. The latter's fights look like ballet, most likely since Mel Farrar couldn't fence and learned the fights like a dance. The fights (three if memory serves) between D'Artagnan and Rochefort are particularly outstanding in the Musketeer pictures. My personal favorite is the night-time fight in the first film, but my husband, a former fencer, says the final fight in the second film is superior to the others.

Are they realistic though? I guess if your husbands a fencer he would know, but I've always found those sort of fights airy-fairy (sorry). My dads always going on about Scaramouche though, so I guess I'll watch it one day!

Do you know of a straight-to-video pic called By the Sword ? I haven't seen it but it's set in the world of competitive fencing. F. Murray Abraham and Mia Sara are in it. I always wondered if it was any good.

The most realistic sword fights are from the Zatiochi Series. Quick deadly and usually done within 30 seconds.

Now broadsword, claymore, etc fighting is a lot different and I don't really have an idea of what a good example of that style of sword fighting would be on screen.

It's almost not a fight at all (which is the point), but the final scene of Kurosawa's Sanjuro is unforgettable.

Someone mentioned Zorro, but not which version. Tyrone Power vs. Basil Rathbone in The Mark of Zorro is a classic, and unique in the way it plays out in a very constricted space.

Straying from the subject of realism here, but I love the duel between Tony Curtis and Ross Martin in The Great Race . There's a beat midway through where they agree they're both too good to fight with foils and they switch to heavy sabers, which give off a distinctive ringing sound that gives me chills.

Well, I've never seen a fight to the death, and I don't suppose my husband has either (and I should clarify that he hasn't fenced in years), so I couldn't say for certain. I think Scaramouche is too choreographed to be realistic except perhaps the early fights when the hero doesn't even know how to hold a sword. The Three Musketeers, however, seems as realistic as anything I've seen.

The Sacaramouche scene is totally unrealistic but as pure action one of the best screen duels ever done.
"By The Sword" is really well done. The final duel is not that realistic but most of the film is very accurate about fencing. The training methods shown are the standard ones that both my wife and I were trained on when we learned fencing before we met.
BTW Bob Anderson, the great guru of movie fencing....he worked on Sacramouche and has just retired after choreographing the individual combat in "Lord Of the Rings" and "Die Another Day" states that Actresses who have taken dance find that a real advantage in learning how to fence because the footwork is very similair. BTW for those of you who have never fenced the name of the game is footwork. It's not apparent in the movies but footwork makes or breaks a fencer.

The one moment I like in Phantom Menace is when Liam Neeson is advancing on Ray Park in the red corridor. I'm no expert, but his footwork has a Samurai quality to it.