To compete with the big budget swashbucklers Warner Bros. (The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938), 20th Century-Fox (The Mark of Zorro, 1940), and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (The Three Musketeers, 1948), Universal and Columbia exploited the fact that the principal production value common to those lavish period pieces was a good looking leading man, stripped to the waist, and handling a sword with charm and aplomb. As Universal had Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson, and Jeff Chandler, so Columbia put swords in the hands of Cornel Wilde, Larry Parks, and Wilfred Parker - each an heir, early on in their careers, to Errol Flynn. Early publicity notices for The Fighting Guardsman (1946) had Parks in the running for the principal role of a French aristocrat leading a band of peasant partisans in Robin Hood-style revolt against King Louis XVI but when the film went before the cameras in December 1944 it was Parker as Baron Francois de St. Hermaine, aka Roland the Bandit. A former tennis pro, who had spent a decade in bit parts at Warners, Parker had just returned from military service in World War II; the former tennis pro's tenure as a leading man at Columbia would last just a few years before he was back among the supporting players, billed well below stars James Stewart, Glenn Ford, John Payne, and Howard Keel. Based on an obscure novel by Alexandre Dumas pere, The Fighting Guardsman provided work for a legion of Hollywood character actors, among them George Macready (as the dastardly Gaston de Montrevel), John Loder, Lloyd Corrigan Ian Wolfe, and Shelley Winters, in one of her earliest film roles.

By Richard Harland Smith