The King's Thief (1955)

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Glorious CinemaScope. Some BIG BIG names, in their early days. Roger Moore, waaaay before he was James Bond. Ann Blyth. George Sanders... who could be hit or miss in his movies. David Niven in another prim and proper English role. Of course, Niven had ALSO played Bond in Casino Royale! Period piece from England, on Charles II, who actually lived from 1630 to 1685. History says he died of kidney illness, which may or may not have been brought on by poison. In our story, Dermott is played by Edmund Purdom; fun bio on IMDb.... Purdom has the distinction of being the only actor to have his hand-prints removed from the sidewalk at G's Chinese Theater. Swordfights. Chases on horseback. Brampton (Niven) is the evil dude, having his opponents knocked off with false accusations. The usual palace adventures. Its okay. Fun to see some of those big names from back in the day, but the acting is all pretty stilted, as if they are reading off cue cards. Directed by Robert Leonard... one of his last films.

Even lavish sets and costumes and a background score by Miklos Rozsa can't save THE KING'S THIEF from the boredom of a banal script. Lots of flashing swordplay takes place, but none of it has enough sizzle to make up for a tiresome story about a scoundrel (David Niven) who is keeping his thievery a secret from Charles II (George Sanders).The best sequence involves an adventurous escape from heavy chains in a prison dungeon and a final encounter in a tower holding fabulous jewels whereby our hero ultimately wins the approval of Charles II.David Niven does well enough as the charming thief, handsome Edmund Purdom is nimble and rugged enough as a swashbuckling highwayman, and Ann Blyth is pretty in her costume finery. But none of them have more than cardboard characters to work with and the end result is a routine period adventure wasting a talented cast.Even Rosza's score is less memorable than most of his work for this kind of swashbuckler.

Filmdoms most notorious cad, George Sanders, makes a second film appearance as King Charles II of Great Britain, the first being in Forever Amber. Charles II has come down in history as a pleasure driven hedonist, he's not called the Merry Monarch for nothing. Hedonist he was, but that was also so much image management as well. He had a good head on his shoulders, he survived the defeat of his father and a decade of exile to return as King in 1660. The man that has come down to us in history is hardly likely to have been taken in the Duke of Brampton as played by David Niven.But that's what this film asks us to believe. We're given no real reason why Charles has placed such confidence in the fictional Duke, but he has. So Niven's got himself a real nice racket going, he denounces folks as traitors and Charles believes him and executes them. And their property goes to him.In fact Niven's got himself as little black book with a Restoration Dun&Bradstreet rating on all the richest and loyalest of Charles's subjects. The book unfortunately falls into the hands of highwayman Edmond Purdom. Then Purdom makes an alliance of more than one dimension with the daughter of one of the late nobility, Niven's had done in, Ann Blyth.Niven looks very uncomfortable in the part of villain one of the few, maybe the only one he ever did. Purdom and Blyth are reunited from the film they did the year before, The Student Prince, which was far better than this. Sanders saunters his way through Charles II again. If he had been this dumb, the Popish Plot which occurred later on in his regime would have knocked him off the throne.One of the dumber swashbuckler films I've ever seen. Only for the quality of the players which includes Roger Moore as one of Purdom's gang does it get as high a rating as it does.

I watched The King's Thief for one reason only, and that was that I am a bit of a Roger Moore fan. Alas, Roger isn't in the film very much, though what little he does he does well enough. However, I still enjoyed it as an easy-on-the-brain swashbuckler, the type of thing that Errol Flynn might have starred in twenty years earlier.The plot is brisk and simple. It involves a plot to overthrow the king of England, recorded in a notebook which falls into the hands of a woodland bandit. The bandit is a bad man, but when he realises what is going on, he knows that he must do something to protect the monarch. In this way, the villain actually becomes the good guy. After a lot of swordplay and treachery, the bandit and his merry men save the king and catch the deceivers.There's not much to remember about the film once it's over. There's one particularly suspenseful escape sequence, in which two bandits get out of Newgate prison, but besides that it kind of floats out of your head as quickly as it floated in. All the same, this is fun. It is the kind of movie your kids could watch without being exposed to blood and gore, sex and swearing. Yet at the same time it deals with action, murder, treachery and brigandry. I can't honestly recommend the film as a great viewing experience (it certainly isn't some kind of forgotten classic, so don't think it is), but if you want to pass an hour and a half on a Saturday afternoon, you could do a lot worse.