[arrows swish]
Fire arrows, as a rule, get way overused in cinema.
These are a little more interesting, though.
Hi, I'm Toby Capwell.
I'm curator of arms and armor
at The Wallace Collection in Central London.
Since I was a kid, I've been riding horses
and fighting in armor.
I've taken part in competitions,
armored combat, all over the world.
Today, we're going to be looking
at the treatment of medieval arms and armor in cinema.
Éomer: What business does an elf, a man,
and a dwarf have in the Riddermark?
Speak quickly!
Toby: Yeah, this is a great entrance of a character.
You know, Tolkien imagined the Rohirrim as Anglo-Saxons
who fought like knights on horseback.
Because the Anglo-Saxons didn't.
They rode horses, but they got off to fight.
They didn't fight on their horses.
The design of the helmet is derived
from early medieval examples.
He really should have his chin strap done up.
The helmet is riding a bit too high on his head.
The brow of the helmet,
the horizontal edge there,
should be right down on his eyebrows
to really protect the front of the skull.
You want to bring that down as far as it can go,
and it can go right down onto your eyebrows.
So, I'll stick this on. All right.
This is one of my own, made for me.
[helmet clatters]
OK?
Now, you see, that brow is right down on my eyes,
and it's sticking out beyond my skull, right?
So a weapon comes in, it can't get to me.
The skull, it might get there, but that's still safe.
Gimli: Give me your name, horse-master.
Toby: You know, things were often more highly decorated,
even for practical fighting,
than modern people often imagine.
They're going for armor that looks kind of architectural.
Like, the dwarves build caves,
and they work with rock,
and that's under mountains and stuff.
So they're looking for a kind of blocky aesthetic.
It's starting to look a bit too much
like polyurethane here, to me.
There's something about metal that --
it has a weight, it has a rigidity
that rubber and plastic and polyurethane don't have.
I gotta dock them a couple of points here
for the fit and the chin strap,
but it's still gotta be, like, an eight out of 10.
What's he doing?
I think his son was already a knight at this point.
I don't know why he feels the need to knight him again.
This is a total mishmash
of pretty good and pretty not so good.
The mail that you're seeing in close-up here is real mail,
and you can actually even see the rivets
that are closing each of the links.
It's not fitting him well,
and it's not tailored to him.
It's something that's been just
hoicked out of a van and stuck on the actor.
A lot of film mail
is just, like, plastic links
butted together, sprayed silver.
For a lot of uses it's fine,
but they don't have the rivets.
Real mail is, you know, iron links riveted closed.
I appreciate the fact that he's got a lining under there.
He's got padded textile under the mail,
which you have to have, otherwise it is going
to do precisely nothing for you.
A lot of exposed throats there.
And they've stuck random articulated shoulder plates
over the mail shirt.
This is Robert the Bruce in the early 14th century.
They were starting to introduce more hard armor.
They're a long way from full plate armor at this period.
They're a significant way away, really,
from articulated constructions like that,
that look a bit like the tail of a lobster or whatever.
It's a later thing.
And the shoulders were less of a priority in this period.
If you're gonna put plates on a guy, in this period,
it should be on the elbows and the knees.
And here you can see his mail is a little off-center,
is bagging around his throat.
Just is bad.
The key thing about a mail hood
is that it has a piece called a ventail,
which comes up and ties up to the chin.
And it's sculpted to protect the whole throat.
You know, this is armor that's doing nothing,
because I can stab him straight through his windpipe.
This film is actively engaging with real heraldry.
Heraldry is the system of colors and shapes
put onto shields as a form of visual identification.
'Cause when all these guys are in armor,
it's hard to tell who's who.
Heraldry was the answer.
And it works very well.
They got things wrong
that they didn't have to get wrong,
but they still did a fair amount that's right.
Seven out of 10.
[arrow hits] [both gasp]
What?
Nothing.
Toby: I like this little scene because
it shows that getting shot with arrows
isn't immediately fatal.
And Gilles de Rais here, Joan's companion --
who was, incidentally, a serial killer in real life,
he was a pretty despicable child murderer --
anyway, he knows that he can take a hit.
She's not wearing armor in this scene. He is.
Shot for shot, a longbow arrow
has very little chance of hurting a man inside.
You need the kind of mass volume
that Henry V organized in his armies
to put so many arrows downrange
that somebody's gonna get hurt no matter what.
Charles: I asked for a grandiose coronation,
and this is what you give this?
Toby: He wouldn't do that, almost certainly.
He'd wear his coronation robes,
and all of his knights certainly wouldn't
wear armor to a coronation.
Certainly not rusty, banged-up stuff like that.
Most of this is aluminum.
This armor was made by Terry English,
who's one of the most famous modern armorers
working in cinema.
He's made armor for lots of things.
He made Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze armor
for the Batman movie,
he's made space marines armor for "Aliens,"
and he's done a fair amount of historical stuff.
The king here is putting on gold armor.
It's gold colored.
And this is actually good.
This doesn't look like gold armor.
But fully gilded armor, where you have steel armor,
and then it's copper-plated
and then it's fire-gilded,
where you mix gold with mercury
and you apply this mercury-gold mixture,
if you then heat that mercury up and you boil it off,
it leaves the gold chemically bonded to the steel.
Normally, most people wouldn't be able to afford that.
I mean, really only kings can afford this.
And not all kings, but the French kings liked this.
It was a distinctive thing, actually.
It creates an image of a king
as, like, the sun manifested in human form,
like a superhuman being.
But it would have been nicer
if they'd given Terry the budget to gild it properly.
I give it a four out of 10.
Wolf: We've already been through this before.
We both know you haven't got it in you!
Toby: A sword is not a gun.
Pointing a sword at someone out of range
with your arms fully extended
so you have nowhere to go with it
doesn't achieve anything except making you look
like you've never held a sword in your life.
You point your weapon out there like that,
he's gonna take it away from you.
There's often not enough color
in medieval depictions in cinema.
Medieval people loved color,
bright color, richness.
It didn't populate their world very much otherwise.
OK. So, you've got your leader,
your king, leading a cavalry charge.
They're in wedge formation
with the king at the point of the wedge,
which is great.
This is how it's done.
The guy on the point of the wedge
is steering the whole cavalry charge.
He's like the guidance system on a missile.
The wedge formation is one of the most
effective formations for a heavy cavalry charge.
He's got his chin strap done up. Love that.
He's still got his visor up, which is good,
because at this stage he's still
far enough away from the enemy
where he's got other things to worry about.
A cavalry charge might start when you're maybe
600 meters away from the enemy line,
but you're not going to be full pelt straight off.
You need to start the charge in good order.
He's got to look around
and make sure his formation is maintaining its position,
they're keeping their cohesion.
If he starts running too fast,
then they have to catch up,
and then they start getting too spread out.
They've got to stay close.
He's got to be watching that. Fine.
But now the real test of the sequence,
and the thing that Hollywood hates to do,
is cover its famous actors' faces.
But in a real cavalry charge, this guy,
once he's got himself set up,
he needs to close that visor,
and let's see if they do it.
He could close it right about now.
Now would be good.
Oh, he's closed it!
I give it a seven.
[swords clashing]
If I could change one thing, I would change this.
He's wearing his gorget on the outside of his breastplate.
A gorget is that neck plate.
He should actually have plates covering his throat.
The gorget has neck plates in here,
and it comes down and has this larger chest plate.
That chest plate should be underneath the breastplate.
The breastplate has a turned edge
to stop things sliding up into your face.
But if anything does get past, it hits the gorget.
But in "Game of Thrones,"
they habitually put them on the outside,
and it's a howler that I just, I can't abide.
Fire!
Toby: Fire arrows were a thing,
especially in naval warfare,
when you've got key pieces of equipment
you want to set on fire,
like sails and rigging and things.
Fire arrows, as a rule, get way overused in cinema.
These are a little more interesting, though.
There's something more interesting going on.
You see, it's not just a lump
of burning material stuck on an arrow.
They've actually got some kind of explosive charge
on these arrows that has a fuse.
And this is actually much more historically plausible.
There are early incendiary manuals
from the 15th and 16th centuries
that give designs for different kinds
of gunpowder bombs and other explosive devices
to be put on arrows and crossbow bolts.
[man groans]
My Lord!
[man groans]
Toby: I love this, right here.
That's armor doing its job, you know?
An arrow, when it hits you in full armor,
it'll probably glance off.
That's what armor's designed to do.
But if it hits you square and it gets enough purchase,
it can start to bite into the steel.
And if it hits you somewhere on the arm
or the shoulder where the steel is thinner,
it might even get through.
Chances are most arrows are not going to get through enough
to do meaningful damage to the person inside.
But they are going to get stuck,
and seeing a knight fighting on the walls
in a siege with arrows stuck in him
is the best thing I've seen all day.
10 out of 10, absolutely.
Just for that.
One of the absolute best treatments of historical armor,
in any film ever,
is in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film, "Henry V."
But the film is set
and the design is led
by the reality
of clothing and equipment and architecture
and so forth of the early 15th century.
One of his historical advisors was my predecessor
at The Wallace Collection,
the keeper of arms and armor in the mid-20th century,
Sir James Mann.
And Olivier went to The Wallace Collection,
and he saw the collection, and he worked with James Mann,
another arms and armor scholar named Charles Beard,
and that film looks just like
a 15th-century manuscript come to life.
And it's real steel armor on all of these actors.
And it's one of the best ever.