The Black Arrow

Another of those one-night salutes that TCM likes to run was to actor Louis Hayward, this time spotlighting his work in historical action pictures. One of the movies that I hadn't seen before was The Black Arrow, so once again I recorded it in order to be able to watch another new-to-me old movie and write up a post on it.

The Black Arrow opens late in the Wars of the Roses, which were of course fought between the English royal houses of Lancaster and York. Louis Hayward plays Richard Shelton, who had been fighting for the Yorkists before returning to his ancestral home in Yorkshire, Tunstall Castle. Unfortunately, he comes home to the sad news that his father Harold has been killed. Sir John Sedley, who lived in the next castle over, if you want to put it that way, was a Lancastrian who killed Harold and was executed for his troubles.

Since there's basically a civil war going on, Sir Richard's uncle and Harold's half-brother Sir Daniel (George Macready) gets the spoils of managing Sedley manor, as well as making Sedley's daughter Joanna (Janet Blair) his ward, although his plan is ultimately to marry her. Sir Richard and one of Sir Daniel's associates are sent through the dangerous forest to fetch Joanna and bring her back to Tunstall. I say dangerous because, like in the Robin Hood stories, there are men lying in ambush in the forest just waiting for the wrong person to try to pass through. Sir Richard is more or less innocent in that he wasn't around for any of the back story, but none of the others were, and one Sir Daniel's associate Appleyard is killed by an arrow to which there's a letter attached.

That letter argues that the arrow for Appleyard is in revenge for the killing of Sir Harold and the taking of the Sedley estates, signed by a "John Amend-All" and naming in addition to Appleyard two more of Sir Daniel's associates who have arrows coming for them. More ominously, the last name on the list is Sir Daniel himself, who if this letter is to be believed is actually the person who killed Sir Harold, not Sedley!

Sir Richard doesn't know what to believe, and Joanna doesn't exactly like him at first for fairly obvious reasons. But Richard plans to do some investigating. We learn fairly quickly that John Amend-All's letter is more or less accurate and that Sir Daniel did in fact kill his half-brother and put the blame on Sedley, with the intention of taking over the Sedley lands. Not only that, but John Amend-All turns out to be Sedley himself, who survived the execution thanks to a well-placed Bible stopping an arrow to the heart.

So Sir Richard throws in with Sedley. Also, as you might guess, he's going to fall in love with Joanna along the way. However, there's the slight problem that she's stuck at Tunstall and Sir Daniel clearly knows by now what Sir Richard is up to and that this means danger for him. So of course Sir Richard is now persona non grata at Tunstall. Yet, at the same time, we can expect that a movie like this is going to have a more or less happy ending. How it gets there is what you're going to have to watch.

The Black Arrow starts off slowly, which isn't exactly a good thing for a movie that only runs a shade under 80 minutes. It does pick up, and reaches the point that it's the sort of movie that would have pleased the movie-going public of the late 1940s without exactly being any great shakes. The Black Arrow is one of those movies that's probably best to watch with some friends and your favorite snacks.