Well yes. It winds up being fatal to both. But its done with all the skill and grace of the South park slapfight.
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Yeah in the Star Wars prequels they managed to make the swordsmanship and choreography of lightsaber duels much more impressive while making the emotional stakes fall totally flat.
The most memorable parts of the lightsaber duels in the original trilogy weren’t the cool backflips or parrying or whatever, they were the exposition that came in between the bits with the clashing blades. So it’s hardly any wonder that the “Darth Maul vs. Qui-Gon & Intern” lightsaber fight in The Phantom Menace doesn’t carry a fraction of the weight of the “Luke vs. Vader” lightsaber fight in The Empire Strikes Back.
Who was Darth Maul? What drove him, and what was his beef with the protagonists? Why should we give a shit? We never got an answer to any of those questions until someone made a damn cartoon about it like 15 years later.
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The the rhyming duel scene against a man who insults Cyrano’s nose is where the Gérard Depardieu version literally lost the plot.
The fight establishes Cyrano as a complex man of immense skill and a prickly and deadly sense of honor, who will cold bloodledly kill any man who offends him. He toys with his opponent while improvising multiple quatrains, then murders him with perfect and utterly ruthless efficiency, timed exactly to his poem. That sets up all of the tension for when Roxane asks Cyrano to look after Christian, and just how much danger the young pup is in when he attempts to insult Cyrano, and how much forbearance Cyrano shows in following Roxanne’s wishes.
But the Depardieu version has Cyrano just lightly tap his opponent at the end of the fight, rather than kill or even hurt him. It isn’t until later, after Cyrano’s humiliated opponent attacks him from behind, that Cyrano defends his life and kills him. That is a completely different character. In the play Cyrano will defend his perceived honor to the death by killing people, the the Depardieu version he only kills to defend his life. Very, very different.
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I’ll add this one. Anime, yes. And with a bunch of cultural implications and backstory.
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I can’t let this pass without mentioning Scaramouche, especially the minute long final fight
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But will he do a fandango?
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I’ll add two that are particularly memorable to me. Both follow the themes above with plenty of tension in place of big fancy moves.
Harakiri:
The Twighlight Samurai
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