The only historical inacurracy?

"By the Sword" by Richard Cohen states the short story written by Conrad was based on two officers, Captain Fournier and Captain Dupont, who maintained an ongoing duel for close to 20 years.

Thanks Ted, very interesting post, and those uniforms are great, very beautiful. Do you know what other movies used this same uniforms?

Mr. Sewell, thank you for your post. This is one of my favorite period films, and the wonderful costumes contribute a large part to its imagery. I never would have guessed this film was made on a small budget.

Call me a cynic and, rest assured, I am merely playing Devil's Adovcate and am in no way impugning Ted Sewell (especially as imdb says he is a lawyer in Houston!) but it is interesting to me that many people have taken this post at face value and thanked the person for this comment without seeming to confirm that this statement from tedslaw is accurate.

It would seem a strange thing to pretend to be working for a costume company which supplied a small film (if it was bogus I would expect someone to claim they were much higher up and influential) , so no doubt there is truth to this post from tedslaw. However the person did say check out their bona fides and that is what I am doing.

There is indeed a person on imdb called Ted Sewell who worked for Western Costume Company, but no where on that page does it say he worked on The Duellists. Of course as a 24 year old in his first job as part of a large US firm it is probably unlikely that his relatively small role would be recorded on the credits of a UK film. Nowhere on the credits of The Duellists is the Western Costume Company mentioned (or Ted Sewell for that matter) and The Duellists is not mentioned as one of the films the company worked on on their website (again not a huge clincher as the firm has been going for 100 years and a tiny British film would not be high on their list).

The credits for The Duellists mainly list production in London, Scotland and France and does not mention many US connections. The distributor was the American firm Paramount and Ridley Scott mentions in the commentary that they supplied the budget of $900,000 but there does not seem to be any other American companies involved. The credits do mention Simpsons of Piccadilly which is a London clothing supplier. Maybe they were merely sponsors but I wonder if they were also suppliers of some of the costumes on the film.

It seems surprising that a low budget film which was shot mainly in France and Scotland in a short time for about 6 weeks would bring the bulk of the uniforms over from West Coast America. Surely they could source them from Europe or the UK. There were also other Napoleonic productions in the UK since King Vidor's 1956 War and Peace, notably the 1972 to 1974 BBC TV mini series of War and Peace. Would not Ridley Scott have sourced the costumes locally from the BBC first?

It seems highly unlikely to me that the production company would find by chance the right number of French Hussar uniforms still in existence from a 20+ year old production in the US (although it is possible that these expensive uniforms were kept) and they just happened to have enough and for a similar regiments to the ones the film makers required?

Finally, in the DVD commentary Ridley Scott credits the costume designer Tom Rand and states that Rand had the costumes made in Italy. Perhaps many of the extras' costumes could have come from a US house, but it seems odd that if they had specially made costumes in Italy that these wouldn't be provided for the stars Keitel and Carradine rather than giving the stars costumes from the 1920s and 1930s, as tedslaw states.

Again, it would be a strange thing to make all this up and everything tedslaw said is still quite possible, but I always like to check things out, especially things that appear on the internet.( I don't know how many times I have seen friends post unsubstantiated nonsense as fact on Facebook - from fake photos of current events to bogus deaths of celebrities). It is part of my university training and they way I was brought up to never take anything at face value and to always check and verify.

Of course, if I wanted to be a real cynic, one could argue that Ted Sewell was indeed involved with The Duellists, but how do we know that the tedslaw who posted this comment is the real Ted Sewell?

I do not wish to be disrespectful or to upset anyone. I have merely engaged in an exercise of research and intellectual curiosity to make sure facts are correct. I would be delighted to be proved wrong, but I need more evidence from tedslaw for this post. I hope Ted Sewell takes this in the right spirit and appreciates my scepticism (which surely the law teaches people to always check facts) and he will be able to see that it is OK to be sceptical and he can easily refute my comments in the academically good natured way it is intended.

Scott's comments on the DVD extras-

Ridley Scott: The great military costumes were made in Italy at Peruzzi. I learnt a big lesson in film making: I paid for the costumes, they owned them. I thought, "Wait a minute! That doesn't work for me." I was furious about that. Just the costumes for these two guys [ Keitel and Carradine ] at the time [ 1977 ] cost me 19,000 pounds. I said, "How come they own them?" They said, "That's the deal."

Western Costume was not involved.