The term "adventure film" is, by some definitions, a redundancy -- any film produced for commercial distribution is supposed to be an "adventure" on some level; and if it isn't an adventure, then it is likely going to be a failure. But as a genre, the adventure film, also sometimes referred to as the "action-adventure" film, is one of the most uniformly popular and stable of categories -- except for language and settings, the characteristics of these films have changed little from the 1920s to the 1990s.

The most rudimentary adventure films that concern modern viewers are the swashbucklers. Essentially costume films with lots of action, these films set the pattern that most of popular adventure films -- regardless of their settings of costumes -- would emulate: A handsome hero, quick with his wits (and wit) as well as his fists, sword, or pistol, goes up against a villain of some stature for a prize, whether it is a woman, a fortune, a nation, or a world. The first -- and still one of the best -- swashbuckler of any note was the silent Mark of Zorro (1920), starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr. This picture was also the first of Fairbanks's swashbucklers, and it pretty much defined his screen persona for his next 15 years in movies as a cheerful, dashing swordsman and athlete who could handle any situation in which he found himself.

For most viewers, however, the adventure film really begins in the 1930s, the period when sound was fully evolved into the movie-making process. The decade is full of adventure films of all stripes, from swashbucklers such as Michael Curtiz's Captain Blood (1935), starring Errol Flynn, to jungle adventures like Zoltan Korda's Sanders of the River (1935), with Leslie Banks and Paul Robeson, and fantasy tales such as Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's King Kong (1933), with Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, and Fay Wray. These films depicted men of action put up against impossible odds, often with no help to be found from outside, battling forces of chaos, evil, and greed. Flynn was, after Fairbanks -- who worked into the sound period but did his best work in the silent era -- the best of them, a glib, cheerful screen figure who seemed to relish the chance to show off his prowess with a sword (or, in later movies such as Dodge City, a pistol), and luxuriated quietly in presenting his on-screen sexuality to the world. During the 1930s, he became the model for the attributes that virtually every adventure film hero from that decade forward would need in order to succeed on screen. Others who came along during that same decade with more mixed success were Leslie Howard, whose verbal cleverness masked a fierce fighting spirit and brilliant tactical mind in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) and Pimpernel Smith (1941); Ronald Colman, whose gentle-spoken nature stood out for a wry, thoughtful on-screen personality in pictures such as A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1937); and Laurence Olivier, whose dark, brooding good looks and screen personality made him irresistible to women in movies such as Fire Over England (1936) and Q-Planes (1939).

The adventure film during this decade had few limitations of subject matter -- the world seemed very large then, and it was perfectly reasonable to play a story such as Sir H. Rider Haggard's {~King Solomon's Mines "straight," as director Robert Stevenson did in 1937, with a low-keyed but believable Cedric Hardwicke portraying Allan Quartermaine and Paul Robseon as an African chieftain hunting for gold in the far reaches of the dark continent; or for Robert Donat, the glib hero of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, to play a British agent rescuing Russian countess Marlene Dietrich from the Revolution, in Knight Without Armour (1937). By turns, Ronald Colman, Ray Milland, Ralph Richardson, John Lodge, and John Howard portrayed the literary action hero Captain Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond in a dozen movies between 1929 and 1939, battling international arms merchants, murderous traders, and perfidious industrialists to prevent the outbreak of war or disease.

The coming of World War II put a stop to the making of most adventure films -- winning the real war, in Europe and Asia as well as on screen, was more important, and it was not a time for the kind of charismatic heroics of the 1930s; movie heroes had to work as part of teams and organized armed forces (indeed, one of John Wayne's most interesting World War II dramas, Flying Tigers, is built around the story of a skilled, ambitious pilot, played by John Carroll, who destroys many of the men around him by refusing to fight as part of a team; he ultimately redeems himself with the sacrifice of his life for the greater good).

The postwar era saw relatively few adventure movies set in contemporary times -- the era didn't seem right for it as the very real threats of communist aggression and nuclear destruction made it difficult to do serious escapist films in a modern setting, apart from musicals and comedies. The change affected most of the previous stars who had lived through the war -- Errol Flynn did a number of swashbucklers that were undeniably well made but failed to capture anyone's imagination. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. tried working in his father's manner, with limited success, in Sinbad The Sailor (1945), but the Technicolor film fell flat for most audiences. Gene Kelly tried his hand at adventure films in The Three Musketeers (1948), a lavishly made Technicolor vehicle that somehow never became exciting enough to sustain its more than two-hour running time. Instead, the costume satires, which included At Sword's Point (1952), starring Cornell Wilde and Maureen O'Hara, and the delightful Scaramouche (1948), with Stewart Granger, which was both satire and serious swashbuckler, were more successful.

Alan Ladd, who had achieved film stardom in crime thrillers such as This Gun For Hire (1941), became a major action/adventure hero in the late 1940s in movies such as O.S.S. (1946) and Appointment With Danger (1951). He was more convincing in contemporary roles than John Wayne, who tried his hand at espionage dramas (Big Jim McLain,1952) to limited success. A succession of actors, beginning with Biff Elliot and Robert Bray, essayed the role of Mike Hammer, the two-fisted private detective created by author Mickey Spillane (who played the part himself in The Girl Hunters), but only Ralph Meeker was memorable, in Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

But Hollywood didn't rediscover the adventure movie proper until the early 1960s, after the film capital had shed most of its prior restrictions on violence and implied sexuality. A pair of producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, bought the rights to most of the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming. Beginning with Dr. No (1962), directed by Terence Young and starring Sean Connery and Joseph Wiseman, the James Bond movies stretched the boundaries of acceptable sex and violence while entertaining audiences as they hadn't been since the 1930s. A hero who could shoot off a joke as quickly as a bullet and escape from a villain's burning headquarters with the girl in tow was something that hadn't been seen on movie screens since before World War II. In addition, the mixture of humor, action, violence, and sex was refreshing and liberating, not only to audiences but to producers and directors.

Within two years of Dr. No's release, the follow-up James Bond movies From Russia With Love and Goldfinger were breaking box-office records everywhere, and filmmakers everywhere were bringing a range of sub-Bond heroes to the screen, from Paul Mantee as A Man Called Dagger (1967) to Michael Caine's "Harry Palmer" trilogy, The Ipcress File, Funeral In Berlin, and Billion Dollar Brain. The Caine movies were actually amazingly good and in many ways superior to the Bond movies in intellectual content and sophistication, but the Bond movies have proved more durable, surviving changes in the lead role (George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan) and public taste over the past 30 years.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Hollywood gained a newfound source of inspiration for adventure filmmaking out of its own past in the guise of the hero Indiana Jones, portrayed by Harrison Ford. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), directed by Steven Spielberg, drew on traditions from movie serials of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and used 40 years of technological advances in filmmaking to upgrade them. The public, hungry for adventure, devoured it. Subsequent efforts, apart from the two sequels by Spielberg, included attempts to revive H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and efforts at bringing pulp-fiction paperback heroes such as Jake Speed to the screen. A few of them were downright embarrassing, such as John Carpenter's Big Trouble In Little China (1986). The late 1980s/early 1990s thrillers Die Hard and Die Hard II, both starring Bruce Willis as a somewhat reluctant, wise-cracking hero with greater brashness, embrace the same action/adventure formula that one found in the 1930s and the refinements of the James Bond era. These have been carried into the mid-1990s with Die Hard 3. Indeed, the Die Hard movies have spawned their own cycle of imitators, including most of Stephen Seagal's pictures, most notably Under Siege (1992).