The Brigand is a 1950s romantic adventure filmed in Technicolor

Technicolor

Technicolor is a color motion picture process invented in 1916 and improved over several decades.It was the second major process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952...

 and directed by Phil Karlson

Phil Karlson

Phil Karlson was a film director known for his no-nonsense film noirs. Karlson directed 99 River Street, Kansas City Confidential and Hell's Island all with actor John Payne in the early 1950s...

. It is the second film that Anthony Dexter

Anthony Dexter

Anthony John "Tony" Dexter was an American actor known for his resemblance of Rudolph Valentino, whom he portrayed in the 1951 biographic Valentino. Dexter sometimes used the pseudonym Walter Craig...

 made for producer Edward Small

Edward Small

Edward Small was a film producer from the late 1920s through 1970....

 for Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...

 after his debut in Valentino

Valentino (1951 film)

Valentino is a 1951 American drama film billed as the life story of movie legend Rudolph Valentino.- Cast :*Anthony Dexter as Rudolph Valentino*Eleanor Parker as Joan Carlisle / Sarah Gray*Richard Carlson as William 'Bill' King...

. Loosely based on The Brigand by Alexandre Dumas, the film is set in the Napoleonic era in 1804 in the mythical Iberian

Iberian Peninsula

The Iberian Peninsula , sometimes called Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe and includes the modern-day sovereign states of Spain, Portugal and Andorra, as well as the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar...

 nation of "Mandorra". The film bears a resemblance to The Prisoner of Zenda

The Prisoner of Zenda

The Prisoner of Zenda is an adventure novel by Anthony Hope, published in 1894. The king of the fictional country of Ruritania is drugged on the eve of his coronation and thus unable to attend his own coronation. Political forces are such that in order for the king to retain his crown his...

with Dexter playing a dual role of a rogue exile who impersonates a King in danger of being overthrown by his cousin played by Anthony Quinn

Anthony Quinn

Antonio Rodolfo Quinn-Oaxaca , more commonly known as Anthony Quinn, was a Mexican American actor, as well as a painter and writer...

.

The scheming Quinn plans a "premeditated accident" to King Lorenzo by giving him a hunting weapon that is rigged to fire backwards; an idea reused by director Phil Karlson in his The Silencers

The Silencers (film)

The Silencers is the title of an American spy film spoof motion picture produced in 1966 and starring Dean Martin as agent Matt Helm. It is only loosely based upon the novel The Silencers by Donald Hamilton, as well as another of Hamilton's Helm novels, Death of a Citizen.The film was the first of...

. With the real King unable to perform his duties, the swashbuckling distant relative Carlos DeLago, late of the Sultan of Morocco's Guard steps in to save the Kingdom.