How can you resist a movie with the credit, “and Oliver Reed as Otto Von Bismarck”?

Reed, who later died while filming “Gladiator,” costars with the invaluable Malcom McDowell in 1975’s “Royal Flash,” one of those fencing-and-wenching period larks that seemed to come out every month in the 70s (and whose spirit lives on in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series). McDowell plays Flashman, a whoring, gambling loutish soldier in Her Majesty’s army who gets caught up in Bismarck’s scheme to impersonate a prince from a duchy in Europe. McDowell works his snivel-and-cringe act to perfection as Flashman stumbles through a series of improbable adventures; this is the kind of movie where the hero uses his sword to slash the rope holding up the chandelier, only to be trapped when the chandelier falls on his head. Jolly good stuff all around.