Drama about Heston as a medieval knight who is given some remote northwestern coastal village as his fiefdom. The Duke tells him to clean up the place and make sure the stupid villagers are Christians and no longer Druids. Yes, when Feudalism was in flower.
The most impressive thing about the film is the production design. Everything LOOKS authentically ten-sixtyish. The village is a pig stye and so is the "castle," which, as Heston observes, consists of marshes and a lone tower. The tower, reachable only by a small drawbridge, is about five stories high. It's the sloppiest castle you've ever imagined. When Heston and the dozen or so men in his retinue first enter it, bodies are strewn about and furniture overturned. Heston orders, "Clean this up," or words to that effect. The men do, but afterward they continue to throw their leftovers on the floors. The furniture itself makes St. Vincent De Paul look like Nieman-Marcus.
My God, what uncomfortable armor -- and how ugly, those full-length coats of chain mail. And those soup-bowl haircuts. Only Heston, he of the aquiline beak and jutting chin could survive such a haircut. The men, however, are closely shaved by the studio's barber. We want them realistic but not offensive. Wardrobe has made the villagers drab, except for the girl Heston falls for, in the biggest mistake of his life, who has a loosely draped gown with a cunning décolletage and a slit up the side like Shanghai Lil's.
That girl is Rosemary Forsythe, which brings us to the performers. Plump-lipped and, even PG, Rosemary Forsythe is attractive enough but can't act very well. That's not too much of an irritant because she hasn't that many lines. She's quite tall, almost as tall as Heston. Put her together with Uma Thurman and Mariel Hemingway and you've got the beginnings of a girl's basketball team.
Heston is at his stalwart best, but he is as dumb as one of the Druid's carved trees. If he can make a mistake, he takes advantage of the opportunity. He develops a case of intense lust for Forsythe after glimpsing her in the river and exchanging a dozen lines with her. He frets. He utters hoarse, goaty cries as he destroys tables in an excess of heat. Why he simply doesn't relieve himself solo is a puzzle the writers never solve. He hardly knows the girl and, when you get right down to it, there are farm animals all over the place. But he plays the character as written, and does it well.
Boone is the self-contained and ever-loyal bodyguard. Guy Stockwell is the jealous younger brother who finally precipitates a fatal quarrel just when victory seems to have been achieved. Stockwell is unlikable from the beginning. Every utterance is accompanied by a sweaty sneer. He's cynical, ruthless, and greedy. The knife fight between him and Heston ends in a cliché. The two are struggling over a knife and are pulled together with a thump, face to face. The action stops and we know one of them has a knife in his belly. Stockwell's twitching face lifts into a smile. But you're not fooled for a moment.
The writers include John Collier, who is skilled in his craft, but the drama here is pretty murky. There are a couple of oppositions. First, the Frisian Islanders who raid the village fight Heston and his men. It's hard to know who to root for, although we are on Heston's side because we've gotten to KNOW these people and Heston is, after all, Heston. But the lingo of the Frisians, who live on islands just off the Netherlands, was the closest to English of any language in Europe and, I think, it still is. Some sentences in Frisian and English are almost identical. There's one about wanting a piece of green cheese that IS identical. Think about that for a minute.
Also, this "droit de seigneur" business. It never existed. It was one of those legends from, I think, a Roman traveler who attributed it to barbarians in the Middle East or some other alien place. And the dialog: "You can go to hell." "I've been there."
The musical score, if you listen to it with any degree of diligence, is generic. The love theme is derived from a folk tune and is given a syrupy arrangement. The action music is lifted in whole or in parts from other epic stories of the period, like "Taras Bulba." But I don't want to go on carping about these things because they're all made up for by wardrobe, production design, and some of the performances. I exclude Maurice Evans, along with Rosemary Forsythe, from the list of good performances. He has an old-fashioned, stagy Shakespearian style. His voice quivers like John Gielgud's, but Gielgud seems to know about it and Evans never really did. Lawrence Olivier's Shakespeare was always delivered in a more naturalistic and convincing style.
