AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Dotbankey A lot of fun.

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Josephina Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

elcoat Like a goddess, she walked into my graduate class and sat down next to me, Summer 1972. She was tall, slim but with an unmistakable figure, blonde and blue-eyed, ladylike, and German-American. (She was quite like Rosemary Forsyth's Bronwyn in The War Lord, which I had seen and taken as my own, only this girl was even more beautiful.) I always had something prepared to ask and talk about with her, however briefly before class would start. She would always respond in friendly but careful fashion.Then one day, our ("visiting") instructor - a sharp-tongued young woman aggressively proud of her new doctorate in our field - just unloaded on this girl, for no conceivable reason other than jealousy. In shock, the girl quietly said (to me), "I was just trying to answer her." and in an also-barely-audible, consoling voice - but loud enough I hoped the instructor would hear and just *try* to take *me* on - I said "Maybe you try too hard." After that, whenever we were around each other outside class, and I would look at the girl, she would seem to become emotional and look away.It was just as well, I thought. Only a few days before the summer session had started, I had married a sweet young girl whom my family and I had long known, who adored me, and who was trying her best to be a good young wife in every way possible. I could not betray her.At the end of the summer session, my classmate came up to me in the departmental library. Emotionally, she said "Coatney, ...." and I cut her off, saying, "I *know*." Upset, she turned and left, and I felt horrible.Coming back from vacation for the regular academic year, I learned she had gotten married during that! It was one of the hardest emotional hits I have taken in my life, however unjustified.40-some years have passed, I recently found her on Facebook, and we have become friends. She is now a grandmother, still beautiful. She has there some photos of her in those years. Under the best, I have written "Unforgettably beautiful." Indeed.All the characters in The War Lord are - with the possible exception of the Frisian prince - prisoners of the Middle Ages' highly regimented social system and life, not free to follow their hearts without causing great disruption and grief.The criticism of Rosemary Forsyth's performance as being "wooden" is unjustified. Bronwyn is trying to control herself, but she and Chrysagon were lost to each other from the first moment they met, and she is being swept along, stunned, by feelings and events completely out of her control. Similarly, James Farentino is excellent for his role - young and idealistic, even admiring Chrysagon at first. (And maybe the previous priest had been Italian - who knows?) And as others have noted, the role of an imperious but all-too-human knight suited Charlton Heston completely.The film is a beautifully conceived medieval tragedy which belongs with the art of that age. Many of those works of art were composed long after the actual events, and 1965 is an elapse of only 1000 years, which - if the human race does somehow last another 20,000 years or so - will come to seem not so far after the fact either.The development of the characters and their respective places in those times is both full and educational. Their emotional interplay is as intense as it is fated.Anyone who follows ... or consciously decides not to ... their heart takes such powerful, lifelong feelings with us to the grave ... as Lord Chrysagon may have been soon to do.GREAT, historically important film, beautifully acted.

syntinen It's rotten luck when someone takes the trouble to make a historical drama based intelligently on the best historical knowledge available to them, only for subsequent research to prove it completely wrong. This fate befell The War Lord, which hinges on the idea – a perfectly respectable academic theory in 1965 when it was made – that the "jus primae noctis" was a survival of pre-Christian fertility rites. A couple of years later a French historian thoroughly exploded the idea that the custom ever existed at all; this left the film looking like an obvious historical nonsense, and as it doesn't contain enough wall-to-wall action for the average "never-mind-the-sense-bring-on-the-swords-and-battle-axes" fan of historical epics, it's been all but forgotten. A pity, because there's really a lot in it to like.The hero is an 11th-century Norman knight, Chrysagon (Charlton Heston in a brutally unflattering Norman haircut), who after many years' service as a household knight has finally been given a fief of his own somewhere on the North Sea coast to defend against Frisian incursions for his master the Duke. (It's not clear which duke – of Normandy?) The action opens as Chrysagon arrives with his younger brother and small following of fighting men to claim his fief. They're pretty underwhelmed by it – it consists of swampy coastal forest, the castle is a grim dank primitive tower, and the paganism practised by the local peasantry unnerves them considerably. Still, a fief's a fief, and Chrysagon has fought a long time for this hike in status.One of the local customs entails brides being taken to the local lord for their wedding night – for luck, fertility etc. Chrysagon rejects this custom not out of virtue but because he recoils from this pagan carry-on, and anyway, a Norman lord should be able to ravish peasants for himself - he shouldn't have to wait till they're brought to him. However (and you all saw this coming, didn't you?) one day his hounds chase a beautiful local bride-to-be into a pond and …… Okay, the plot is a bit cheesy – but the whole thing is surprisingly realistic and medieval; you get the feeling that everyone concerned was genuinely trying to think themselves into the 11th century. Someone went to a lot of trouble working backwards from 19th-century European folklore and forwards from The Golden Bough to imagine how an 11th-century fertility rite might have been enacted – it's not their fault said rite never existed. The village really looks as though nothing very much has moved on there since the Migration Period, and the lord's tower is genuinely Romanesque. (Okay, it's more 12th than 11th century, and any stone tower at all would have been the last word in luxury and modernity back then – but that's nitpicking.) The Normans have the usual Hollywood knitted-string mail, but you can tell that the designer was looking hard at the Bayeux Tapestry. (And possibly even at the Norman-Sicilian clothes in the Imperial Treasury, judging by the side neck fastening on the Unreliable Younger Brother's tunic!) But it's not only the look of it that they tried to make medieval, but the way everybody thinks and behaves. Somebody thought through the questions "did 11th-century Norman fighting men believe pagan gods existed at all, and if so what did they think they were?" and "how might Norman knights and priests have squared with their consciences participating in pagan customs?". Chrysagon is not only good but (according to his younger brother) tediously righteous; but everybody, including him, assumes that he can and will shag on the spot any peasant who takes his fancy. (It's only a superstitious fright that stops him.) He has power of life and death over the peasants, and takes for granted that they are inferior, yet he also accepts that local law and custom have some weight which he can't simply brush aside. It's going to be a hundred years before anybody invents courtly love, so all the Normans – including Chrysagon himself – take for granted that any feeling for a peasant girl deeper than crude lust is as at best an unmanly weakness, at worst madness or bewitchment. His men are all loyal followers of many years' service, but as they see their lord starting to go mushy over some slut and endanger them all by provoking a peasant revolt on her account, their loyalty starts to crumble. His younger brother, who was more-or-less content to play second fiddle to him when they were both household knights, finds himself resenting the gap in status that has opened up between them now he is his brother's vassal. All this has credibility.It's far from perfect. Perhaps it really was necessary to label the peasants' religion as "Druidism" in order to convey the notion of pre-Christian paganism to the average viewer - but did they really have to call the heroine "Bronwyn"? (A friend of mine was misled by this into assuming the action was set in Brittany – she couldn't otherwise account for "Druids" and Celtic names!) And she is the one real embarrassment of the film. Her character is written as hopelessly sweet, feeble and drippy – no detectable personality - and Rosemary Forsythe doesn't look or sound like any kind of peasant from any place or time in history. Even so, The War Lord is one of the most medieval films I've ever seen, and is definitely worth watching if you can find it.

loosid_dreamers I was a little kid seeing this in the theatres for the first time and I remember that before the credits ran Heston and Forsyth did a little introductory summary about the middle ages speaking directly to the audience. I can't remember exactly, but I think they also addressed the issue of the violence in the movie - which by today's standards is pretty mellow. It seems to me they talked about it as adding credibility to the film in terms of historical content. When does that happen anymore? I don't know if it's included in the DVD but it would be cool. I also think Franklin Shaffner was a wonderful director. No slop. No unnecessary scenes. And as good as Heston is, the performance that blew me away was given by Guy Stockwell. Oh my god. How was his brother Dean more visible in the industry? I don't know. And of course Richard Boone was terrific - especially in his last tender scene comforting Heston - the son he never had. I usually hesitate watching movies that I saw as a child because I don't want to lose the special feeling they gave me as a child, but this one certainly retains the romanticism and excitement found in a few other movies such as Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Samson and Delilah, and Demetrius and the Gladiators. Definitely an "A".

janecreates If good acting, an unusual and very realistic story line are what you're after, this has it. And just for the record its very romantically shot and scored, and the battle scenes are cool. The script is well crafted and developed. I enjoy it whenever I'm feeling escapist, but don't want illusions! A tall order - but this film does just that. The medieval story transports faithfully and accurately to another time, making the watcher forget the present without any of the camp, glamorized, contemporary touches that so often accompany films set so long ago. Please - if there's anyone reading this who can - bring out a DVD!