| |||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sexy-Rexy Does The Crusuades AND Gets Away With It!!,
By "cruthlach" (Sherman Oaks, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: King Richard & Crusaders [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Having stolen the story idea from Robert Scott's THE TALISMAN, Warner Bros. of the 50's uses plenty of smaltz & zippered costumes along with desert daring-do. Yeah, it's very VERY dated & absolutely unauthentic, but Rex Harrison's portrayal of Saladin is NOT TO BE MISSED! Ah, sigh, to be in his harem...and Lawrence Harvey, bleached hair & all, does the best an Englishman can to impersonate a Scot. It's fun. It's flashy. You'll enjoy it over & over.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Panto season in Hollywood,
By
This review is from: King Richard and the Crusaders (DVD)
David Butler may have directed Calamity Jane and a slew of successful Doris Day pictures, but in 1954 he also directed one of the great on screen calamities, King Richard and the Crusaders, a well deserved entry in the original 50 worst movies of all time that pretty much killed off his career in features. For decades the epic genre got no critical respect, being regarded as spectacularly stupid fare for the less discerning masses, and it's scripts like this one that are the reason - the cast should have been paid danger money for uttering lines like "Go squat on your alps!" or the immortal "War, war! That's all you ever think about, Dick Plantagenet! You burner, you pillager!" (yes, Virginia Mayo really does say that). But far worse than being stupid is the fact that, once the shock of the atrocious dialogue wears off, it's also very dull: brief skirmishes and a tedious chase finale aside the Crusaders spend more time bickering among themselves than fighting Saracens in a Holy Land that looks just like Bronson Canyon and Chico, California.
Very loosely based on Sir Walter Scott's The Talisman to cash in on the success of Ivanhoe, at times it looks like it was designed as an Errol Flynn vehicle, although Laurence Harvey, with a quiff like a tsunami and a Scottish accent so bad you'll thank whatever god you worship when he drops it after the first scene, makes a poor a replacement for the ageing and ailing star (though fair dos, he does a neat line in leaping off a horse). George Sanders plays most of his scenes as Richard from his bed, and he probably wished he'd stayed there. Rex Harrison plays the 'Persian popinjay' Saladin like a cross between the King of Siam and the genie of the lamp in a very bad panto, which is pretty all you can do when you're saddled with lines like "These strange pale-eyed Goths, they show their hearts like the bumps on a pomegranate." Over in the villains' corner a grinning rabbit-like Michael Pate impersonates Michael Rennie for all he's worth while Robert Douglas reprises his Adventures of Don Juan shtick to decent effect. Yea, verily, it's enough to make you miss Henry Wilcoxen and Cecil B. De Mille. Still, it wouldn't be Christmas without a turkey... Currently the film is only available on DVD in Germany as 'Der Talisman', and like many of Warners' German division's 50s titles, the transfer is poor - but it's the only way to see it in its original Scope ratio at the moment (although it does have a German title sequence, the film is English language with removable subtitles).
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Ineptly written, poor in colorful characters and chivalry...,
By
This review is from: King Richard and the Crusaders (DVD)
The fifties was Hollywood's decade of change... With television's continuing stronghold on the public, the film industry had to rethink itself into competing against the monster box and, in so doing, underwent a radical personality change...
Clearly, the only way to lure audiences back into the cinema was to provide them with something that was unavailable on television. The alternatives soon became apparent: new projection ratios that could in no way be matched by the small screen, epics whose production costs were beyond the reach of TV... "King Richard and the Crusaders" begins with Richard the Lionhearted (George Sanders) and his allies having hardly set foot in the Holy Land on the Third Crusade when a group of treacherous nobles plans to kill Richard and take command of the whole operation... Sir Kenneth (Lawrence Harvey) makes his appearance as a noble Scotsman, the only knight who is truly loyal to Richard... He warns the king about the traitors in his midst, and rides off to find evidence against them... Virginia Mayo is Richard's cousin, Lady Edith, who is hopelessly in love with Sir Kenneth, but she can't marry him until he proves himself... Rex Harrison plays the role of the Saracen ruler Saladin, who falls in love with Lady Edith... The motion picture makes it clear that it is Saladin, not Richard, who is the nobler and wiser chieftain through a series of intrigues which show the great Sultan playing physician, matchmaker and spy all the while Richard is being cheated by traitors and self-interested allies around him... In fact, the tricked king is moved to condemn to death his bravest knight and supporter... Robert Douglas is Sir Giles Amaury, the treacherous knight who sneaks up to Richard's tent one night with a hired bowman... "Strike deep!" he urged, "this is no ordinary man!" Very loosely based on Sir Walter Scott's The Talisman, David Butler's "King Richard and the Crusaders" is a fun film, full of adventure and exotic locales, but absolutely far from Richard Thorpe's "Ivanhoe," poor in colorful characters and chivalry...
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
