The Crusades (1935)
Country: US
Technical: bw 127m
Director: Cecil B De Mille
Cast: Henry Wilcoxon, Loretta Young, C. Aubrey Smith
Synopsis:
King Richard I sets out for Palestine to wrest Jerusalem from the hands of Saladin.
Review:
Horribly long and verbose epic, whose only interests are the siege of Acre sequence, Loretta Young's gowns and the rare, and somewhat wooden, presence of Wilcoxon. At one point DeMille intercuts shots of the Saracens and Crusaders charging towards each other, the former across desert, the latter across field, accelerating the crosscutting all the while together with appropriately matching music: just one of the unintentionally hilarious ways in which the showman's craft is suited more to a silent Keystone idiom than that of a historical drama. Having said all that, no one else has got all the stories in as entertainingly as this either before or since.
Country: US
Technical: bw 127m
Director: Cecil B De Mille
Cast: Henry Wilcoxon, Loretta Young, C. Aubrey Smith
Synopsis:
King Richard I sets out for Palestine to wrest Jerusalem from the hands of Saladin.
Review:
Horribly long and verbose epic, whose only interests are the siege of Acre sequence, Loretta Young's gowns and the rare, and somewhat wooden, presence of Wilcoxon. At one point DeMille intercuts shots of the Saracens and Crusaders charging towards each other, the former across desert, the latter across field, accelerating the crosscutting all the while together with appropriately matching music: just one of the unintentionally hilarious ways in which the showman's craft is suited more to a silent Keystone idiom than that of a historical drama. Having said all that, no one else has got all the stories in as entertainingly as this either before or since.
Country: US
Technical: bw 127m
Director: Cecil B De Mille
Cast: Henry Wilcoxon, Loretta Young, C. Aubrey Smith
Synopsis:
King Richard I sets out for Palestine to wrest Jerusalem from the hands of Saladin.
Review:
Horribly long and verbose epic, whose only interests are the siege of Acre sequence, Loretta Young's gowns and the rare, and somewhat wooden, presence of Wilcoxon. At one point DeMille intercuts shots of the Saracens and Crusaders charging towards each other, the former across desert, the latter across field, accelerating the crosscutting all the while together with appropriately matching music: just one of the unintentionally hilarious ways in which the showman's craft is suited more to a silent Keystone idiom than that of a historical drama. Having said all that, no one else has got all the stories in as entertainingly as this either before or since.