What I Watched Last Night: Ivanhoe (1952)

Oh, did I say I was gonna write about a bad movie today? Cause I didn't. My bad.

In place of the scheduled post, I offer you the first entry in a new recurring series that will run when I haven't prepared anything for the post I was supposed to write. It's called "What I Happened to Watch Last Night."

Last night I watched the 1952 romantic adventure Ivanhoe, directed by Richard Thorpe and based on the classic novel by Sir Walter Scott. It's a good ol' medeival story about a knight named Ivanhoe who has discovered that King Richard of England has been kidnapped by Austria for a sizeable ransom. He has to raise the money in secret because Richard's brother, John, has kind of taken over things and is just fine with his brother rotting in prison. But with the help of his family, a kind Jewish girl, and some swashbuckling skillz, Ivanhoe is able to rescue the king and earn the love of his gal. The end.

Some other stuff happened in the book, but this is not a movie that is here to tell a story. It's here to entertain and does so with lots of exciting action set pieces that have often been compared with similar scenes in the classic adventure films like Errol Flynn's Robin Hood. There's swordfighting and battling and jousting and racing agaisnt time, and it's mostly good clean fun, empty-headed though it may be.

The color cinematography, by Oscar nominee Freddie Young (The score by Miklos Rozsa was also nominated along with the film for Best Picture), is pretty dazzling, and a couple of the supporting performances are worth watching. George Sanders is good as a rounded villainous character and a very young, and fairly stunning, Elizabeth Taylor has a great presence in her dramatic scenes that come off a lot less hammy than some others. On the flip side, Robert Taylor and his love interest Joan Fontaine both are pretty dull playing comic strip hero and princess. Oh, well.

This Ivanhoe doesn't get any points for originality or brilliance in any of the usual cinematic facets that would make up a great movie (direction, writing, acting, etc.) and yet it's a really entertaining family film that is worth digging up, especially at its brisk 100 minutes. What can you lose?!

B+