The Crusades

Cecil B. DeMille’s film presents Richard the Lionheart as a monarch marching on Jerusalem, with his relationship to Berengaria of Navarre at the centre of the telling. Its relationship with history is thin: it skips the first two Crusades entirely, mixes elements from different expeditions, and arranges events around a love story. Critics said so at the time; Time called it historically worthless while separately conceding its entertainment value. On costume, sets and crowd work, by contrast, DeMille was exacting. Produced by Paramount, it opened in August 1935. The framing the film adopts, that the expedition went to preserve Christianity in Jerusalem, is the film’s own; the campaign historians describe is a good deal more tangled than that.