The War Lord

A film set on the Normandy coast in the eleventh century. Chrysagon is a knight. He is sent to a coastal district in the duke's name; his task is to guard the shore and hold the tower. The district is not ordinary. The peasants are Christian in name but keep their old beliefs; they hold rites in the marsh and live by their own rules. The tower is ruined. It is repaired after a skirmish and Chrysagon settles in. There is a peasant girl called Bronwyn. The knight watches her and she is about to be married. Chrysagon remembers an old right. By a custom of the period a lord could claim a night with a bride on her wedding night. He uses it. Then he does not give her back. From there the film becomes a siege. The village rises, the girl's husband goes to the forces outside, and the tower is surrounded. What the narrative is interested in is not love but a claim of right: the film describes the price of a man using his own authority for his desire, and never clears the character. The brother's line matters. Draco is loyal to the tower but thought this decision wrong from the start. The period is unusually portrayed. The film shows no ornamented castle Middle Ages; there is mud, marsh, a wooden tower and cold. The siege scenes are at a realistic scale. Burning oil, ladders, arrows and a narrow gate. Charlton Heston championed the project for a long time and was unhappy with the studio's cutting of the film; those cuts are argued over in its production history. The source is a stage play. Charlton Heston, Richard Boone, Rosemary Forsyth and Guy Stockwell are in the cast. Franklin J. Schaffner directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes a dirty, distanced Middle Ages. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a hero; what the main character does is indefensible and the film does not try to change that.