In the good old medieval days, a Norman Knight is sent to Normandy to rule over a Druid village. While there he avails himself of a local custom by taking part in the right as Warlord to sleep with a newlywed wife before her honeymoon. Needless to say all hell breaks out as the locals storm the knight's castle to get her back.
This is a Universal studios film all the way. Charlton Heston plays the knight but the rest of the cast is made up of contract players from their casting department. Richard Boone is Heston’s second in command playing Richard Boone as usual. Guy Stockwell was in about every Universal TV movie you could watch around this time. Probably the biggest casting problem with this film is the female lead played by yet another Universal contract player, model/actress Rosemary Forsyth. She is so bland and uninteresting it's hard to believe she could be a woman who fills men's hearts with "lust" much less "like" as they say.
The director was Franklin J. Schaffner who is five years from his big critical and commercial hit Patton. Russell Metty was the cinematographer who had previously worked for Orson Welles on Touch of Evil. The War Lord was filmed on the back lot which probably gave the studio executives a lot of say on the picture. All said, it's an interesting if overlong film.
The running time is 123, the writers were John Collier and Millard Kaufman.
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