1965 - THE WAR LORD, attempt at an intimate epic

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.

1981 - SPHINX - HItchcock wanna be thriller and travelogue

Actress and model Lesley-Anne Down was fairly hot in the mid 70's.  Today I doubt most people would have a hard time even recalling exactly who she was and what she appeared in.  Down was chiefly known for appearing in the British upper class/lower class drama Upstairs, Downstairs.  That show was the Downton Abbey of it's day and was very popular on PBS, sound familiar?

Down tried to use her popularity on that show to jump into a film career. She did a number of supporting roles in films before she got her big break in the film Sphinx.  Sphinx was directed by a fairly decent director, Franklin J, Schaffner who had directed Patton and was based on a novel by the then hot writer Robin Cook.  Sphinx is a thriller set in Egypt about the illegal buying and selling of ancient artifacts,  Lesley-Anne Down plays a noted Egyptologist who just happens to look like a hot model.  She pretty much throws any credibility this film has into the garbage.

On the positive side for this film, it is extremely well photographed and is if anything a nice record of all the traditional tourist hot spots of Egypt,  the Pyramids, The Valley of the Kings, Cairo, etc.  On the negative side the plot has a lot of holes and coincidences that it really stretches credibility to the point of maximum tensile strength.  

Lesley-Anne Down couldn't carry this film and it was back to TV movies and mini series for her after Sphinx flopped at the box office.  Another film with a miscast actor that suffered from the miscasting.

118 minutes, screenplay by John Byrum.