This is one - perhaps the only one - of old Sequoia Charlton Heston's best films. As an actor Heston is so wooden he makes Laurence Harvey look like a Mexican jumping bean yet here he is surrounded by a photogenic landscape and a cast and crew who exploit it to the full. It's a neat reverse take on the bog-standard 'epic' in which high-tech battles are everything and any 'love interest' is shoehorned into the background and given just enough screen time to justify the macho lads taking their wives and/or girl friends along; here we have a love story filling the frame so much so that we resent the skirmishes and full-scale battles that distract us from the star-crossed lovers who represent an unlikely pairing, a lowly peasant girl, who in reality would have been illiterate yet here is strangely eloquent, and the high-born nobleman as portrayed by Mr. Mahogany. It stands up well. Catch it if you can.
Review of The War Lord
