Ivanhoe Reviews

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since it seemed to have a decent reputation (it was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award and it was apparently a big box-office success when it was released), I thought I might as well check it out. On top of that, when I was studying English in College, I read ‘Waverley’, another book written by Walter Scott but, to be honest, it was probably the most tedious book I had to read at the time. Still, I was always intrigued by this other story which was probably the most famous book written by Scott. Well, unfortunately, I really had a hard time to care about the damned thing after all. It’s funny that this movie is described as an epic swashbuckling action flick when, in fact, most of the movie was about the characters having some rather tedious conversations. The fact that I saw it on the BBC without subtitles probably didn’t help though. Sure, I have to admit that there we some action scenes and I guess they were fairly impressive for a movie which was produced at the beginning of the 50’s. However, the most intriguing thing was the love triangle involving Ivanhoe, Rowena and Rebecca. Indeed, Joan Fontaine and Elizabeth Taylor were both super charismatic back in those days but, even though it made more sense that Ivanhoe would choose Rowena, Rebecca, a Jewish girl, was actually much more mysterious and interesting. So, it was a rather intriguing situation but you might wonder why it was introduced in the first place since they didn’t do anything really interesting with it. The fact that Ivanhoe was such a perfect righteous boring hero was also a major issue. Anyway, to conclude, even though the damned thing didn’t really impress me, I have to admit that it is still worth a look, especially if you like the genre.