Saturday, August 22, 2020

Movie review - "King Richard and the Crusaders" (1954) **1/2

 Better than I'd been led to believe. Laurence Harvey is quite good as a dashing knight hero. Virginia Mayo is silly. Rex Harrison is in brownface and sings songs but he's fun. So too is George Sanders.

It was expensive but a lot of scenes look cheap - two actors in a tent. George Sanders spends a lot of time lying down in bed sick. The plot has nasty English knights trying to cause trouble. It's actually quite nice to the Arabs, this movie.

It's just so silly but there's lots of action and at least the three male leads are all uniformly miscast so it works coherently. Michael Pate is a villain as is Robert Douglas. Virginia Mayo is there.

The Medveds listed this among the 50 Worst Movies of All Time. That is not, not true. I mean it's dumb but... I was taken with it.

They get around the dodginess of the Crusades by having Harrison help Sanders take out some treacherous knights.

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