IS THAT A BROADSWORD IN YOUR HAND OR ARE YOU JUST GLAD TO SEE ME? WE DO BATTLE WITH "THE WAR LORD"

THE WAR LORD (1965) in its own strange little way, stands apart from the usual overblown 1960's clanging-swords-and armor costume epic. These films,featuring Charlton Heston clenching his jaw, along with vast collections of horses, crowds. castles and flaming arrows, usually filmed overseas in Spain or Italy ("Ben Hur", "El Cid", "55 Days In Peking", etc)  "The War Lord", however, didn't stray far from Los Angeles, shooting entirely on the back lot at Universal studios.

This strategic choice makes sense for the film, since it functions more as an overheated romantic drama that also happens to throw in Viking pirates, catapults and arrow-perforated stunt men hurling themselves off rickety battle towers.

Heston, ably doing his template signature character, the battle-hardened but conflicted epic hero, plays a Medieval knight charged by his boss, The Duke of whatever to seize and control some scrawny patch of coastal real estate. Why anyone wants this place is beyond me.....it features a lone prop department castle and a raggedy bunch of villagers who pay little attention to their priest (Maurice Evans) since they've all become orthodox Druids, dressing up as prancing chickens and goats at their official ceremonies, like weddings and such.)

But Heston's gotta do what Heston's gotta do, shlepping along his small army, including his grizzled, gruff mentor (the reliably grizzled and gruff Richard Boone) and his wild card jealous brother (Guy Stockwell, having a ball chewing the scenery.) Not long after parking themselves in the crumbling castle, a newly smitten Heston exercises his knightly privilege to pluck a Druid ingenue (Rosemary Forsyth) for sexual sampling on the eve of her wedding, This, needless to say, doesn't sit well with the Druid-babe's intended, her childhood BFF.(James Farantino) So Jimmy and the villagers round up the rampaging Viking guys, whose leader has a long standing beef with Heston,having slain Chuck's dad way back when....., and further aggravated by Heston and company having inadvertently captured the Barbarian Chief's toddler Prince..during their last clash. Yes, boys and girls....time to fire up the flaming arrows and check the spring action on the catapults.

Director Franklin Schaffner struggles to give this stuff a more literary, intimate sheen....but ultimately, it comes down to how many guys you get to see swan diving off the top of the castle with arrows stuck in their bellies. Without access to thousands of Spanish army recruits like the other competing epics of the time,  Schaffner  makes do with a moderately large company of Hollywood stunt men who put in a lot of Universal studio overtime falling, screaming, clutching their spear-pierced tummies and running around on fire.

The film does come with a nice bonus, though.....a superb score, both beautiful and rousing, by master movie composer Jerome Morross...also the composer  for William Wyler's "The Big Country" arguably one of the best movie scores ever written.

Okay, now that you know bloated costume battle epics are yet another Beached Quill guilty pleasure, we hold our ceremonial sword over this movie and dub it with 3 flaming arrows.