Ivanhoe

There are still naive moviegoers like myself who feel a shiver run up our spines when the music swells and a troup of horses charge over a hill. Hollywood in general, and Ivanhoe in particular, will thrive on people like us. Changing from spectacle to spectacle, Ivanhoe entertains even though it leaves large vacuums of dialogue and acting in its wake.

You remember the plot from high school: after the Third Crusade, Richard the Lion-Hearted languishes in the castle of his Austrian kidnapper while Wilfred of Ivanhoe returns to England to try to scrape up ran-some money for him. But why bother with plot when there are horses and lances and axe-fights and slain knights dropping into moats like so many pebbles? The seige of Torquilstone castle is especially good. It starts in the biggest shower of arrows since Henry V, and culminates in a first-rate conflagration.

Like Joan of Arc and Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe's acting is partly swallowed in the lavish scenery. But the script hurts it even more. Hollywood scriptwriters cannot seem to shake the notion that knights and their ladies were intellectuals, whose every conversation sparkled with neat phrases, like a Stevenson campaign speech. Although they have unshakled the dialogue somewhat from Scott's pedantic and dated prose, they fall far short of realism. The brush off the villian by the heroine, usually accomplished clearly by "get out, you varlet," becomes: "Farewell, and may each stone of this vaulted roof find a tongue to echo it into your ear."

Most of the cast struggle bravely with the script and lose. Robert Taylor is Ivanhoe, and he might as well have kept his iron casque on his face all the time, for all the emotion he musters. Joan Fontaine is just as dull as Rowena. Elizabeth Taylor shows better, partly because you have only to look to appreciate her, and partly because her role of Rebecca, the Jewess accused of sorcery, offers a good deal more meat than the others. The only actors who make their lives come alive are the stalwarts of the Old Vic, Emlyn Williams and Felix Aylmer. They obviously feel more at home in the world of flowery speech.