Staying in the distant past, John Huston adapts a novel by Hans Kroningsberger with a script by Dale Wasserman, takes us into fourteenth century France and a romantic Romance, a story of love in the middle of conflict and war with changing sides and hatred. Feeling like a less compelling version of the same ideas at the heart of The Night of the Iguana, A Walk with Love and Death is another film of Huston's through the sixties that could have been more but simply settled.
Heron de Foix (Assi Dayan) is a student from Paris on a quest to make it to the sea, presumably Calais, walking alone through the unfamiliar countryside and facing the hatred between classes when a poor, old man is sentenced to death for no apparent reason. He comes upon a castle owned by Pierre of St. Jean (Joseph O'Conor) who lives there with his daughter Claudia (Anjelica Huston). Heron only spends a night before continuing on his journey, but it's enough to fall in love with Claudia. There are a couple of small events that Heron witnesses, most memorably coming upon an acting troupe that has killed a noble and will eat his horse, but news quickly reaches him that the St. Jean castle has been burned and everyone killed. He quickly turns back to find that Claudia survived, protected in a church, and the two start their journey off together towards the sea and a promise of new freedom.
The film is most interesting stylistically. Recalling Huston's visual choices in The Bible: In the Beginning..., the film has this green, Romantic quality that fits well with the setting. It's matched by a certain airy quality to the performances, mostly from the young Anjelica Huston in her first credited acting role, her father managing to get a perfectly fine performance from her in the process. Dayan is also in his first credited acting role here, and he's mostly just playing the earnest young man who watches strange things around him.
The two end up heading towards the castle owned by her uncle, Robert the Elder (John Huston) who lives there with his son, her cousin, Robert of Loris (Anthony Higgins), where the Elder promises that he's going to join the rebellion of peasants against the gentry. Things go from bad to worse when the knight Sir Meles (John Hallam) kills Robert the Elder in combat and decides that Robert the Younger must be punished for his father's commitment to the rebellion, leaving the pair of Heron and Claudia nowhere to hide anymore, necessitating them to flee once more.
Ultimately, the film is about two people who wander through a war-torn countryside, finding nowhere they can hide that will let them love, and coming to the conclusion that even in the face of death, they have each other. It's a very materialist viewpoint that never really moves me very much, and it's the same sort of thing that Huston has been saying on some level for a while, one could argue from the beginning of his career with The Maltese Falcon. It's a nice little message that really needs to be carried by compelling dramatics, and the meandering journey that Heron takes through northern France while trying to hold onto Claudia is...fine. It's not the most compelling portrait of two young people in love in the world, and the terror of the countryside never reaches any kind of serious pitch.
I was also reminded of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal as I watched. There are similar settings and situations between the two, but the apocalyptic nature of Bergman's vision of Medieval Sweden is so much more complete than Huston's vision of Medieval France which doesn't seem all that willing to commit to the vision itself. There's a point in the final moments of this film where everyone but the two main characters simply vanish without explanation, leaving them alone in their love, but the dialogue between them shows that they think that death is just around the corner. The maintenance of the green pastoral aesthetic to this point betrays the film's seemingly central point about the coming end, and yet there's a moment early, with the acting troupe at night, that feels, aesthetically, to be of a piece with where the ending goes.
Vincent Canby coined the phrase the "tired period" for roughly this section of John Huston's career, and it just keeps fitting in my mind. He did the bare minimum to get the page to the screen, framing things perfectly satisfactorily while getting good performances from his actors, but he never seems to try and push the films to something more. That this film was actually so expensive for 20th Century Fox is something of a surprise because it looks like the kind of film that someone like Robert Bresson could have managed in France for a fraction of the cost. I'm not sure what Huston was spending his money on because it looks like he's just filming in existing locations in Ireland.
Anyway, the film is fine. It's not really good, but it's far from bad. It looks good. It's acted well. It has a point. However, it just feels like Huston could have pushed it into a better direction, elevating the material, and chose to simply film it as it was, offering nothing but his technical prowess to the production when it needed a creative hand to move it more.
Heron de Foix (Assi Dayan) is a student from Paris on a quest to make it to the sea, presumably Calais, walking alone through the unfamiliar countryside and facing the hatred between classes when a poor, old man is sentenced to death for no apparent reason. He comes upon a castle owned by Pierre of St. Jean (Joseph O'Conor) who lives there with his daughter Claudia (Anjelica Huston). Heron only spends a night before continuing on his journey, but it's enough to fall in love with Claudia. There are a couple of small events that Heron witnesses, most memorably coming upon an acting troupe that has killed a noble and will eat his horse, but news quickly reaches him that the St. Jean castle has been burned and everyone killed. He quickly turns back to find that Claudia survived, protected in a church, and the two start their journey off together towards the sea and a promise of new freedom.
The film is most interesting stylistically. Recalling Huston's visual choices in The Bible: In the Beginning..., the film has this green, Romantic quality that fits well with the setting. It's matched by a certain airy quality to the performances, mostly from the young Anjelica Huston in her first credited acting role, her father managing to get a perfectly fine performance from her in the process. Dayan is also in his first credited acting role here, and he's mostly just playing the earnest young man who watches strange things around him.
The two end up heading towards the castle owned by her uncle, Robert the Elder (John Huston) who lives there with his son, her cousin, Robert of Loris (Anthony Higgins), where the Elder promises that he's going to join the rebellion of peasants against the gentry. Things go from bad to worse when the knight Sir Meles (John Hallam) kills Robert the Elder in combat and decides that Robert the Younger must be punished for his father's commitment to the rebellion, leaving the pair of Heron and Claudia nowhere to hide anymore, necessitating them to flee once more.
Ultimately, the film is about two people who wander through a war-torn countryside, finding nowhere they can hide that will let them love, and coming to the conclusion that even in the face of death, they have each other. It's a very materialist viewpoint that never really moves me very much, and it's the same sort of thing that Huston has been saying on some level for a while, one could argue from the beginning of his career with The Maltese Falcon. It's a nice little message that really needs to be carried by compelling dramatics, and the meandering journey that Heron takes through northern France while trying to hold onto Claudia is...fine. It's not the most compelling portrait of two young people in love in the world, and the terror of the countryside never reaches any kind of serious pitch.
I was also reminded of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal as I watched. There are similar settings and situations between the two, but the apocalyptic nature of Bergman's vision of Medieval Sweden is so much more complete than Huston's vision of Medieval France which doesn't seem all that willing to commit to the vision itself. There's a point in the final moments of this film where everyone but the two main characters simply vanish without explanation, leaving them alone in their love, but the dialogue between them shows that they think that death is just around the corner. The maintenance of the green pastoral aesthetic to this point betrays the film's seemingly central point about the coming end, and yet there's a moment early, with the acting troupe at night, that feels, aesthetically, to be of a piece with where the ending goes.
Vincent Canby coined the phrase the "tired period" for roughly this section of John Huston's career, and it just keeps fitting in my mind. He did the bare minimum to get the page to the screen, framing things perfectly satisfactorily while getting good performances from his actors, but he never seems to try and push the films to something more. That this film was actually so expensive for 20th Century Fox is something of a surprise because it looks like the kind of film that someone like Robert Bresson could have managed in France for a fraction of the cost. I'm not sure what Huston was spending his money on because it looks like he's just filming in existing locations in Ireland.
Anyway, the film is fine. It's not really good, but it's far from bad. It looks good. It's acted well. It has a point. However, it just feels like Huston could have pushed it into a better direction, elevating the material, and chose to simply film it as it was, offering nothing but his technical prowess to the production when it needed a creative hand to move it more.