A Walk with Love and Death

Never dull, always alive with authentic and rich scenes; unpredictable and interesting. The wooden acting of the leads is appropriate for two young people who are fresh out into the world. They are surrounded by an extravagant variety of characters of the late Middle Ages, all well portrayed and decently acted. The scenery is picturesque, the music is lilting and fair, and the plot veers between barbarisms and nobility. It has been beautifully filmed and the direction keeps the plot moving briskly. There is no fat, no wasted scenes, no stupidity. The story is believable and moving, a story of sensitive youths trying to survive in a world suddenly gone mad. The creatures who seek such chaos are trying to turn the world upside down; they seek their own order through chaos. They seek to rearrange the world into their own hideous image. This is a story of how civilized people deal with the carnage of progress.

Brilliant evocation of youth in a time of social disruption. Angelica Huston's best work. Fascinating direction by John Huston. Based on an excellent novel. Well realized. Good depiction of medieval society. All in all, well worth seeing.

Filmmaking legend John Huston's visually sumptuous, rousingly full-blooded, hugely undervalued 'A Walk With Love and Death (1968) is, for me, one of the more unfairly neglected works of 60s agitprop cinema. This rather cruel, emotionally visceral, oppressively dark tale of burgeoning love set against the squalling, brutalist backdrop of 14th century France, with its increasingly malign, irreligious mania and ceaseless warmongering has retained much of its power to draw you into this especially grim and turbulent epoch.

Unlike so many bloodless, pretty-plastic cinema couples I had a great sympathy for the desperate travails of naive, haughty, yet wholly innocent Claudia of St. Jean (Angelica Huston) and her earnest young paramour Heron of Foix (Assi Dayan), and I can readily imagine Terry Gilliam, Michael Winterbottom, Andrea Arnold, and Gaspar Noe might also appreciate Huston's doomily atmospheric, frequently distressing period masterpiece. A bold, triumphant expression of refined cinematic art made ever more divine by maestro Georges Delerue's sublime score! While 'A Walk With Love and Death' is certainly not without its missteps, it is quite obvious that Huston's majestic, witheringly unsentimental film has not only endured, the galvanizing themes of an impoverished, ruthlessly exploited minority angrily rising up against their mercenary oppressors is disturbingly relevant!

This film bends over backwards to look like old paintings and tapestries, and succeeds better than some others with ten times the budget.

Dayan is not a strong actor, and baby Angelica is even worse, but the film is worth watching if you're in a poetic frame of mind.

The story wanders and is lumpy in shape, yet I'm glad to have seen this movie and finished it with strong, lingering emotion.

A doodle from a great artist can be more interesting than a strained masterwork from a lesser talent. Worthwhile for those who still have nerve endings.

The movie is a thin, episodic journey through a landscape marked by battles and skirmishes and dangers - it doesn't aim for an epic quality (everything is very sparse) nor to analyze the political or social aspects of the situation (except in a brief appearance by Huston himself as a nobleman who's giving up his rank to join the peasants - he's much more vibrant and interesting than anyone else in the movie): actually it's a bit of a mystery what it DOES aim to do. Judged simply as an evocation of pure time and place, it's a bit too discreet and tidy - hardly the kind of attempt to conjure up messy verisimilitude that failed in "Revolution." Huston is fairly interesting and manages to convey both her noble blood and the idiosyncratic attitude that would have led her on this journey. The film's general discretion works against a compelling depiction of passion, and it ultimately seems to have worked its way merely to a teenage idyll of togetherness, which makes it hard to face up to the imminent tragedy. An odd item in Huston's filmography, sometimes exhibiting the awkwardness of a dubbed Continental item.