User reviews

The two biggest reasons for seeing 'A Walk with Love and Death' were seeing father and daughter John Huston (as director) and Anjelica (in the lead role and her film debut) collaborating together in the first of three films. The others being the infinitely better 'Prizzi's Honor' (which garnered Anjelica a deserved Oscar win) and 'The Dead' (John's last film). Have loved Anjelica ever since 'Ever After: A Cinderella Story', a film still close to my heart, and John directed a number of classics such as 'The African Queen', 'The Asphalt Jungle' and 'Treasure of the Sierra Madre'.

Neither are at their best here by any stretch. Did like the concept for 'A Walk with Love and Death' and really wanted to like it considering my love for Anjelica and John, but this was one of those difficult to rate and review films. And this reviewer has always had a bit of a nightmare summing up her thoughts on films that left her mixed or/and conflicted into a review, and it is going to be obvious in this review. It is a contender for Anjelica's worst performance and when it comes to John's filmography it is a lesser effort (nowhere near as poor as 'Phobia' though).

'A Walk with Love and Death' does have good things. It is beautifully filmed with sumptuous costuming and settings that are very evocative of the period. Which is given a very intriguing and uncompromisingly unpredictable depiction in how it deals with social disruption. The music score is very haunting and dream-like.

Did think that a good job was done showing how combat and chaos was like at the time and what is shown is very realistic and not for the faint hearted.

Having said all of that, there are a number of strikes against 'A Walk with Love and Death'. Both Hustons are out of their depth, particularly Anjelica whose inexperience in acting and reluctance in doing the film come through loud and clear in a very wooden performance. John's direction is lethargic and lacks cohesion, there was a real sense that he had no idea what to do with the material which he was not at ease at. Assi Dayan does fare a little bit better in the acting stakes, but still is stiff and out of place and he has no chemistry with Anjelica.

Furthermore, 'A Walk with Love and Death' is very sluggishly paced from dragging out a pretty slightly plotted story, managing to make the already overlong length feel longer. Because of the sprawling all over the place structure the film lacks cohesion and at worst is borderline incoherent. The script is pure self-indulgence and over flowery, trying hard to be poetic and thought provoking but sounding like gibberish instead. None of the characters are fleshed out that well.

In conclusion, something of a moderately intriguing failure to be seen as a curio. 5/10.

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.

I would have preferred the film in Sepia or black and white. Everyone was a bit too made up for the 14th. Century. Interesting, thought provoking but only mildly entertaining. Certainly not one of John Huston's best efforts.

Walk with Life and Death, A (1969)

** (out of 4)

When people discuss the great or awful films in the career of John Huston, this effort here rarely gets mentioned and that's probably because even the most die-hard Huston fan either hasn't sat through it or simply can't make it through. Apparently Huston selected to do this as something small and personal and one does have to respect him for trying a poetic movie like this but in the end the thing just didn't work for me. A man (Assaf Dayan) "hears" the "calls" of the sea and decides to leave Paris and walk to it. Along the way he encounters various forms of violence and a blooming relationship with a young woman (Anjelica Huston) who soon joins him on his journey. This film wasn't popular when it was first released and it seems very few people have bothered checking it out since then even though we've got a legendary director and his famous daughter in her first role. From the reviews I've read there appear to be a few fans of the film and it's poetic vision but for me the thing was a pretty big misfire. One of the biggest problems is Anjelica who is simply way out of her range in this type of part. This would have been a challenging role for anyone let alone someone making their first acting appearance. At times she seems all over the place while at other times she seems as if she doesn't know where to turn. Dayan doesn't fair much better but at least he seems at ease going through everything on this journey. The film moves at a rather slow pace, which I didn't really mind as Huston was trying to build some atmosphere out of it. The dialogue, cinematography and even the music score are all used to be dream-like but it just never really came together for me. This isn't an awful movie or an embarrassing one but it just felt too empty for me.

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.

This is possibly Huston's purest film, by no means the most complex, but one in which he is least self-conscious and most able to let the creative process run free. It's the equivalent of Ingmar Bergman's "Virgin Spring", just as "Chinatown" might compare to "Cries and Whispers".

Huston's daughter, Angelica, contrary to some reviews above, fits extremely well, is not harsh-looking and unattractive, and is a superb casting. The difference between her looks as a teenager and as a woman are striking, but to call the casting "nepotism" is political correctness gone mad. Huston shouldn't ever be expected to conform to the codes of 21st century Mother Grundies.

Assaf Dayan may, paradoxically, have been helped by struggling a little in a language that was not his native tongue in conveying the sheer youth and hothouse growth of the character he's portraying. Contrast his performance as the psychotherapist in "Betipul", the Israeli TV series unceremoniously and unsubtly copied by HBO's "In Treatment". Age changes men as well as women, and in similar ways, even if Hollywood critics disagree.

Huston's movie is based on a curious but superb short novel, by a very underrated writer. Hans Konigsberger reminds me in some ways of Milan Kundera. He has the same flat intellectualised style contrasting starkly with the passion of the issues he's addressing. The novel takes about an hour to read and is well worth the effort.

Does someone know where I could buy a copy of the movie?

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.

An obscure movie from the master John Huston, what's hell it happens I really don't know, but for me a forgotten gem, set place during the Hundred Years War between England and France, a young French man Heron of Fois (Assaf Dayan) distressed by such killing and madness he decides leave Paris and start a journey towards to the sea, wondering leaves the country at overseas, along the way he meets several people, peasants, soldiers and a beauty lady Claudia (Anjelica Huston) whose he wrote a poetry, in exchange she gave him her silk scarf for good luck, late he meets a bunch of men back from a failed journey to Jerusalem, this small group are gathering newcomers to try again, the Pilgrim's leader asking him about everything, including women, if he wants follow them he needs forget all sins and treat the women as Devil's creatures, very soon he realizes that they are crazy and left them for good, when he finally reach near of shore, someone talk about an uprising of the peasants against Noblemen, then he returns to helps Lady Claudia which the castle was raided, a rarest movie to be found, where John Huston implies a sort of pureness in a world collapsed by an endless wars, a man looking for peace and freedom, an anti-war picture, shrewdly done by the prolific director, a must to see!!!

Resume:

First watch: 2020 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 8

This is a fairly dry, low budget medieval picture by John Huston and starring his daughter Angelica...LOOOONG before she emerged as one of our great actresses. She's very awkward here, and the role is awkwardly written and the whole thing simply doesn't work.

I have read some things Angelica herself wrote about this film -- that her father was often not active in her life, and that he wanted to do this film to sort of make things up to her, i.e., allow her to star in something he was doing. Also, that it was made to some degree to piggy-back on the popularity of Zeffirelli's '68 "Romeo and Juliet", which created a brief interest in romance films in medieval settings. That makes perfect sense, but the film "A Walk with Love and Death" doesn't work on any of those levels, unfortunately.

A rather sad waste of some amazing talent. Knowing what Angelica has become, you have to wonder what she could have done acting-wise under different circumstances. Also, it's particularly unkind to cast a young woman of her looks -- interesting, but harsh and definitely not "pretty" -- in this sort of role, where her lack of prettiness seems at odds with the character. You can't help but feel sorry for her here!

You can file this one under "every dad thinks his daughter is beautiful", right next to Sophie Coppola's debut in "Godfather 3". (And nothing against either amazingly talented lady, but this further proves that nepotism not only is a bad idea, but IT DOESN'T WORK.)

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.

I saw this film on TV when I was a young man. I loved the music, the story and the characters. The sets were magical and the acting was perfect for this movie. The musical score was one of the best ever, and perfectly fit the times. It all made such an impression on me. That time in history came alive. I have the musical score (not the original but still a pretty good arrangement). I have two copies taken from the TV showings and I watch it every six months or so and am thrilled by each showing. I wish there were a fan club for "walk". These comments may seem simple and unsophisticated, but I wish every one could see this film; some might be as enchanted by it as I am.

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!