Ivanhoe

One of the vintage MGM costume epics from the early '50s when Thorpe was making countless medieval movies 'over at Metro' (this usually meant on location in England). Ivanhoe is one of the best, with Robert Taylor in the title role, Elizabeth Taylor as Rebecca, and Fontaine as Rowena. The dialogue and script are fatuously Americanised from Scott's original, but these chivalric Hollywood sagas still have a strange poetic quality about them, perhaps partly because of the way they unscrupulously and inaccurately ransacked literature and history for ideas and images.