The Beloved Rogue dvd movie.|
The Beloved Rogue dvd videos, dvd movies reviews |
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List Price: $24.99 Our Price: $22.99 You Save: $2 Features • Black & White • DVD-Video • Silent • NTSC In Theaters : 12 March, 1927 DVD Release : 25 June, 2002 |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | The Beloved Rogue |
| Hollywood used to have a thing about turning the clock back four or five hundred years, locating things in a European capital, and dressing the Big Star in tights while having him clatter over the rooftops or through the trees. Come to think of it, movies are still partial to tights and rooftop cavortings, although today's heroes are apt to wear a more elaborate costume, move faster than a speeding bullet, and are almost always forced to suffer through at least one origins' story.
The extra-normal powers enjoyed by FranA ois Villon, the fifteenth century first great poet of France,' seems to have been a limitless capacity for wine and an uncanny talent for spontaneous creation of metered verse. At least so says the 1927 silent THE BELOVED ROGUE, a biography of sorts starring the ever-entertaining John Barrymore. I haven't been able to squeeze many facts about the historic Villon out of the internet. What it does have to say is a little more piquant than what you'll get from the movie. Apparently, Villon was a thief, robber, and may have killed a priest or two during his career. Banished a number of times for his crimes, Villon was sentenced to death by hanging at least once. More immediately, an operetta based on Villon, The Vagabond King, premiered in 1925. The Vagabond King would be turned into a movie twice, in 1930 and 1956. In 1938 the Justin Huntly McCarthy play would be adapted to If I Were King, starring Ronald Coleman. Popular guy, that Villon. THE BELOVED ROGUE may be the only movie about Villon not based on the operetta. Not having seen any of the other films I can't attest to comparisons, but on it's own this movie is a lot of fun. Villon, as legend has it, was born on the day of Joan of Arc's martyrdom, and our first glimpse of the toddler is an amusing scene that shows him refusing the bottle unless wine is mixed in with the milk. Villon grows into the King of Fools, a low caste lover of life who chums around with silent film comics Slim Summerville and Mack Swain. This seems to be something of a light romantic comedy, but it's hard to tell with silent movies. In any event, the humor induces smiles rather than guffaws. To add some class conflict grit into the proceedings the movie has Villon fall in love with the beautiful princess Charlotte de Vauxcelles, played by the transcendently beautiful Marceline Day. The bent and seedy King Louis XI (played with decrepit aplomb by German actor Conrad Veidt) banishes Villon from his beloved Paris not, as the history books seem to indicate, for murder and mayhem, but because Villon insults the foul, Princess Charlotte chasing, Duke of Burgundy. Although it's relatively breezy and easygoing, THE BELOVED ROGUE has a few strange, rough edges. This is the second John Barrymore silent film I've seen, and it's the second one in which he's gone through physical torment for Love. In this case it's a jarringly well-staged trial by fire. Some of the minor players are strange, too. There's a bouncy dwarf and Dick Sutherland as the palace executioner. Sutherland suffered from acromegaly, a disease that distorts the facial feature. It's the same disease Rondo Hatton - the Creeper in the Basil Rathbone/Sherlock Holmes The Pearl of Death - suffered from. In other words there's something side-show exploitative to this movie that some may find more jarring than entertaining. |
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