Lovespell
Picture: C
Sound: C Extras: D Film: C-
What were they thinking?
In 1979, yet another film involving the love affair between Tristan
(Nicholas Clay) and Isolde (Kate Mulgrew), but this was Mulgrew a few years after
the TV non-hit Mrs. Columbo and Lovespell just never works. Sure, it is a curio to see Richard Burton,
who is not even here enough to justify top billing or Nicholas Clay, later in
Guy Hamilton’s underrated Agatha Christie thriller Evil Under The Sun (1982). In that film, he romances a much older Diana
Rigg, but she seems somehow younger than Mulgrew does here. Didn’t director Tom Donovan learn anything
from Diana Ross in The Wiz?
Even Clay seems much older and bored stiff. The picture drags like crazy and is constantly
uninspired. So is the music,
cinematography and directing. In
comparison, Clash Of The Titans (also 1982) seems outright
innovative. Love triangles in historic
settings can backfire easily, as the recent First Knight sadly proved,
but even that had its moments and a bigger budget. Mulgrew’s sometimes droning voice also is a bit offsetting in the
more intimately intended scenes, and the scenes between the lovers had the
passions of a campfire recently extinguished.
The full screen, color (originally processed by Rank)
image is from an old analog composite transfer with poor Video Red and
clarity. Cinematographer Richard H.
Kline, A.S.C., just seems not to be able to help this hopeless project. It looks like it was composed for 1.85 X
1, but Cinerama could not save this film.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 is barely stereo if that, though it seems to have
been a theatrical monophonic release.
The music of Paddy Moloney and The Chieftains is sparse and no match for
their work in Stanley Kubrick’s masterwork Barry Lyndon (1975). There are, understandably, no extras, though
a trailer would have been interesting to catch.
Cyril Cusack and Geraldine Fitzgerald also cannot save the
film. We look forward to a better
version of the Tristan and Isolde story to review later, but Lovespell
is not it and best passed on. Some Star
Trek fans are sure to buy it anyhow.
- Nicholas Sheffo
