The British actor Sam Riley has been cast as Wilfred of Ivanhoe in director Iain Softley’s upcoming adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s novel about the troubles and victories of the disinherited Crusader knight in England after his return from the Holy Land. Riley is best known for his portrayal of the doomed Joy Division singer Ian Curtis in “Control.” He will shortly be seen as Sal Paradise, the narrator of “On the Road” in Walter Salles’s Kerouac adaptation.
“Ivanhoe,” reports Screen International, is a German-Spanish co-production with British and Belgian involvement. Written by John Brownlow and James Jacks, it will be filmed in 65mm, enabling higher resolution than 35mm.
The shooting of “Ivanhoe” will coincide with the centenary of the earliest films based on Scott’s romance. Herbert Brenon’s 1913 “Ivanhoe,” filmed in Wales, starred King Baggot, Hollywood’s first internationally famous American leading man and himself a writer and director. The long forgotten British stage and film actor Lauderdale Maitland played Ivanhoe in “Rebecca the Jewess,” released the same year.
Scott’s novel, published in 1820, predated the campaign for the emancipation of Jews in Britain. Although the moneylender Isaac is a stereotypically Shylockian figure, his daughter Rebecca, a gifted healer unrequitedly in love with Ivanhoe, is one of the most sympathetic characters in the book. In the 1952 Hollywood version, directed by Richard Thorpe, she was played by Elizabeth Taylor. Robert Taylor was Ivanhoe and Joan Fontaine was Rowena, the Saxon Ivanhoe loves – and the chivalric ideal of the virtuous lady.
Although it was MGM’s top earner of the year, Thorpe’s film shares the woodenness of many costume adventure films of the fifties. Equally weak was the 1958-59 British-made TV series starring Roger Moore, which despite its bigger budget paled in comparison with the contemporaneous “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” the legendary long-running series that made a star of Richard Greene.
The 1982 television film starring Anthony Andrews as Ivanhoe, James Mason as Isaac, and Sam Neill as the villainous Templar knight Brian de Bois-Guilbert was an advance on any previous versions; it was particularly impressive in its depiction of the tournament in which the mysterious Black Knight comes to Ivanhoe’s rescue and for David Robb’s drily humorous Robin Hood.
In 1997, Steven Waddington, the beefiest Ivanhoe yet, starred in the superior BBC miniseries – muddier, bloodier, and more grimly realistic than any previous adaptation. Iain Softley’s film promises to be the first epic “Ivanhoe” – as medieval tales go, it can hardly fail to be better than Ridley Scott’s rote and pointless “Robin Hood.”