| Lionheart | |
|---|---|
Promotional film poster |
|
| Directed by | Franklin J. Schaffner |
| Produced by | Francis Ford Coppola and Jack Schwartzman (executive producers), Talia Shire and Stanley O'Toole (producers) |
| Written by | Menno Meyjes (story), Menno Meyjes and Richard Outten (screenplay) |
| Starring | Eric Stoltz Gabriel Byrne |
| Music by | Jerry Goldsmith |
| Cinematography | Alec Mills |
| Editing by | David Bretherton Richard Haines |
| Distributed by | Orion Pictures (theatrical) Warner Bros. (later) |
| Running time | 104 minutes |
| Language | English |
Lionheart (also known as Lionheart: The Children's Crusade) is a 1987 adventure film directed by Academy Award-winner Franklin J. Schaffner. Loosely based on the historical Children's Crusade, the story follows an exiled young knight, played by Eric Stoltz, who leads a band of orphans to join the Crusade of Richard the Lionheart while protecting the children from the Black Prince (Gabriel Byrne), a disillusioned crusader turned child slave trader. Francis Ford Coppola, who had initially planned to direct the film, is credited as Executive Producer. Coppola's sister, Talia Shire, and brother-in-law, Jack Schwartzman, also produced the film. The screenplay was written by Menno Meyjes and Richard Outten from a story by Meyjes. Oscar-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith wrote the score.
Contents |
Lionheart was a big budget movie filmed in Hungary and Portugal utilizing several castles and hundreds of Slavic children hired as extras. The movie was Schaffner’s penultimate film and represented the final collaboration between the director and his friend Jerry Goldsmith (together they previously worked on Planet of the Apes, Patton, Papillon, and The Boys from Brazil).
The distributor of the film, Orion Pictures, delayed its theatrical release but when they finally did show it in August 1987 in Canada, the limited release garnered negative reviews. Therefore the movie was largely unseen until being shown on pay television and finally released on VHS tape and DVD. Leonard Maltin’s review is a rare complimentary one: “Richly produced, well acted, with a superb Jerry Goldsmith score, it’s a shame this sincere, if slight, film received almost no theatrical release.”[1] Variety's reviewer watched the film at the Cineplex Odeon Canada Square theatre in Toronto on August 18, 1987. The review appeared in the August 26, 1987 issue describing the movie as "a flaccid, limp kiddie adventure yarn with little of its intended grand epic sweep realized" and accurately predicted that the movie "should head straight for the home video shelves".[2][3]
In 1987 Varèse Sarabande released the soundtrack on two discs, with Jerry Goldsmith conducting the Hungarian State Opera Orchestra. Warner Home Video brought out a VHS tape in July 1994 and issued a DVD in December 2009 on the Warner Archives label.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||