Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes (review)

In the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama's ground-breaking speech at Cairo University, this volume seems even more timely and important. Both Hollywood and the Holy Land are contested spaces, and both examine and intervene in each other's territory. In many ways, it is a mutual occupation.

Nickolas Haydock's extensive introduction provides a concise overview of the diverse contents of the volume and includes his own intense examinations of treatments of the Crusades in narratives and in media that are generally less well-known than most of the examples examined in the following essays. He discusses the videogame Assassin's Creed, which seems to have a peculiar obsession with an Ismailite sect of the Shia. He also examines the animated Saladin and the BBC series Monkey Dust, which includes an episode on the Crusades. He concludes this section with a discussion of Raymond Khoury's The Last Templar before going on to examine the interplay of representation and Crusade and the image of 'Taking the Cross.'

In 'Framing the West, Staging the East: Set Design, Location and Landscape in Cinematic Medievalism,' John M. Ganim provocatively investigates the implications of setting in a number of films, most amusingly in The Conqueror in which Utah stands in for Mongolia. More importantly, he shows how the long shot of Jerusalem (standardized, if not invented, by Cecil B. DeMille in The Crusades) opens the Holy City to appropriation by all those who gaze upon her.

Haydock's essay, 'Homeland Security: Northern Crusades Through the East-European Eyes of Alexander Nevsky and the Nevsky Tradition,' begins the close examination of particular films (or groups of films) that will occupy most of the rest of the volume. His important essay analyzes what is probably the best-known film (Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky) dealing with the least well-known Crusade (at least to Western viewers) examined in the volume. Even less-known are the Eastern films in the tradition that he discusses, particularly Frantisek Vlacil's Valley of the Bees.

In subsequent essays, Lorraine Stock ('Now Starring in the Third Crusade: Depictions of Richard I and Saladin in Films and Television Series') examines the Hollywood tradition (derived in large measure from Sir Walter Scott's The Talisman) of a close relationship between the two heroes and the role of Saladin as a healer. Paul B. Sturtevant examines Chahine's Saladin (probably the second most important film after Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky) in 'SaladiNasser: Nasser's Political Crusade in El Nasser Salah Ad-Din,' in which he carefully demonstrates how the film presents Saladin as an allegory for Nasser. While the film is propaganda, as Sturtevant stresses, it is pretty good propaganda and a significant correction of Hollywood's distortions of the East. Sturtevant's analysis is pertinent, although it sometimes feels as if he is being a little too apologetic for Chahine's politics and passions.

Lynne Ramey ('"Le geste que Turoldus declinet": History and Authorship in Frank Cassenti's Chanson de Roland') provides an elegant reading of one of the few films attempting to 'recreate' a medieval response to the Crusades. Kevin J. Harty ('Agenda Layered Upon Agenda: Anthony Mann's 1961 El Cid') and Tom Shippey ('El Cid: Defeat of the Cresentade') examine one of the more enduring and spectacular Crusade films and take us from the eighth-century Basque attack on Roland to the eleventh-century Castile of the heroic Cid. E.L. Risden ('Nobody but the Other Buddy: Hollywood, the Crusades, and Buddy Pictures') examines the trope of interracial friendships in Crusade films, including the relationship of Morgan Freeman and Kevin Costner in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and Balian (Orlando Bloom) and Nasir (Alexander Siddig) in Kingdom of Heaven, the most popular and most successful of the few recent films dealing with the Crusades.

The remaining essays treat...