Re-presenting History: Ivanhoe on the Screen

Srebnick | Re-presenting History: Ivanhoe on the Screen Walter Srebnick Pace University Re-presentingHistory:IvanhoeontheScreen Isaac ofYork (FelixAyImer) and Rebecca (ElizabethTaylor) in lvanhoe(]%2). 46 I Film & History The Medieval Period in Film | Special In-Depth Section When Braveheart and Mel Gibson won Oscars for best picture and best director in 1995, Hollywood was for the first time acknowledging the genre ofthe medieval epic. The outstanding model ofthis genre is the 1952 MGM film Ivanhoe, the first film of its kind to attempt what Hollywood considered an accurate recreation ofthe Middle Ages. While Braveheartis ostensibly the saga ofthe thirteenth-century Scottish rebel hero William Wallace, Ivanhoe is the cinematic recreation of a classic Sir Walter Scott novel of nationhood and romance set in late-twelfth-century England. Both films, however, reveal more about the time periods in which they were created than they do about their fictionalized medieval settings. Just as the Middle Ages ofBraveheart reflects the restlessness, anti-government sensibility, and culture ofviolence ofmid-1990s America, Ivanhoe's more courtly, idealized Middle Ages represents the temper and political stresses of 1950s America and ofHollywood in particular. As such, it is a unique document in the cultural history ofAmerican medievalism and a window on that age. Released in 1952, Ivanhoe followed the classical Hollywood formula of adapting a revered novel to the screen. Audiences were familiar with its representation of the Middle Ages as a time when romance coexisted with brutality, since the novel had been required reading in American high schools until the Second World War. The actual title of the film in the opening credits is, in fact, Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. The product of the collaboration ofMGM producer Pandro S. Berman and MGM director of production Dore Schary, Ivanhoe stars Robert Taylor in the title role, the young Elizabeth Taylor as the Jewess Rebecca, and Joan Fontaine as Ivanhoe's betrothed, Rowena. The film was in part Hollywood's response to the competition that television posed in 1952, exploiting the visual and narrative sweep and the color that the newer medium could not yet bring into people's homes. Apart from its drama and pageantry, however, the film is a product of the culture of the early Cold War period in America, a culture that included McCarthyism, the Hollywood ten, and blacklists, as well as the problem of intolerance and of anti-Semitism in particular. Not surprisingly, this culture also mandated narrowly inscribed domestic identities for women. The intersection of this culture and the film is the topic of this essay. Set in the late twelfth century, the film Ivanhoe contains four main narrative actions, all centered around its hero, the Saxon knight Wilfred of Ivanhoe. It begins with Ivanhoe's return from the Holy Land to an England ruled by an oppressive Norman nobility, whose rightful king, the crusading Richard the Lionhearted, is being held for a large ransom in Austria. Ivanhoe then rallies and unifies the Saxons, and raises Richard's ransom with the aid of a Jew, Isaac ofYork, and Isaac's daughter, Rebecca, who falls in love with him and heals his wounds. Finally, Ivanhoe rescues Rebecca from the Normans just as Richard is restored to the throne. Significantly, Isaac and Rebecca, and, by extension, the Jews in the film, are not only aligned with Ivanhoe, they become champions of the cause ofEnglish national unity and of the restoration of Richard to the throne. However, Rebecca's love for Ivanhoe is doomed, as he chooses his betrothed, Rowena, over Rebecca at the film's end. These plot elements are connected by three combat sequences that are the cinematic heart of the film. The first is a joust at the lists in Ashby, where Ivanhoe bests five different Norman knights and rallies the downtrodden Saxons. Midway through the film, Saxon bowmen besiege Torquilstone, the Norman castle where Ivanhoe, Isaac, Rebecca, and Rowena are imprisoned. At the film's conclusion, there is a single combat to the death between Ivanhoe and a Norman knight, de Bois Guilbert, with the hero fighting for the life of Rebecca, who has been tried and condemned as a witch by the cowardly Prince John and his Norman henchmen...