Lorna Doone

The painful thing about this film is the grotesque distortion of the original novel. Unfortunately, this is what Hollywood used to do with great classics in the early 50s - there are numerous examples, like for instance Henry King's "King of the Khyber Rifles" with Tyrone Power, reducing him to a puppet and the story to shambles. Here at least the surroundings are true to the book - a recklessly romantic landscape with that stupendous waterfall as the centre of the stage, the music is also very well contrived, but all the rest is just common Hollywood artifice. They try to sugar it with some swashbuckling scenes, great sword fights, a royal intrigue (missing in the novel) and villains as wicked as possible. This was not worth seeing except for the colours, the settings, the romance (more for Barbara Hale than for Richard Greene) and the characters of Charles II and Ron Randell as Tom Faggus, the only fresh touch of humour in this depthless hollowness.