Quarto comandamento

I've never been able to shake this movie. Although I hated it while watching it, its authority convinced me utterly that its portrait of medieval castle life as lonely, dreary, and brutal (contradicting the swashbuckling fantasies in which many of us are apt to indulge) is the way it probably was. Indeed, the recollection of that awful, far-flung, yet confining world overrides and incapacitates every representation of the period I've seen since. It must be one of the most convincing views of a historical era ever put on film. The film itself is brutal; that was one reason I hated watching it; but in retrospect I believe there was no other way to tell the story fairly, and certainly it's the humanity of Beatrice, not the inhumanity of her surroundings, that the film leaves as its final impression. If this isn't a great film, it's a commanding and uncompromising one.