Movies on the Crusades

[Inkpaduta]

I am currently teaching a course on the Crusades. I have shown the movie Kingdom of Heaven and had a good discussion on the film.
I am also aware of the TV series Nightfall that is on. Are there other movies on the Crusades I could use? Looking for recommendations.

Thanks!

[Bogdanwaz]

There's the Swedish movie Arn The Knight Templar, very good.

The 1954 movie King Richard and the Crusaders, based on Sir Walter Scott's novel The Talisman with Rex Harrison as Saladin.

The 1935 movie The Crusades about Richard the Lionheart, a very Hollywood version of history.

[Bogdanwaz]

If you are looking at the Baltic Crusades, there is of course Alexander Nevsky and Krzyzacy or The Black Cross, a 1960 Polish epic about the Battle of Grunwald.

[carlos marighela]

Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

[Kitsune]

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

[Anderson Collection]

Saladin the Victorious (1963) directed by Youssef Chahine

[Calimero]

El Cid (1961) 

[James Holloway]

"King Richard and the Crusaders" (1954) has Rex Harrison in regrettable brownface as Saladin.

[Arthur]

The Crusades in the Holy Land aren't a subject cinema tackled all that often. Most of the relevant films are listed in the wikipedia page below :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Crusades_films

There's also a very old French TV series from the 1960's entitled Thibaud The Crusader (Thibaud ou les croisades in the original French). It looks pretty cheap and awfully dated now but I suppose it retains an old-fashioned charm of its own in a way. All episodes can be found on YouTube although they're all on the original French without English subtitles :

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv-DA0JolucRFGB-rOJllLb-MbGdlaX1d

When I was a kid, I loved the rousing opening credits theme by Georges Delerue though.

[FierceKitty]

Kingdom of Heaven would be worth a whole class about its inaccuracies.

[Arthur]

Every contemporary film dealing with the Crusades is bound to be inaccurate in many regards for a simple economic reason : these expensive productions aimed at mainstream audiences (who in most cases know precious little about the medieval world) must recoup their budget and therefore be in tune with modern concerns and sensibilities if they are to appeal to the public out there. Make Balian of Ibelin or Guy de Lusignan behave as they did historically and most spectators will probably complain that they can't make sense of these characters or their worldview as they appear totally alien to us. Throw in the added challenge of making the impossibly complex political environment of 12th century Middle East understandable to laymen and you'll inevitably end with medieval screen characters who think and react like early 21st century people - or at least the 21st century notion of what a medieval person was like.

Kingdom of Heaven is certainly filled with inaccuracies and egregious anachronisms but it is far from being the worst offender on the historical film market in that respect, and it does get a number of things right too - a sense of time and place in particular. I personally consider it a fine piece of filmmaking and enjoy it very much despite not being blind to the many ways in which it obviously strays from history.   

[armchairgeneral]

There was a 1980 BBC series dramatising The Talisman which I recall enjoying at the time but it might be a bit dated now.

https://www.amazon.com/The-Talisman/dp/B07C13SRY1

[Will Bailie]

You could look at Terry Jones' Crusades documentary series.  Mixes in humour and is biased towards a 'look how bad they were' point of view (several of the historians that contributed to the series complained that their views were misrepresented).

[FierceKitty]

Every contemporary film dealing with the Crusades is bound to be inaccurate in many regards for a simple economic reason : these expensive productions aimed at mainstream audiences (who in most cases know precious little about the medieval world) must recoup their budget and therefore be in tune with modern concerns and sensibilities if they are to appeal to the public out there. Make Balian of Ibelin or Guy de Lusignan behave as they did historically and most spectators will probably complain that they can't make sense of these characters or their worldview as they appear totally alien to us. Throw in the added challenge of making the impossibly complex political environment of 12th century Middle East understandable to laymen and you'll inevitably end with medieval screen characters who think and react like early 21st century people - or at least the 21st century notion of what a medieval person was like.

Kingdom of Heaven is certainly filled with inaccuracies and egregious anachronisms but it is far from being the worst offender on the historical film market in that respect, and it does get a number of things right too - a sense of time and place in particular. I personally consider it a fine piece of filmmaking and enjoy it very much despite not being blind to the many ways in which it obviously strays from history.   

I didn't know there were any contemporary films dealing with the crusades. Hell, they'd barely got beyond mosaics!

[janner]

What is the level of your students (High School, Primary) and what is your objective, i.e. understand the crusades or how they are remembered?