MovieChat Forums > The Black Rose (1950) Discussion > Tyrone Power Rendered Impotent

Tyrone Power Rendered Impotent

posted 17 years ago by star-blazer
7 replies | jump to latest

"The Black Rose" = stinkweed. Its unprepossessing plot is shot full of holes. The poorly drawn characters are generally unsympathetic. Consider the atrocious casting of the film's leading roles: mature, very American Tyrone Power as a young Oxford scholar; juvenile French actress Cecile Aubry--as the (unconvincing) romantic interest--is about as sexually devastating as a kewpie or cabbage-patch doll. The film's leaden pacing, its prolix and unremarkable dialogue, its profound lack of credibility as well as its failure to appeal to any other emotions than this viewer's boredom and contempt result in my judging "The Black Rose" as one of the worst films Tyrone Power ever had the ill fortune to appear in.

[–] david_barnett1 17 years ago

Hard to dispute any of this. What such distinguished actors were doing in this garbage is hard to understand.

[–] thatsnumberwang 17 years ago

Who the HELL OKed Cecile Aubry as the female lead? If, as the IMDB trivia section for this film states, Leslie Caron was previously offered the lead...Can someone explain to me why casting a native French actress was apparently the lead criterion for the role of an Englishwoman? What were they thinking? All I can say is she must have been sleeping with someone high up in the production to get the part.

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[–] hobnob53 16 years ago

Boy, you guys are pretty vicious about this film! When I first saw it many years ago I thought it was overlong and dull, though I never had the kind of really nasty attitudes I've read on this thread.

But over time, as I watched it and tried to pick up on things, get more into it, I've come to like and appreciate it more. It's far from a great film, but the fact that it's short on action compared to most such movies doesn't necessarily render it bad.

I agree that Cecile Aubrey was a poor choice for the female lead, but in general the cast is good. Sure, All-American Ty seems miscast, but then technically so was everyone, not to mention their all speaking modern English across Eurasia, much less medieval England. This is a more cerebral film than most of Ty's swashbucklers, but if you give it half a chance it's really not so bad at all. It depends on your own willingness to be a bit more broad-minded, look at it a little more deeply, appreciate the film on its own terms. Give it a second, maybe third try, without the negative attitude.

[–] Pharaoh-in-de-Nile 16 years ago

I haven't seen this film for some time, but wasn't Cecile Aubry a Norman rather than Englishwoman. Normans spoke French in England for a very long time.

They were a conquering class, a ruling elite rather than people of the land, even hundreds of years after Hastings...in fact their attitudes still exist in the 'aristocracy' to this day. The British Empire and then UK are really the 'Norman Empire' the English just get all the bad press!

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[–] [email protected] (1631) 5 months ago

I thought I read Richard the Lionheart did not speak English, only French.

[–] JrnlofEddieDeezenStudies 14 years ago

It's certainly not an action film by any stretch of the imagination, and I can easily understand lots of folks finding it a bit slow, but I enjoyed it and had no problem with the casting. I'm glad that most films have moved on from casting white American and European actors in all major roles, whether the character is a white American or European or not, but on the other hand, I quite like Orson Welles' performance in this film. Many of the performances, including Welles', are quite odd in various ways, but I like that.

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[–] 14 years ago

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