One of John Huston’s least-seen films, A Walk with Love
and Death is usually glossed over as a fairly toothless period piece, which
it may have seemed in the year of flamboyant works like Satyricon, Easy
Rider and The Wild Bunch.
Seen on its own terms, though, the film is a modest and moving story of
two solitary young people striving to find some manner of respite and freedom
in a world consumed with war and pestilence.
The film is notable as the debut of teenage Anjelica Huston, the
director’s daughter, in the role of Claudia, the eldest surviving heir of a
small fiefdom in plague-ridden Europe during the Hundred Years War. One day, along comes Heron (Assaf Dayan) a
wanderer on his way to the sea and, hopefully, a life away from the death and
disease that surround him. Despite being
separated by levels of class, the two fall in love; a situation aided
considerably by the fact that they seem to be the only two young people in the
entire country. Huston deliberately used
a muted color tone over the film – as he did in a number of others, from Moulin
Rouge (1952) and Moby Dick (1956) to Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)
– to de-romanticize what he saw as the artificial look of Technicolor. This probably made it seem drab to critics at
the time, but it also gives it a texture unique from contemporaneous films,
which, (along with its bleak atmosphere), makes it look and feel as if it could
have been made a decade or two later.
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