Norman Nights

The War Lord is a costume epic with an unusual theme. Its hero, quite as usual, is Charlton Heston, playing a misspent 11th-century knight who falls heir to a small and dreary Norman fief on the coast of the North Sea. "There's a strangeness in this place," Heston remarks. And his servant Richard Boone nods sagely, like a man who knows a godforsaken frontier town when he sees one. Heston's castle is a tacky stronghold, one lone tower surrounded by sullen villagers and under constant threat of attack by swarms of large blond barbarians wearing identical wigs.

Unhappily--and here's the twist--milord's lust for battle counts as nothing compared to the lust inspired in him by a winsome peasant girl, Rosemary Forsyth. He needs her, he explains, as he needs bread, sunshine, fire in winter. Honor. Well, blast honor. He claims the lass on the very day of her marriage to a husky serf, invoking the ancient droit du seigneur whereby a nobleman may claim ''the right of the first night" with any bride in his domain. The local priest (Maurice Evans) fusses a bit, suggesting that he choose another virgin, but his lordship will have none of them.

At dawn, the borrowed bride seems agreeable enough when her master, defying the laws of God and man, declares himself sole possessor of his prize. Though their tepid passion would scarcely justify a stern frown, it somehow brings on rebellion, invasion, indeed an all-hands orgy of picturesque violence. Enemy hordes besiege the tower, piling up in the moat while oil and dissension boil within. "Is this what we get for loving?" asks the fair captive.

Amidst its famine of pleasures, War Lord affords a feast of anachronisms, the choicest assigned to his lordship's quarrelsome sibling (Guy Stockwell, brother of Dean), who ends one clash with the withering retort: "I hate your knightly guts." Scenarists Millard Kaufman and John Collier share credit for this adaptation of The Lovers, a somber play by Leslie Stevens that lasted less than a week on Broadway. The movie version runs on and on and on, but proves nothing whatever about the survival of the fittest.

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