Whatever you do, try to avoid the dreadfully hacked version of this - the original version; coming in at just under 2½ hours is far, far better. That said, however - it still isn't all that great. Ingrid Bergman doesn't so much act as Joan of Arc, she suggests quite strongly that Joan of Arc would have been just like her! The pained, saintly expression coupled with the rousing battle cries and heartfelt pleading make it hard to imagine the real woman could have been anything but! José Ferrer expertly plays the, duplicitous, selfish monarch who'd betray his own mother for a sou in a creepily magnetic fashion and, of course, Francis L. Sullivan is super as the presiding Bishop Cauchon serving whichever master suits him best so long as our heroine goes to the flames. The rest of the cast rather underperform though: Ward Bond, Gene Lockhart and Cecil Kellaway are fish out of water and Lief Erickson is frankly dreadful in the quite pivotal role of Dunois. The writing is dreary; way too wordy. The ensemble performances never seem to set foot out of doors, which renders the battle scene largely ineffective and the trial scenes are just all too bitty to establish any genuine sense of the threat she was under during this corrupt trial. Maybe it needed Cecil B. De Mille to take the grand scale cinematography to it - the story certainly merits it; but this is uncomfortably constricted and too physically theatrical. The costumes are glorious, though, and the lighting does go some way to compensate for the rigidity the production. Well worth watching, but it could have been much better had Victor Fleming had more imagination.
