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The Name Of The Rose [1987] [DVD] | ![The Name Of The Rose [1987] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51749Y840PL._SL160_.jpg) | Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Actors: Sean Connery, Christian Slater, Helmut Qualtinger, Elya Baskin, Michael Lonsdale
Studio: Warner Home Video
Category: DVD
List Price: £13.99
Buy New: £5.98
as of 24/11/2009 20:38 GMT details
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New (5) from £5.98
Seller: Amazon.co.uk
Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 6559
Format: Box set, PAL, Special Edition
Languages: English (Original Language), Latin (Original Language)
Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
Region: 2
Discs: 1
Number Of Discs: 2
Running Time: 123 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 7321900344760
ASIN: B0001Z65NU
Theatrical Release Date: September 24, 1986
Release Date: July 1, 2006
Shipping: Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Jean-Jacques Annaud's IThe Name of the Rose/I is a flawed attempt to adapt Umberto Eco's highly convoluted medieval bestseller for the screen, necessarily excising much of the esoterica that made the book so compelling. Still, what's left is a riveting whodunit set in a grimly and grimily realistic 14th-century Benedictine monastery populated by a parade of grotesque characters, all of whom spend their time lurking in dark places or scuttling, half-unseen, in the omnipresent gloom. A series of mysterious and gruesome deaths are somehow tied up with the unwelcome attention of the Inquisition, sent to root out suspected heretical behavior among the monastic scribes whose lives are dedicated to transcribing ancient manuscripts for their famous library, access to which is prevented by an ingenious maze-like layout. PEnter Sean Connery as investigator-monk William of Baskerville (the Sherlock Holmes connection made explicit in his name) and his naive young assistant Adso (a youthful Christian Slater). The Grand Inquisitor Bernado Gui (F. Murray Abraham) suspects devilry; but William and Adso, using Holmesian forensic techniques, uncover a much more human cause: the secrets of the library are being protected at a terrible cost. A fine international cast and the splendidly evocative location compensate for a screenplay that struggles to present Eco's multifaceted story even partially intact; Annaud's idiosyncratic direction complements the sinister, unsettling aura of the tale ideally. --IMark Walker /I
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
 Brilliant atmospheric Medieval murder mystery. August 20, 2004
russell clarke (halifax, west yorks)
59 out of 64 found this review helpful
Adapted from Umberto Eco, s award winning wordy novel The Name of the Rose is a sombre gloomy thriller set in a Benedictine Abbey high in the Italian Appennino Mountains during the 14th century.brTold from the perspective of a now elderly Azdo of Melk who narrates part of the script, we learn he was once a gauche apprentice to Brother William of Baskerville (A sly nod to Conan Doyle surely.), an erudite Franciscan Monk with highly developed powers of deductive reasoning. This Medieval Crackers singular talent is called upon when after arriving at the forbidding Abbey to attend a Seminary on "Wether or not Christ owned his own clothes?" a series of bizarre murders occur. The Head of the Abbey Father Abbot, played by a sibilantly murmuring and creepy Michael Lonsdale, asks Baskerville to discreetly investigate before the arrival of the Inquisitor Gui who has a nasty habit of torturing and burning ostensibly innocent people. Baskerville, wonderfully portrayed by Sean Connery as a man of considerable learning with a penchant for sudden outbursts of almost childlike enthusiasm, dispenses the benefit of his perceptive analysis of the situation to his eager charge who in turn has his head turned by a feral but attractive girl who scrounges for scraps of food disposed of by the well tended brothers. Christian Slater forgoes his vanity to play the young Adzo complete with Peter Beardsley bowl cut and the requisite bald patch and is suitably wide eyed with wonder one minute and intimidated the next.brThe film starts out as an intriguing whodunnit but with the arrival of the sadistic Gui the tone suddenly turns darker as he targets the unfortunate girl and a mentally challenged Brother (Ron Perlman..superb) because they haven't the means to defend themselves, naturally much to the consternation of Baskerville.brThis is a superb atmospheric movie. The Monastery is a suitably bleak and labyrinthine, it radiates hidden frigid menace and the Brothers are a truly bizarre collection of individuals, like a meeting of Terry Gilliam grotesques. Connery has stated he was never as cold on a film set as he was during the filming of The Name of the Rose and you can tell. The acting is all spot on and the direction by Jean Jacques Anaud lets the story flow in a naturalistic unfussy manner. The ending is touching in a subtle almost poetic waybrIt's terrific that a film as individual and compelling as this is at last being released on DVD and hopefully more will follow. Can I request through these pages the immediate release of "To Live and Die in L.A."? "Hardware", "Talk Radio" and "Scandal". But for now those of us with a love for films that eschew the formulaic Hollywood norm this is a must have five star release,
Horror in the hills... September 29, 2004
Guy Sclanders
20 out of 22 found this review helpful
This film is one of those that stands out to me as Connery at his best ... and also not Connery. Typically in his films he's a dominant, hero, who charges forth to save the day. In Name of the Rose he's reserved, humble and most importantly he's not Connery. Although a mystery this film handles human nature, explores the role of the church in developing (Or in this case not developeing) the western world, examines sexuality and by and large is a wonderful piece of cinema. pWith todays films being manufactured to carefully examined research on what viewers want, it's these older films that were crafted for love of story and picture that stand out for me. Name of the Rose is superbly shot, with breathtaking accuracy. One feels cold, isolated, muddy, and in a different world. Christian Slatter makes his film debut as the novice and to my mind really shows us that he is one hot actor. pAll in all Name of the Rose is one for the collection, to be watched and appreciated as a solid piece of film making. pI highly recommend it.
Moody Medieval Whodunnit January 31, 2003
MarmiteMan (Norwich, England)
26 out of 29 found this review helpful
Bit of an oddity, this filmed version of the 14th Century whodunnit written by Umberto Eco (Travels In Hyper-reality, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island Of The Day Before), University of Bologna Professor of Semiotics (a disputed 'scientific branch of philosophy' first posited by Ferdinand de Saussure). A pan-European co-production, "Curious, remote, randomly developed and edited, [...] can never have been an obvious candidate for box-office success: yet it did pretty well."pBoth moody and gloomy (there is very little daylight throughout the film), it is more or less narrated by a mature Adzo of Melk, who as a young Franciscan noviciate (Christian Slater) accompanies John of Baskerville (Sean Connery; Oscar-nominated for Best Actor) to an isolated Benedictine abbey high in the bleak northern Italian Appennino mountains to engage, along with delegates from other monastic Orders, in discourse upon "whether or not Christ owned his own clothes." [Believe it or not, such scholastic debate was not uncommon at the time. A century later, upon the onset of the Renaissance, another profound debate occurred when artists considered whether or not Adam should be depicted with a navel ... or not ...].pUnfortunately, whilst there, the second in a spate of mysterious - and 'prophesized,' of course - deaths occurs, prompting the Benedictine Father Abbot (the ever soft-spoken Michael Lonsdale) to ask John of Baskerville to - discreetely, of course - apply his known gift of deductive suppositioning to explain these deaths, before the feared Inquisitor Bernardo Gui (F. Murray Abraham) arrives and starts burning people. Applying Socratic reason and dropping witticisms and bon mots to his young charge, John of Baskerville (is the Doylean name significant, one wonders!) pokes around the incredible squalour of every-day monastic life (the abbey makes the Bates Motel seem idyllic), in the face of mounting scepticism (Gui produces a simple local girl with a black cat - 'clear proof' surely of satanic possession, demonic skulduggery and Whore of Babylon guilt!), until the mystery is unravelled.pNOTE: unregarded by general opinion, the Papal Inquisition, granted by Pope Gregorius IX in 1231 to 'inquisitors' drawn from the Dominican and Franciscan Orders, existed long before both the better-known Spanish Inquisition [1479] and the fanatical Societá de Jesu, the Society of Jesus (or Jesuit Order) [1534-40], came into being. It authorized the auto da fé ('act of faith') burnings at the stake usually associated with the Spanish Inquisition.
What's in a name? December 21, 2005
Kurt Messick (London, SW1)
35 out of 40 found this review helpful
This film is a fascinating combination of modern and medieval elements. The setting is an abbey, whose name according to the narrator, 'it seems pious and prudent to omit'. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Umberto Eco, a semiologist and intellectual I had the pleasure of meeting twice - once at my university in America, and then again a few years later in London. Semiotics is a study of signs - in many ways, my theological training parallels, and it is this kind of parallel that is at the heart of the novel. pThere is a debate about to be had at the high, inaccessible abbey. This debate, according to the leading Franciscan participant, is one that can determine the theology of the church for generations to come. So pivotal was this issue that papal envoys and monastics from around Christendom have gathered to determine the answer to the question - did Christ, or did he not, own the clothes he wore. pThis is a play on the kind of theological musings that, then and now, distract the church from its proper functions of being a witness to the world. One could imagine the question of how many angels dancing on the head of a pin being used by Eco, except that that would be far too obvious a silliness. pHowever 'pivotal' this conference may be to the future of Christendom, it is in fact incidental to the storyline of the film. The real story revolves around the happenings at the hosting abbey, a Benedictine community whose vocation involves the preservation and transcription of a major library (libraries being full of books, written in language, full of signs and symbols). However, two things become immediately apparent - there don't seem to be any books around, and the transcriptionists are dying one by one. pEnter William of Baskerville (the name an obvious homage, a sign of respect, to Sherlock Holmes). William is a Franciscan journeying to the abbey with his novice, Adso, to take part in the upcoming conference. The Abbot enlists William's assistance in discovering how the monks are dying, which he does with Holmesian technique and precision. Analysing data such as footprints, fall-patterns from hillsides, and other such observational information, he comes to a few conclusions, but these distress the head librarian, who has seen it as his task to protect the world from blashphemous books (ironically, while maintaining their existence within the confines of the great library's labyrinth). pWhile William and Adso do their Holmes and Watson in a scientific manner, one of the other Franciscan visitors decides to apply a different interpretation to the happenings, preferring to see in the murderous environment of the abbey the signs of the apocalypse, particularly worrisome given the nature of the pivotal conference soon to take place. pUnfortunately for William, just as he is getting close to the truth, the Inquisition is called (no one expects the Spanish Inquistition), and in the figure of Bernardo Gui, the Inquisition descends upon the abbey with full force and terror. Gui accepts neither William's rational explanations nor Ubertino's end-times interpretations, preferring a more common staple of Inquisition deciphering - it must be the work of the devil. Finding a black cat and a woman smuggled into the abbey only help confirm this, particularly in an environment that sees little value in either. pUltimately, however, the interpretation is wrong. William and Adso finally discover a way into the library, and make the further discovery that the key text the librarian is trying to hide is one by Aristotle, his work on Comedy, for he fears that in the Scholastic environment of the church, in which Aristotle is seen as the rational side of God's wisdom, that a book by Aristotle that permits laughter would be the undoing to the world. pIn the end, the library burns with few books saved, the conference ends without a resolution, the Inquisition gets a judgement leveled against itself in a very 'just-desserts' fashion, and William and Adso depart. pBut what of the name of the rose? We never learn the name of the rose; indeed, the rose is yet one more sign, a symbol for the love of Adso's life, the woman accused of being a witch. As the final credits fall, we learn that in the midst of all the tumult, Adso never learned her name. pThe performances here are solid and gripping. Sean Connery plays William of Baskerville with aplomb. A young Christian Slater is a good novice, with still enough innocence to his performance to be believable. The abbot is played by Michael Lonsdale (not too many years off of playing a James Bond villain). Special mention goes to Helmut Qualtinger, who played the librarian Brother Remigio, who died just hours after filming his last scene, and was frequently in pain from the illness he was suffering during filming. William Hickey plays Franciscan Ubertino with an air of strangeness and mystery. Finally, F. Murray Abraham plays the dreaded Bernardo Gui, in every way as psychologically beguiling as in his starring role in 'Amadeus', but unfortunately with a much smaller role in this film. pDespite not making an Oscar bid, this film won numerous awards throughout Europe, including the BAFTA best actor award for Connery. It also was nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe award for mystery film. pThe sets are dramatic, the costumes are perfect (particularly the contrast between the simplicity of the Franciscans, the durability of the Benedictines, the opulence of the papal envoys, the flair of the Inquisitors, and the rags of the peasants - all signs of a stratified society). The film is done in a cinematographic style that gives an overall feel of isolation; the abbey is isolated from the world, and the people are detached from each other for the most part. pThis is a remarkable film in many ways, and one that I frequently turn to again to see what new signs I missed the last time through.
What's in a name? December 21, 2005
Kurt Messick (London, SW1)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This film is a fascinating combination of modern and medieval elements. The setting is an abbey, whose name according to the narrator, 'it seems pious and prudent to omit'. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Umberto Eco, a semiologist and intellectual I had the pleasure of meeting twice - once at my university in America, and then again a few years later in London. Semiotics is a study of signs - in many ways, my theological training parallels, and it is this kind of parallel that is at the heart of the novel. pThere is a debate about to be had at the high, inaccessible abbey. This debate, according to the leading Franciscan participant, is one that can determine the theology of the church for generations to come. So pivotal was this issue that papal envoys and monastics from around Christendom have gathered to determine the answer to the question - did Christ, or did he not, own the clothes he wore. pThis is a play on the kind of theological musings that, then and now, distract the church from its proper functions of being a witness to the world. One could imagine the question of how many angels dancing on the head of a pin being used by Eco, except that that would be far too obvious a silliness. pHowever 'pivotal' this conference may be to the future of Christendom, it is in fact incidental to the storyline of the film. The real story revolves around the happenings at the hosting abbey, a Benedictine community whose vocation involves the preservation and transcription of a major library (libraries being full of books, written in language, full of signs and symbols). However, two things become immediately apparent - there don't seem to be any books around, and the transcriptionists are dying one by one. pEnter William of Baskerville (the name an obvious homage, a sign of respect, to Sherlock Holmes). William is a Franciscan journeying to the abbey with his novice, Adso, to take part in the upcoming conference. The Abbot enlists William's assistance in discovering how the monks are dying, which he does with Holmesian technique and precision. Analysing data such as footprints, fall-patterns from hillsides, and other such observational information, he comes to a few conclusions, but these distress the head librarian, who has seen it as his task to protect the world from blashphemous books (ironically, while maintaining their existence within the confines of the great library's labyrinth). pWhile William and Adso do their Holmes and Watson in a scientific manner, one of the other Franciscan visitors decides to apply a different interpretation to the happenings, preferring to see in the murderous environment of the abbey the signs of the apocalypse, particularly worrisome given the nature of the pivotal conference soon to take place. pUnfortunately for William, just as he is getting close to the truth, the Inquisition is called (no one expects the Spanish Inquistition), and in the figure of Bernardo Gui, the Inquisition descends upon the abbey with full force and terror. Gui accepts neither William's rational explanations nor Ubertino's end-times interpretations, preferring a more common staple of Inquisition deciphering - it must be the work of the devil. Finding a black cat and a woman smuggled into the abbey only help confirm this, particularly in an environment that sees little value in either. pUltimately, however, the interpretation is wrong. William and Adso finally discover a way into the library, and make the further discovery that the key text the librarian is trying to hide is one by Aristotle, his work on Comedy, for he fears that in the Scholastic environment of the church, in which Aristotle is seen as the rational side of God's wisdom, that a book by Aristotle that permits laughter would be the undoing to the world. pIn the end, the library burns with few books saved, the conference ends without a resolution, the Inquisition gets a judgement leveled against itself in a very 'just-desserts' fashion, and William and Adso depart. pBut what of the name of the rose? We never learn the name of the rose; indeed, the rose is yet one more sign, a symbol for the love of Adso's life, the woman accused of being a witch. As the final credits fall, we learn that in the midst of all the tumult, Adso never learned her name. pThe performances here are solid and gripping. Sean Connery plays William of Baskerville with aplomb. A young Christian Slater is a good novice, with still enough innocence to his performance to be believable. The abbot is played by Michael Lonsdale (not too many years off of playing a James Bond villain). Special mention goes to Helmut Qualtinger, who played the librarian Brother Remigio, who died just hours after filming his last scene, and was frequently in pain from the illness he was suffering during filming. William Hickey plays Franciscan Ubertino with an air of strangeness and mystery. Finally, F. Murray Abraham plays the dreaded Bernardo Gui, in every way as psychologically beguiling as in his starring role in 'Amadeus', but unfortunately with a much smaller role in this film. pDespite not making an Oscar bid, this film won numerous awards throughout Europe, including the BAFTA best actor award for Connery. It also was nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe award for mystery film. pThe sets are dramatic, the costumes are perfect (particularly the contrast between the simplicity of the Franciscans, the durability of the Benedictines, the opulence of the papal envoys, the flair of the Inquisitors, and the rags of the peasants - all signs of a stratified society). The film is done in a cinematographic style that gives an overall feel of isolation; the abbey is isolated from the world, and the people are detached from each other for the most part. pThis is a remarkable film in many ways, and one that I frequently turn to again to see what new signs I missed the last time through.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
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