Bride of Vengeance (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Jun 26, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Mitchell LeisenRelease Date(s)
1949 (April 30, 2025)Studio(s)
Paramount Pictures (Imprint Films/Via Vision Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: B-
- Video Grade: B
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: B
Review
[Editor’s Note: This is a Region-Free Australian Blu-ray import.]
This is an odd one. Despite its exploitation movie-sounding title, Bride of Vengeance is a historical romantic melodrama trying very hard to rise above its inferior screenplay. It’s too good to qualify as high camp in the manner of Universal’s Maria Montez vehicles, but it’s also too uneven and generally mediocre to qualify as good, though it is unexpectedly watchable. Generally, it’s a film made by talent working beneath their abilities.
Produced the same year Harry Lime in The Third Man wryly noted the irony of the glories of the Italian Renaissance blossoming simultaneously with the violent, scandalous ambitions of the House of Borgia, Bride of Vengeance revolves around Lucrezia Borgia (Paulette Goddard), the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI. In the film, her brother, Cesare (Macdonald Carey), plots to conquer the kingdom of Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (John Lund), whose well-defended lands stand between Cesare’s Papal States and Venice, which he covets.
To achieve this, he has Lucrezia’s husband arrowed by an assassin (Douglas Spencer, Scotty the reporter from The Thing), and when the visiting Alfonso offers the services of his skilled physician, Filippo (Fritz Leiber), Cesare secretly substitutes the assassin, who strangles the husband to death while leaving Lucrezia believing it was Alfonso to order the deed. She then surprises all by an offer of marriage, she working with her brother to poison Alfonso after the wedding and seize Ferrara.
Ray Milland, in his long career at Paramount, had never turned down an assignment until Bride of Vengeance, a script he thought so bad he preferred going on suspension than star in it. John Lund, set to play Cesare, took over the role of Alfonso, with Macdonald Carey taking over that role. Decked out with an exotic beard and wig, Carey is almost unrecognizable but effective, Lund less so. Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, released that same year, is virtually the only movie for which Lund is remembered today. In that film Marlene Dietrich gave an excellent performance, Jean Arthur delivered an even better one, one of the best of her career, and Lund was... competent. As the London Times accurately put it in their obituary of Lund, his “film career was cut to a familiar pattern: the young actor imported to Hollywood after a big success on Broadway begins by playing the handsome guy who gets the girl, then descends by gradual degrees to being the male lead in minor westerns and occasionally, in major films, being the handsome guy who does not get the girl because he lacks the spark of the hero who does.” In other words, Lund was a decent enough actor, better certainly than top-billed Paulette Goddard, but also spectacularly charisma-free. That said, he plays the somewhat interesting character well: a shrewd leader masquerading as a hedonistic fool.
Goddard, meanwhile, is simply too emphatically American and contemporary to be believed as a 16th century Italian noblewoman of Spanish descent. Much of the film has a Taming of the Shrew vibe with Lucrezia spurring Alfonso’s amorous advances, but it equally suggests Lucy Ricardo trying to break into showbiz screen testing for the part of a Renaissance-era noblewoman. The political intrigue material works a lot better than scenes of Alfonso trying to woo the temperamental Lucrezia.
Unusual for the time (or now), director-producer Mitchell Leisen also designed the film’s costumes (in partnership with Mary Grant, then newly-married to Vincent Price). Both the costumes and production design eschew the usual DeMille-style gaudy glamour—for one thing, Bride of Vengeance is in black-and-white (perhaps a deliberate attempt at gravitas) rather than Technicolor, generally expected for this kind of thing. Rather, there’s an obvious effort at historical verisimilitude, and this generally works. Goddard still looks very Hollywoodized with her jutting eyebrows and long false eyelashes but, buried under layers and layers of thick costuming, period wigs and hair pieces and beards and mustaches, most in the cast at least appear historically authentic. The big exception to this is Raymond Burr as Michelotto, Cesare’s scheming lieutenant. Very heavy and bloated during this period, Burr is fitted with a Prince Valiant-type wig and a Fu Manchu-type mustache and looks positively ridiculous, not remotely menacing as written.
Imprint’s Bride of Vengeance, limited to 1,500 copies, is presented in its original black-and-white, 1.37:1 standard screen shape. The 1080p presentation is just okay; it doesn’t appear mastered from the original camera negative but some secondary source. Though generally okay, it’s a little softer than expected with signs of minor damage and warping, though acceptable overall. The LPCM 2.0 mono is somewhat better, the Region-Free disc supported by optional English subtitles.
Extras are limited to a new audio commentary track by film historians Daniel Kremer and David Del Valle and a 24:12 featurette, A Flair to Remember: An Appreciation of Mitchell Leisen by Allan Arkush (2025), the filmmaker discussing at length his appreciation of Leisen’s films.
A peculiar production, Bride of Vengeance doesn’t quite succeed vying for respectability. It shoots for historical verisimilitude and certainly doesn’t look like the usual Hollywood film of this type, and is more entertaining than it has any right to be, but the screenplay is still substandard.
- Stuart Galbraith IV