"Ilya Muromets" looks gorgeous. It's beautifully shot -- such that many scenes almost look more like spectacular paintings rather than shots from a live action film -- and lavishly produced and costumed. One can tell that there was no expense spared on the extensive location shooting, swarming armies, et cetera, and visually this all pays off. Unfortunately, that's mostly all of what this film as going for it, and ninety minutes of scenic decoration eventually becomes too much. The story is based on a very old Russian folk tale, but it seems to me that the writer of its adaptation didn't pay a lot of attention to what would make it into an entertaining film. We end up with a spectacle that is largely plot less for much of its running time, revolving around the hero effortlessly doing some casual superhuman trick, then getting lauded for it by everyone. We get the message that people are supposed to like him a lot, but we don't feel it ourselves. We move past being quite so episodic about halfway through as get some story, but the villains are too cackling and over the top to seem a threat, and the heroes are still presented devoid enough of character, revealing dialogue, or involving story that I didn't find it involving. We jump far ahead in time at various points, but nobody seems to change much, so we end up with a film trying to tell what should be a lot and weighty story that in fact carries none of the impact it should. Then we have a few plot howler moments as well, such as the long-lost son immediately changing his national allegiance and vowing to fight for it as soon as somebody new claims to be his dad. It deserves commendation for fantastic photography and production, but unfortunately the humorlessly uninvolving story keeps it from being very entertaining, so I can't say it didn't deserve the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment that it ended up receiving.

I remember this movie well as a kid going to see it in theater which is the only place it really should be seen. The Sword And The Dragon is the English dubbed version of the Russian film about their legendary hero, Ilya Murometz. In size and scope it's like some of Charlton Heston's films at the time.In the Russian culture Ilya Murometz is a knight errant with no membership at anybody's Round Table. Several of the stories about him are included in The Sword And The Dragon. The main plot line however is the repelling of those rather ugly looking Asiatics who are called Tugars in this film as opposed to Tartars.A Russian subject is best done by Russians. I have to say in watching the film again if you stop it at just about any given point it will look like a medieval painting or tapestry. The way D.W. Griffith's Birth Of A Nation looks like a moving picture of that Matthew Brady could have produced had moving pictures been invented then. The set designers should get lots of recognition for their achievement.The special effects, the wind demon, the dragon also come in for kudos. They're out of date now, but Cecil B. DeMille couldn't have done better. I'm sure the Russians probably studied his work to get it right.I'm glad to read that the film has been restored. After being in theaters here it was on Million Dollar Movie for years and I saw it many times during the Sixties.I'll bet it would do good business for a family audience even today.

This film looks like it had very impressive production values. Huge sets, a rather decent looking monster and other things one associates with a big time budget. What it lacks is a coherent story, however, this may be more due to the fact this is a heavily edited American cut of the film, cut even more so by the fact I saw it on MST3K. What I saw warrants a score of three, mainly due to the fact it seemed to randomly jump from scene to scene. If I ever see a print of the film as it was meant to be seen I will gladly score and review it again, but now I have to review the film as I saw it. Unfortunately, what I saw in terms of story was a convoluted mess.The story is the main problem, but I will attempt to explain the main gist of it as I saw it. A man is crippled, unable to move, an evil warlord type is plundering the land and a strange hero who may as well not been in the film at all dies and wishes for these men to pass his sword to another. Well, these men find the poor man who is crippled and witnessed his village pillaged and his wife taken by the horde and they make him better and give him the sword that he does not use very often at all during the film. He goes to the prince of the kingdom's palace (why not a king?) and brings him this creature that blows wind. At a point he is reunited with his wife, only to promptly leave her side again and she is again captured, for some strange reason the prince locks up the hero and during this time the wife has their son a big battle occurs where the hero has a plan that does not really seem like a plan. You just know there is something being missed of vital importance, unfortunately during the early years when they dubbed these films they often times did less translating and more insert whatever sort of make sense and that seems the case here.The title of "The Sword and the Dragon" makes one think that both play a vital role in this film. Well neither does, as the hero rarely pulls the sword out and the dragon only has a short scene in the beginning and a longer scene at the end. It looks very good, however, as it reminded me of Godzilla's foe King Gidorah. It looks like they made a fairly large sized model of it too. My guess is though that the original Russian title made no reference to either the sword or the dragon.The set pieces in this one looked great. The forest the hero goes to looks really good with its large and twisted trees. They also do an okay job at a full scale battle, though one will see that there really was not much done during the battle after the two sides rushed each other. The castle and village look good and like I said the production did a great job especially considering it was 1956. It is one of the reasons I have to believe that the story would be much better if it was not dubbed. I just do not see them putting all this effort into everything else, but not the story.So, from what I saw it was a incoherent movie with great scenery and a cool looking dragon. I am sure the film would be better if seen in its original Russian, but I saw what I saw and that is what I reviewed. I know a lot of people bash MST3K at times for putting down movies such as these, but without them I never would have seen this film at all and I bet that goes for a lot of other people as well. It is also not their fault that the film was horribly reedited and dubbed for American audiences. It was, for me, an interesting watch and in the end most certainly not one of the worst films I have seen them do.

I first saw this Russian/Soviet epic on WOR TV's "Million Dollar Theater" back in the 60s, on our old B&W set. I would compare it with Sergei Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky"-virtuous Russians fighting evil invaders, in this case with a big dose of fantasy, Russian folklore, and done on a Cecil B. DeMille scale. I have not read much about the making of this movie but I suspect most of the extras were Red Army soldiers, much the same way the Soviet Army provided all the extras for "Waterloo" in 1970. The acting probably is a little broad by our standards but they do things differently in other countries and seeing a foreign is like travel-you see something different. And this is a fantasy-were there any subtleties of expression in "Star Wars"? I think the 1950s special effects hold up even in our CGI era and they looked fine on a 14" B&W screen in 1963. A nice big bag of popcorn, a cold winter night-or just a rainy one, the lights down, sit back and enjoy the show.