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The Crusades (Paramount), produced in 1935 by Cecil B. DeMille, has been reissued on two pretexts: that war has come again to the Holy Land; that an Oscar has just come to Loretta Young, the picture's star. Neither excuse is necessary. The film just about attains the DeMillen-nium of screen spectacles and is worth a second look any day.

As usual, DeMille twists history until Clio cries uncle. The Third Crusade was a chiefly political adventure which set one-half of the world against the other; under DeMille's pseudo-Homeric touch the story shapes up as a sort of Puppetoon Iliad, chiefly concerned with regal wrangles over a medieval beauty (Miss Young).

Richard Coeur de Lion (Henry Wilcox-on) is passed off as a weak-headed strongarm. He is fed a macaronic tangle of lines that would have choked the poet prince. ("England! France!" pants Mr. Wilcoxon as he paws at Miss Young. "What's it all matter!" And she replies, "One kiss to last through all eternity!")

But DeMille needs no sense of history, and little sense of taste; he has the film sense. All the picture's best scenes--the English army blurting through Marseille streets, the gnashing assault on Acre, the churning battle before Jerusalem--are masterly affirmations of cinema's first law: keep it moving.

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