Maybe it was watchable in the seventies.... I don't remember. But I know it's a stinker at this point (2006). You can see why Raines had a short career in films, and why Michael Winner never directed a quality movie. It's really embarrassing to watch. Even if the costumes didn't look like they were out of every bad seventies porn flick, the acting and directing (or lack thereof) would doom this film. Please watch it and tell me where I went wrong here... Tell me it's not really this bad. Even the good actors (Burgess Meredith, Jerry Orbach, Ava Gardner, et al.) look bad because of the writing and non-directing. Chris Sarandon does OK (not sure why), but he's paddling upstream most of the time, trying to rescue scenes from Raines' wooden and forced acting. And I've never been much of a fan of his, oddly. I haven't seen the remake, but I'm going to watch it in hopes of driving the memory of this disaster permanently from my poor abused mind...
Review of The Sentinel
