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In 2017, the silent melodrama “Shiraz: A Romance of India” earned a restoration by the British Film Institute. It’s what you got when a German director tackled a British script based on an Indian historical romance play back in 1928.

“Shiraz” is a motion picture made on real locations, not sets, whose producers boasted of “no artificial lighting” in an opening credit for “authenticity,” one presumes. Their story? Victorian hokum, with kidnappings, bandits, love that endures past death, and Western mores when it comes to cinematic displays of affection — kissing.

The Bavarian Franz Osten, a Nazi who later made India his filmmaking home, isn’t remembered as one of the innovators or stylists of the German cinema. And this picture — with its stagey, broad and dated acting and far-too-basic cinematography and editing and European (not authentically Indian) pedigree, is best appreciated as a cinematic artifact, a curiosity. It’s a 1920s effort to recreate a fairy tale to go with the creation of an Indian landmark of the Mogul (Mughal) Empire era.

A little princess is orphaned when her caravan is ambushed, and grows up under the care of a kindly potter’s family.

Their oldest son, Shiraz (Himanshu Rai), grows up looking out for Selima (Enakashi Rama Rao), and that care grows into love, even though he has no idea of the difference in their lineages.

Wouldn’t you know it, Selima is kidnapped again, and this time sold into the household of Prince Khurram (Charu Roy), heir to the throne and a guy who likes his slavegirls to be fetching. This happens in spite of the protests of Shiraz, who makes it to the auction in time to rail against Selima’s illegal and unjust imprisonment, and be outbid by the Prince’s aid.

As Selima disappears into the household, Shiraz vows to stay close by — taking a job as a potter’s apprentice, showing the skills he learned in a lifetime of working by his father’s side.

Years pass, and Shiraz’s dreams and palace intrigues of those threatened by the prince fancying Selima coincide in a play to spirit her away, or disgrace her. It fails.

Mughal justice, as  we come to understand, is swift and unjust. “You shall die under the elephant’s foot!”

The third act has suspense, a hint of heartbreak and a sentimental punch. The first two acts? Lots of film of Indian architecture, unspoiled by Industrial Era grime and 20th century alterations.

It’s a middling movie by Western standards of the era, technically primitive and emotionally unsophisticated. The story is historical fiction, dull and formulaic. And not being authentically Indian, it lacks value as a cultural touchstone.

But “Shiraz” still, by virtue of its on-location photography and great age, provides a template for representations of that period in Indian history. Like Keaton’s “The General,” it is close enough in time and geography to suggest what 17th century India really looked like, with villages frozen in time for centuries and cities decorated with architecture meant to last through the ages.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Himanshu Rai, Charu Roy, Seeta Devi and Enakashi Rama Rao

Credits: Directed by Franz Osten, script by William A. Burton, based on the play by Niranjan Pal. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 1:45

“Almost Love” is one of those soapy romances set in that “fantasy” New York where broke people and the affluent mingle, and the broke, young and hip can somehow afford to live there at all.

It almost works. The characters make us laugh, here and there. And they almost make us invest in them.

The variation on a theme here is that the central romance is that of a gay couple, with the usual selection of flippant, frustrated folks orbiting around it.

And if incidents, characters and couplings in it have a whiff of “sitcom” about them, that might be due to “Friends” and “Seinfeld” burning into the writer-director Mike Doyle’s brain, even if he isn’t aware of it.

Scott Evans and Augustus Prew are Adam and Marklin, the couple at the center of this universe. Marklin is a successful fashion/lifestyle “influencer” blogger, running “The Detailist” and its daily dose of product placement selfies. Adam is a successful painter — or rather successful at being the ghost painter for one of those mass-production pop artists (think Thomas Kincade, only contemporary).

They’re at the stage of the relationship where they’re at a crossroads — marry (they’re against it), or maybe accept that they’re not destined for that. One of the attempted serious threads in the story is suggesting how gay men are different from other couples, in that male “compartmentalization” and “just move on” way.

Cammy (Michelle Buteau of “Always be My Maybe” and “Work It”) is having a “thing” with Henry (Colin Donnell), a bearded, brooding sort who finally admits to her his big, scary secret.

“I’m homeless!”

But but “you have such nice SHOES!”

Haley (Zoe Chao of “Downhill” and “Always be My Maybe”) is her always-supportive, always-apologizing tutor pal. Sure, Cammy is sleeping with “the homeless.” But “What white guy is homeless…at 36? On TINDER?”

And besides, Haley says, she’s tutoring a teen who is crushing on her so hard she’s about to get into a “full Pamela Smart” thing (Cammy’s words) with him. Yeah, Haley admits her big faults just to make her shame-spiraling friends feel better.

At least Elizabeth (Kate Walsh) and Damon (Chaz Lamar Shepherd) have been happily married 15 years. Except for the whole disagreement over children thing, they’re perfect.

The friends, who met working together at CB2 years before, are close in age and experiencing slightly different versions of the premature midlife crisis — getting “serious” about life in their mid-30s.

Not that they don’t still get together for dinners out, or meet at the bar for “slap shots,” which is pretty juvenile.

Each comes to a crossroads — after a fashion — and figures out which way to go, or how to carry on after hitting a dead end.

It’s all pretty bland stuff, most pointedly in the person of our main couple. Evans (TV’s “Grace and Frankie”) and Prew (TV’s “The Morning Show”) aren’t terribly interesting together, don’t set off many sparks and never make the relationship feel like much more than an arrangement. It’s commendable, building the rom-com around such characters, men comfortable with who they are in a world where they can be themselves, and be all they can be. But they’re boring.

The financial imbalances in several of the relationships in the film are mentioned but not really explored.  See “Friends With Money,” or for that matter “Friends,” to get a better handle on that.

The glib swipe at New York homelessness doesn’t have the edge to come off, because the film doesn’t have the nerve to commit to any “bad” relationship meriting abandonment.

There’s enough funny banter and connection in the supporting cast to make Buteau, Chao and Walsh the standout performers playing more relatable characters.

A deeper dive into things that test a gay male relationship is glossed through, the “big fight” isn’t, the big reckoning with the fraud (Patricia Clarkson) that Adam paints for or big “influencer” torching never comes.

None of it ever truly comes together in a way that makes “Almost Love” almost a rom-rom that works. “Almost” pretty much covers it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Scott Evans, Michelle Buteau, Augustus Prew, Zoe Chao, Kate Walsh, Colin Donnell, Chaz Lamar Shepherd and Patricia Clarkson

Credits:  Written and directed by Mike Doyle. A Vertical release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:32

With Gawd as my witness, I swear I had never heard of “Tiptoes,” a cinematic debacle like few others. This is “The Room” packed with future Oscar winners.

A “little people” comedy with Gary Oldman playing a dwarf, it was two and a half hours long when it screened at SXSW Austin in 2003.

It wasn’t released widely, and not at all in the US. That it still exists makes one wonder why the participants didn’t pool their cash and have it destroyed.

It basically ended the career of writer-director Matthew Bright (“Guncrazy”), although it didn’t prevent Matthew McConaughey’s “Lincoln Lawyer” comeback, or the Oscars that would eventually come to him, Patricia Arquette and Oldman.

It didn’t do Kate Beckinsale any favors.

Peter Dinklage? There’s no such thing as a bad Dinklage moment, and he got through this utterly unscathed.

But man, what a tin-eared, un-PC fiasco.

McConaughey plays Steven, a firefighting consultant about to marry a successful artist, Carol (Beckinsale). She becomes pregnant before she meets his family. He is a bit freaked out by that prospect, and the pregnancy.

You see, he has a twin. Rolfe (Oldman) is a soulful goof who spends too much time with hipster/ladies’ man Maurice (Dinklage). And like Steve and Rolfe’s parents, those guys are dwarves.

Rolfe and Maurice travel cross country on motor trikes, and Maurice picks up a tarted-up Lucy (Arquette) along the way.

There’s a convention of “little people” (shades of “Under the Rainbow”) in Vegas, where they’re shown carrying on, coupling up, cheating and cursing and carousing.

Amidst all that potential mayhem, Carol meets Rolfe, picks up on the whole dwarf genetics thing Steven is panicked about and is a bit shocked by it all.

There is a wedding. But where highly-strung Steven isn’t reconciled to the risks and responsibilities of how their child might come into the world, Rolfe is unflappable, realistic, sympathetic and kind. Carol responds to that.

The medical and genetic obsessions of the script turn out to be off, if not outright wrong — offensively so in some cases.

Oldman’s performance is sweet enough, but a jarring stunt that no one in his or her right mind would have attempted.

The milieu has a certain amusement to it, the way those farcical “Seinfeld” episodes about an imagined “code” and “culture” of this “little people” could be. Debbie Lee Carrington, who appeared in “Seinfeld,” plays a more out-there version of the “hot dwarf” guys are beating each other up over.

There are laughs, here and there, smothered by the endless cringe of it all.

The gonzo, smitten turns by Arquette and Dinklage aren’t enough to make us forget the mess that’s spilling all over the screen around them.

The performers mostly left on the cutting room floor (David Alan Grier) were the lucky ones.

Still, like road accidents and the films of Uwe Boll, it’s worth a gawk as evidence of how a whole lot of people, many of them agents whom one suspects must have been fired after this, can get anything so terribly wrong.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexuality

Cast: Kate Beckinsale, Gary Oldman, Matthew McConaughey, Patricia Arquette, Peter Dinklage

Credits: Written and directed by Matthew Bright. A Canal+ release, streaming on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube etc.

Running time: 1:30

Brisco (Chris Mulkey), the commanding officer, strides into the tent of his elite multi-national commando team.

“How’s it going?” he wants to know.

“Sh—y, sir.”

“War is hell,” he growls.

Kind of what passes for a joke in the never-ending “Rogue Warfare” combat-as-video-game film series.

But let’s drop in on the second film to see if they’ve improved since the debut of the series.

Nah. Same “s—-y” lines, same tone-deaf line readings. Same silly, archetype characters played by actors in over their heads. Same ridiculous variations on the Tom Clancy/movie-fed myth of the “surgical strike.”

Daniel (Will Yun Lee) was captured in the last “Rogue.” So this one’s about fetching him. To that end, let’s roar into an Iraqi terrorist encampment on dirt bikes and ATVs. Ok, one ATV. This IS a combat movie on a budget.

And once we’ve “ROARED” in? Let’s pick off the baddies, one by one, with a silencer. Because, you know, they didn’t hear the effing BIKES.

Supreme Leader (Essam Ferris) is still doing the Bad Guys Wear Black thing, still barking out speeches to Arabic speakers, of which he isn’t.

“I am leading a REVOLUTION in the front lines of a war!” He ain’t got NO time for “weak minded fools.”

The cohesion of the unit is threatened with dissent. Again.

There are more pretty shots from a chopper, more cover scenes of Humvees thundering through desertscapes.

The president (Stephen Lang), reached at a Camp David (in wooded Maryland) that looks like the California ranch Lang makes payments on with “Rogue” checks, is down with doing whatever it takes to find Daniel.

Our guy Daniel is in chains, going nuts — ranting in an “Inside the Actors Studio” audition, in what looks like a Homeland Security cage that they’re not using for little Central American kids at the moment.

The ineptitude in these movies takes a back seat to the wet dreams they feed rural right wing America.

The Russian (Katie Keene) is hot, and on “our” side and not paying bounties for American scalps.

The soldiers make speeches one minute about “What’s that say about us?” when given the choice of shooting a terror-connected guy they just freed in the back, and summarily execute several others the next minute.

“Bloodshed is the only currency accepted throughout the world,” a terrorist intones, fitting into the worldview these idiotic, poisonous pictures push.

So that’s what we get.

But you dive into these things on the off chance that like Cheech and Chong, they might get better over time — that like Tyler Perry, a polish might find its way into the scripts.

Not happening.

“Rogue Warfare: Death of a Nation” is next. I can’t wait.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language

Cast: Will Yun Lee, Jermaine Love, Rory Markham, Katie Keene, Chris Mulkey and Stephen Lang.

Credits: Directed by Mike Gunther, script by Andrew Emilio DeCesare. A Saban Films release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:43

Johnny Leggs also directed this feel good story about one Miami teacher changing lives, one castling at a time — opens in September.

Years after his time in Hollywood, where the great French director Jean Renoir (“The Rules of the Game,” “The Grand Illusion”) spent World War II, he related how cultural stress and strife is the crucible for great art.

All Hollywood needs, he told the future Indian director, Satyajit Ray, “is a good bombing.”

But something else comes through in his second and final completed film in Hollywood — “The Southerner.” Sentimental almost to the point of condescension, it’s an affectionate ode to American resilience and an innate working class decency that stood in stark contrast to the cynicism and factionalism of Europe.

It’s no “Grapes of Wrath,” just a hardscrabble year in the life of a farm family in Eastern Texas, a 30ish married couple struggling to survive as husband Sam (Texan Zachary Scott of “Mildred Pierce”) takes his shot at their piece of what would come to be called “The American Dream” — a sharecropper and farm laborer trying to strike out on his own and not pick another man’s crops.

Sam takes the last words of an aged laborer who dies picking cotton with him to heart — “Raise your own crops.” With Nona (Betty Field), cantankerous Granny (Beaulah Bondi of “It’s a Wonderful Life”) and their two kids, he borrows a truck to move them, borrows mules and a plow, and borrows seed to plant his own cotton.

They settle into a tumbledown shack, struggle through a year of little food, bad nutrition from the possum and fish they eat (pellegra), unfriendly neighbors (J. Caroll Naish and Norman Lloyd) and fickle weather, and the temptation to throw in the towel and take up a wartime factory job. They want to make their own way and their own destiny.

“Jus’ cause we’re havin’ hard times right now, don’t mean we gotta stop nothin’. We gotta keep goin’. Once we give up, we won’t have the courage to get ourselves back to good times.”

It’d be easy to read “patronizing” into this tale, with its country wedding, bar fight, brawl over a fellow farmer’s act of sabotage and bare-handed fishing, and imagine Renoir rolling his eyes at every Granny gripe.

“When you all look down on my cold dead face in the county pine box, you’ll be sorry then! Mebbe!”

But there’s something nobler going on here, a “realistic” and respectful statement on the quiet faith the farmer has in his own enterprise. The leftist politics of Renoir’s earlier work, and of Ford’s “Grapes of Wrath,” isn’t here. The urgency of Renoir’s other Hollywood outing, the Occupation thriller “This Land is Mine,” is missing as well.

There are good people, overreaching people, cheats, predatory floozies, tipplers and in that nasty neighbor, a classic “for me to succeed, you must fail” type. As with his later Indian film (where he met Ray), “The River,” and with his earlier “Rules of the Game,” this is Renoir as cultural anthropologist, observing and dissecting and appreciating, with every painterly-composed scene.

MPAA Rating: “approved”

Cast: Zachary Scott, Betty Field, Beaulah Bondi, J. Caroll Naish, Charles Kemper and Norman Lloyd.

Credits: Directed by Jean Renoir, script by Hugo Butler and Jean Renoir, based on a novel by George Sessions Perry.

Running time: 1:32

An Arabic post-apocalyptic thriller about survivors fighting over the little water that’s left? The pitch alone is enough for “The Worthy” to make one intrigued.

Filmed in Bucharest, financed in the United Arab Emirates and directed by a UAE native/London Film School grad, it’s compelling, competent, and so overfamiliar as to be utterly generic and forgettable.

But the very idea of such a film, that it played in the Arab world, is at least as compelling as the story told on the screen — or it would be, if it took bigger chances and aimed higher.

Civilization has collapsed, evildoers have poisoned most of the world’s fresh water and without that, only scattered pockets of humanity can cling to life, never venturing far from their dwindling supply.

Eissa (Mahmoud Al Atrash, good) narrates our story, relating how his truck-driving dad (Samer al Masri) once picked up a hitchhiker who “saw it coming.” “The Seer” warned “Beware the black flags,” and feel free to remember how many terror cells have used black standards. “Their only loyalty is to themselves.”

So Shuaib, the father, grabbed Eissa and his sister Maryam (Rakeen Saad) and, with a few others, established themselves in a place with water. It’s a ruined airplane factory, with a water tank that sustains the 10 people holed up there.

Strangers approach, and wary but compassionate Shuaib takes the bait — literally. It takes other strangers to rescue him from the predators who chained up a woman to lure him out.

Some mistrust Gulbin (Maisa Abd Elhadi), a scarred Kurdish woman who doesn’t speak Arabic. And none trust Mussa (Samer Ismail), the wild-eyed man who killed to save Shuaib, but isn’t about to surrender his knife when he’s allowed inside.

“This knife and I are old friends,” he purrs to the leader of this “community.” The warning bells have been ringing in the viewer’s head, and must be in Shuaib’s as his “guest” starts prattling on about the need to “separate the strong from the weak,” “the worthy” from “the unworthy.”

Murder and chaos ensue. The siblings must stick together, “leading” and trying to outsmart a homicidal monster, who likes to make booby-traps.

Screenwriter Vikran Weet (“Darkness Rising”) goes to some pains to suggest that the traditional Shuaib has kept tenets of Islamic religious practice alive among his charges. Maryam has the interest of a young man in their group, but he’s got to get her father’s acceptance before anything progresses. Burials, hygiene and “hospitality” have survived centuries among the Bedouin, why wouldn’t they endure beyond the collapse of civilization?

Director Mostafa (“City of Life”) stages some suspenseful moments, and fritters away the chance for more in a story that morphs into a variation of every post-Apocalyptic thriller ever. “The Worthy” has more going for it than the “Maze Runner/Divergent/Hunger Games” YA-oriented fare, where the youth are the hope IF they can to escape/win this contest/fall in love. The stakes are high but the characters’ life-and-death struggle have a perfunctory video game feel.

The limitations on the female characters and a bleak/bleaker/bleakest third act hamper “The Worthy.” Even as the booby-traps, torture and murder — think “Saw” lite — grow more elaborate, one gets the sense that this is a movie scripted with one arm culturally and thematically tied behind one’s back.

The over-familiar tropes of the genre, dissent within, a power struggle built on “Selfishness is what it’s going to take from now on” aren’t enough to recommend the film. And the novelty of its characters, setting and cultural subtext doesn’t compensate for that.

But it’s polished and smart enough to to give one hope that Around the World with Netflix will have more entries from a part of the world not known for sci-fi or action films with coed casts.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, gruesome violence

Cast: Mahmoud Al Atrash, Maisa Abd Elhadi, Rakeen Saad, Samer Ismail and Samer al Masri.

Credits: Directed by Ali F. Mostafa, script by Vikram Weet. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

Feed Hampton, the charismatic Illinois Black Panther, and his betrayal by an FBI informant.

The Revolution will not be televised. It will if theaters don’t open soon.

“Made in Italy” goes down easily, like an unassuming Chianti that doesn’t drown the taste of the pasta. It stumbles out the door, and staggers a bit at the end of the evening, a wino back off the wagon. But everything in between is sweet, sentimental and guaranteed not to deliver a hangover.

Sorry, films about Tuscany bring the cringing wine analogies. I’ll stop.

Liam Neeson, a grand vintage in his own right (sorry), co-stars as a retired painter who accompanies his son to the family’s long-vacant Tuscan villa for a quick clean-up and a quick sale. The kid (Michael Richardson, of those Redgraves and Richardsons) needs the money.

Because Jack isn’t really a “kid.” He’s going through a divorce. His wife’s family had the money that kept his “Flite” London art gallery open. If he wants to keep it, he’ll need to buy them out. No sense telling Dad that.

Robert is a widower, once a star with a brush, now turning his energy to turning on the charm for any woman who catches his eye. He’s fine with selling the house.

One dull, time-killing road trip in an old VW van (Not THAT old.) later, and they’re there. Robert turns sentimental, Jack is on task. Guess who the British-born estate agent, Kate (Lindsay Duncan, fun) sympathizes with? And it’s not just because Robert flirts with a little blast of the Bard.

“Bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst, but Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom.”

Want to impress a lady? Don’t drop “The Taming of the Shrew” on her. All business “Kate” it is.

“Your plumbing seems to work. And people like that.”

Everything else? A bit of a shambles, with a weasel having the run of the place, to boot.

Jack would get a lot more done if Dad would stop reminiscing and pitch in, if the lovely restaurateur Natalia (Valeria Bilello) wasn’t in town, a ready-made distraction.

The actor James D’Arcy (“Dunkirk,” TV’s “Homeland” and “Broadchurch”) wrote and directed this, and he tends towards the maudlin at times. He sets up a sort of competition for Natalia between father and son, which is mercifully dispensed with.

“Made in Italy” was over twenty minutes longer when it played the festival circuit. Bu with romantic idyll movies, shorter and quicker is always better, even if you lose some lovely Italian vistas in the process.

Neeson brings a nice twinkle to Robert, and D’Arcy gives him one clever-bordering-on-brilliant scene. Jack looks at the place in the daylight for the first time and praises the “view.” Dad’s mini-tirade turns purple as he gripes at the kid not doing “one of the most spectacular convergences of nature” justice. Jack thinks that’s over the top, but “the artist,” his back turned, recites the glories of the aspect the place surveys. He has total recall for a landscape that “takes your breath away.”

“No, that’s the DUST, Dad.”

That lovely British word “tumbledown” describes the house, and while there are few surprises in any movie about a house renovation in Tuscany, “Made in Italy” clings to cute for dear life and thankfully — at this shorter run-time — never lets go.

It matters not that we, like Robert, will remember the view but not much about the story told in it or the Chianti reveries it inspires.

Cast: Liam Neeson,  Valeria Bilello, Micheál Richardson, Lindsay Duncan

Credits: Written and directed by James D’Arcy. An IFC Release.

Running time: 1:34

“Cromwell” came out in 1970, a late entry in a formidable run of stately British period pieces.

It’s inferior to “Anne of a Thousand Days,” “Becket,” “A Man for All Seasons” and even the somewhat stagebound “The Lion in Winter.” But it’s got realistic English Civil War battles, glorious Puritan/Cavalier era costumes, an abridged and bastardized piece of British history and Richard Harris and Alec Guinness, so it’s worth a go if you haven’t seen it.

Harris plays the gentleman-farmer Cromwell, about to emigrate to America where his fellow Puritans have set up shop, when he’s goaded into returning to Parliament to show the imperious, constitution-flouting Charles I (Guinness) that “the people” are in charge of the purse strings, and thus the country.

The high-handed Charles needs money, and only the Parliament — which he dissolved years before — can raise it. And with Cromwell and his fellow puritans like Pym (Geoffrey Keen) leading the way, and earls like Manchester (Robert Morley) and Essex (Charles Gray) bristling at the king’s overreach, Charles won’t get a ha’penny, blast his eyes.

Civil War it is then, and with the King’s continental nephew Prince Rupert (Timothy Dalton) here to “Tally HO” the royals, what can go wrong?

The great Geoffrey Unsworth was cinematographer, and the Spanish exteriors (Pamplona, Navarre and environs) make for splendid battlefields filled with musketeers, pikemen, artillery and cavalry, which Spain under Franco was always willing to provide on the cheap.

The dialogue — director Ken Hughes (“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”) also scripted it — is pungently quotable, and Harris and Guinness make quite the theatrical statement with the best lines.

The newly-devout Cromwell –“O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.”

The tyrannical snob Charles — “A democracy, Mr. Cromwell, was a Greek drollery based on the foolish notion that there are extraordinary possibilities in very ordinary people.”

And of course, there’s the most famous Cromwell battlefield quote of them all — “Put your trust in God, but keep your powder dry.”

The history is something of a mashup, condensing three civil wars into one, shifting Cromwell’s importance in this or that battle, putting him at the execution of King Charles (he wasn’t there), all sorts of things great and small which even someone not a stickler for British history can sense.

Still and all, I think it works — after a fashion. Whatever deserved abuse it received upon its release, it’s brisk enough, the grandeur and scale hold up and the cast has just enough heft to carry it off.

It being British history and filmed in the late 1960s, you can expect to see many a James Bond bit player in supporting roles, just as every member of British Actor’s Equity turned up in the Harry Potter pictures more recently.

Here’s Keen, who took over after Bernard Lee (as “M”) died as Bond’s boss for several 1970s films. Gray was in an early Connery Bond as a bit player, and turned up as Blofeld in “Diamonds are Forever,” although he’s best remembered for singing and dancing the “Time Warp” in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Dalton would play Bond for a couple of films in the ’80s. And Hughes directed some of the “unofficial” unsanctioned 1968 “Casino Royale.”

But the oddest thing I fixated on in this viewing was the makeup scheme chosen for Harris. A famous drinker and brawler who once kept a booking on “The Dick Cavett Show”after getting pounded in a bar fight, I was mystified at what I was seeing in Harris’s closeups.

One day, he’d have what looked like bumps and injuries covered by pancake on his chin and forehead, another a busted lip that could have been a cold sore.

There are plenty of photos that show him for the unmarked matinee idol that he was in that day. What gives? Were they going for a version of “Cromwell had boils and abscesses” authenticity (entirely possible), or did the man have herpes and the occasional knock-about in the local pubs?

In any event, he’s good in the film, which does a pretty good job of walking the fence on Cromwell as a Rights of Man patriot, a gifted organizer and field commander, and a religious fanatic who hated Catholicism and recruited fellow fanatics for his New Model Army.

“Cromwell” isn’t the last word on its subject. But to this day, that complex figure has yet to generate another major motion picture that even tried.

MPAA Rating: G, violence

Cast: Richard Harris, Alec Guinness, Robert Morley, Dorothy Tutin, Charles Gray, Frank Finlay, Patrick Magee and Timothy Dalton

Credits: Written and directed by Ken Hughes. A Columbia Pictures release, on Tubi, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 2:09