Nikos Koundouros directed this unpleasant Greek-Russian co-production contrasting the death of a Romantic poet with the Greek struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Set in 1824, the film charts the arrival of George Gordon Byron (Manos Vakoussis) at Messolongi to join the revolution. He quickly becomes a general, but his army is a ragtag contingent of unskilled peasants and nomadic mercenaries. Despite the harsh conditions, his worsening fever, and the twin torments of his memories of his late sister Augusta (Vera Sotnikova) and his love for a young Greek soldier (Farhad Mahmudov), Byron battles valiantly to the end in a heroic effort. Standing out among the international cast are Alexander Kyrilov as Jeremy Baxter and Akis Sakellariou as Byron's Italian confidante Pietro Gamba, but the film in general is pretentious, overly mannered, and filled with the sort of sophomoric rhetoric one would expect from a flunking student's bad term paper on Byron rather than from Byron himself.
by Robert Firsching
synopsis
