The Name of the Rose (1986)

Official trailer

The Name of the Rose is Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1986 European production adapting Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel of the same name. The film depicts Franciscan friar William of Baskerville arriving at a wealthy Northern Italian monastery in 1327 to participate in theological debate between Franciscans and the Pope’s representatives. William must investigate a series of mysterious deaths occurring among the monks. His investigation gradually exposes the monastery’s labyrinthine library and the secret it contains. Sean Connery plays William of Baskerville. Christian Slater plays his novice Adso of Melk. F. Murray Abraham plays inquisitor Bernardo Gui. Michael Lonsdale plays the abbot. Volker Prechtel plays the librarian Malachi. Feodor Chaliapin Jr. plays the elderly monk Jorge of Burgos. Ron Perlman plays the deformed monk Salvatore. Helmut Qualtinger plays the cellarer Remigio. Andrew Birkin, Gerard Brach, Howard Franklin, and Alain Godard wrote the screenplay. Constantin Film, Cristaldifilm, and Les Films Ariane produced the film on a budget of approximately 17 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 77 million dollars worldwide.

This is the kind of film I wish studios still had the nerve to make. A murder mystery among arguing monks, with a forbidden library at its center and Sean Connery playing detective in a friar’s robe, sounds like a hard sell for a popular audience, and it has me from start to finish. My only complaint is how much of Eco’s argument it had to leave out.

Umberto Eco’s intellectually demanding novel about medieval scholasticism, heresy, and the politics of theological dispute has its principal screen adaptation in The Name of the Rose. Jean-Jacques Annaud directed the film with the controlled attention to historical detail that distinguished his Quest for Fire (1981) and his later films. The medieval monastery works with real fidelity to fourteenth-century monastic conditions. The film addresses theological content that conventional adventure productions typically avoid.

The debate between Franciscan poverty advocates and papal authority reflects real medieval church controversy that historians continue to document. Strong cast, careful production and intellectual ambition add up to a medieval film I rank above anything else of its kind from the 1980s.

Connery as William

Sean Connery plays William of Baskerville with exactly the controlled intellectual presence the role needs. William is a Franciscan friar who once did inquisitorial work and now turns investigative methods on theological problems.

I adore this performance. Connery makes reasoning look thrilling, and his measured authority lets me believe William as both a man of faith and a detective. I’d put it at the top of his career.

Connery had been transitioning from his Bond identification toward more serious dramatic roles across the early 1980s.

The William of Baskerville performance showed his capacity for material that conventional action-leading-man work didn’t require. His later Best Supporting Actor win for The Untouchables (1987) the following year extended what Name of the Rose helped establish. The pattern of successful career rehabilitation through specific roles that show range has continued across multiple actors.

The Library Sequence

The monastery library reads as physical labyrinth that William and Adso must find their way through to discover the secret it contains. The monastery was built as a replica on a hilltop outside Rome, and many interiors were shot at Eberbach Abbey in Germany. The combined locations produced one of the more impressive medieval library sets in 1980s cinema. The library contains scrolls and codices that the monks consult under controlled access conditions.

The library sequences capture medieval monastic library practice with real fidelity: the restricted access, the manuscript organization and the librarian’s authority all reflect historical conditions. Monasteries were the main preservation houses for classical and theological texts before European universities built their own. These are my favorite scenes in the film. That maze of books is my idea of an adventure set piece, and the research makes the danger feel real.

The Eco Source

Umberto Eco wrote The Name of the Rose as scholar of medieval semiotics who applied his academic expertise to popular fiction.

The novel contains considerable theological discussion, philosophical debate, and historical detail that conventional thrillers typically avoid. The book was a huge commercial success for an intellectual novel of the late twentieth century. The combination of accessible mystery plot and demanding intellectual content gave the novel readers who wouldn’t typically engage either thriller or scholarly material.

The film compresses major portions of the novel while keeping the central plot mechanics, and Eco’s theological debates and philosophical arguments survive only in compressed form.

Readers of the novel may find it reductive. I don’t. I think the screenwriters made smart cuts, and the debates that remain carry enough of Eco’s weight that the film still feels far smarter than ordinary commercial cinema.

Is The Name of the Rose as good as people say?

I give The Name of the Rose its 9 without much of a struggle. Connery gives the best performance of his career, F. Murray Abraham makes Bernardo Gui an inquisitor I love to despise, and the library sequences are the finest medieval sets I know of. What keeps it from a 10 is the compression, since I miss the debates Eco built the novel around. Watch it if you care about medieval history, about Connery, or about mysteries that trust you to think.

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