Ivanhoe is a 1952 historical adventure epic film directed by Richard Thorpe and produced by Pandro S. Berman for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

The screenplay is written by Æneas MacKenzie, Marguerite Roberts, and Noel Langley, based on the 1819 historical novel Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott.

In 1951, the year of production, one of the screenwriters, Marguerite Roberts, was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and MGM received permission from the Screen Writers Guild to remove her credit from the film, which has since been restored.

One of his knights, the Saxon Wilfred of Ivanhoe, searches for him, finally finding him being held by Leopold of Austria for an enormous ransom.

When the Norman party seeks shelter for the night, Ivanhoe leads them to Rotherwood, the home of his father, Cedric the Saxon.

Isaac's daughter Rebecca gives Ivanhoe jewels, without her father's knowledge, to buy a horse and armour for an important jousting tournament at Ashby.

In the fighting, Front de Boeuf drives Wamba to his death in a burning part of the castle and is slain in turn by Ivanhoe.

At Rebecca's trial, she is condemned to be burned at the stake as a witch, but Ivanhoe appears and challenges the verdict, invoking the right to "wager of battle".

Bois-Guilbert makes a last, desperate plea to Rebecca, offering to forfeit the duel in return for her love, though he would be forever disgraced.

In 1951, the film's main scriptwriter, Marguerite Roberts, was ordered to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where she and her husband, John Sanford, cited the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions about whether they had been members of the American Communist Party.

Consequently, they were both blacklisted,[3] and MGM received permission from the Screen Writers Guild to remove Roberts' credit from the film.

[3] Scenes were filmed on soundstages at MGM-British Studios, Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, and on location at Doune Castle, Scotland.

The studio hired Jack Churchill, a British Second World War army officer (renowned for going into battle carrying a Scottish broadsword, longbow and bagpipes), to appear as an archer, shooting from the walls of Warwick Castle.

Miklós Rózsa's score[6] is one of his most highly regarded, and it received both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations.

It's a lovely melody, breathing the innocently amorous atmosphere of the middle ages, and I gave it modal harmonizations.

I devised a new theme for the Saxons, along with a motive for the battering ram sequence, thereby giving a rhythmic beat which contrapuntally and polytonally worked out with the previous thematic material, forming a tonal background to this exciting battle scene.

While Reis glorios, verais lums e clartatz opens by invoking the divine ("Glorious King, true light and clarity"), it is a secular Occitan alba or dawn-song, in which the narrator is keeping guard while his friend is spending the night with another man's wife or mistress.

In addition, Richard Thorpe was nominated by the Directors Guild of America, USA, for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures.

Bosley Crowther, film critic for The New York Times, wrote that "producer Pandro S. Berman and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer have fetched a motion picture that does them, Scott and English history proud" and delivered "almost as fine a panorama of medievalism as Laurence Olivier gave us in Henry V".