The Name of the Rose (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Name of the Rose arrived in cinemas in 1986 with a puzzle at its heart: how do you turn a labyrinthine medieval novel into a film people will actually watch? Director Jean-Jacques Annaud told Umberto Eco directly that he believed the book had been written for one person to direct, and that person was himself. The result was a historical mystery set inside a Benedictine abbey, starring Sean Connery as the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, a man tasked with solving a string of deaths before an Inquisitor named Bernardo Gui could blame the wrong people. The film was shot partly at the real Eberbach Abbey in Germany and partly on the largest exterior set built in Europe since Cleopatra in 1963. It earned over sixty million dollars worldwide, won Sean Connery a BAFTA for Best Actor, and left Eco himself with a wry verdict: a nice movie that had no choice but to pick only the lettuce or the cheese from his club sandwich of a novel. What follows is the story of how that adaptation was made, who made it, and why it landed so differently in different corners of the world.

• 2. A Director's Obsession

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  Annaud spent four years preparing the film, traveling across the United States and Europe in search of the right cast. His starting point was personal: a lifelong fascination with medieval churches and a deep familiarity with Latin and Greek made the material feel like his own territory. From the outset he resisted the obvious casting choice. When suggestions came in to put Sean Connery in the role of William, Annaud pushed back. He felt the character, already conceived as an amalgam of Sherlock Holmes and William of Occam, would be overwhelmed by the shadow of James Bond. For a time he searched for another actor he could believe in, but no one satisfied him. Eventually, Connery gave a reading that won Annaud over. That decision carried consequences. Umberto Eco was dismayed. Columbia Pictures withdrew from the project entirely, partly because Connery's career was then in a slump. Finance was ultimately raised in part through Jake Eberts at Allied, and the film became a co-production between West German, French, and Italian companies.

• 3. Building the Cast

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  Christian Slater, cast as the novice Adso of Melk, came through a large-scale audition of teenage boys. His mother, Mary Jo Slater, was herself a prominent casting director who consulted on the film, though the role went to her son on the strength of the audition process rather than any shortcut. F. Murray Abraham took the role of the Inquisitor Bernardo Gui, and the supporting ensemble included Ron Perlman, Michael Lonsdale, William Hickey, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., and Valentina Vargas. For the wordless seduction scene between Vargas and Slater, Annaud took an unusual approach. He allowed Vargas to lead the scene entirely without his direction, and deliberately kept Slater in the dark about what she was going to do, believing the genuine surprise on Slater's face would produce a more authentic performance. Elsewhere, Annaud clashed with American casting agencies that proposed only white actors. He insisted on casting a Black monk to play Venantius, the translator. The role went to the Swiss actor Urs Althaus, who had previously modeled for Yves Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein, Valentino, Armani, Gucci, and Kenzo. Annaud's reasoning was rooted in medieval history: he regarded Moors as the intellectuals of that era and saw it as natural that one would serve as a translator.

• 4. Sets, Stones, and Manuscripts

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  Eberbach Abbey in the Rheingau provided many of the interior locations, its real Cistercian stonework lending the film an authenticity no studio could manufacture. The exterior monastery, however, was built from nothing on a hilltop outside Rome, and the scale of that construction made it the largest exterior set assembled in Europe since the 1963 production of Cleopatra. Almost everything visible inside the abbey was purpose-built for the film. Period illuminated manuscripts, the props that characters handle and read and poison, were produced specifically for this production. In 2024, a restored 4K version cut from the original negative was released in France. On that occasion the film was dubbed into Breton and broadcast on the Breton television channel Brezhoweb, an unlikely but specific footnote in the film's long afterlife.

• 5. The Poisoned Book

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  At the center of the plot sits a single object: what William eventually identifies as the only surviving copy of Aristotle's Second Book of Poetics, the volume on comedy. The abbey's labyrinthine library holds dozens of works by classical masters that were thought to have been lost for centuries. Those texts were kept hidden because knowledge originating from pagan philosophers was difficult for the medieval Church to reconcile with Christian doctrine. The Venerable Jorge, one of the oldest monks in the abbey, had poisoned the pages of the Poetics specifically to prevent the idea that laughter could be a vehicle for teaching from spreading further. Readers licked their fingers to turn pages, ingesting the poison each time. When William confronts Jorge directly, Jorge overturns a candle. The resulting fire consumes the library entirely. William rescues only an inadequate armful of books before the rest are lost. Meanwhile, outside the burning tower, Salvatore and Remigio da Varagine, who had been coerced into false confessions by the Inquisitor Bernardo Gui, are burned at the stake. The peasant girl Adso had encountered is saved when local people exploit the chaos of the fire to free her and turn on Gui. They throw his wagon off a cliff, killing him.

• 6. Reception and Fault Lines

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  In Germany the film grossed twenty-five million dollars, a strong commercial result. In the United States it played at only 176 theaters and took in seven point two million dollars. Sean Connery later recalled the total worldwide gross as exceeding sixty million dollars. Critics split along similar geographic lines in their enthusiasm. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a score of 72 percent based on 25 reviews, with an average rating of 6.3 out of 10. On Metacritic it holds a weighted average of 54 out of 100 from 12 reviews, a score the site describes as indicating mixed or average reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a B-plus. Roger Ebert awarded two and a half stars out of four and called it "all inspiration and no discipline." Time Out offered a warmer verdict, describing it as an intelligent reduction of Eco's novel that communicates the sense and spirit of a time when the world was literally read like a book. John Simon attributed the film's failure to an ending that was slightly happier than the novel's. Ron Perlman, by contrast, placed it among the two or three projects of his career he would not change a single thing about, and called it a film that only a very sophisticated moviegoer could fully appreciate. The César Award for Best Foreign Film and two BAFTAs, including Connery's Best Actor, were among the awards the film collected before another adaptation arrived in 2019 as a television miniseries for RAI.