Hearts and Armour (1984): Love, Magic, and Medieval Mayhem in a Lost Tanya Roberts Cult Fantasy

[00:00:08] From Los Angeles, California, the entertainment capital of the world, it's the 80s Movie Podcast. I'm your host Edward Havens, thank you for listening today. Today we'll be visiting another movie that was produced and abandoned, but in a quite different way. Listeners to the show will be hearing this episode in the first week of June 2026, the day before a new version of Masters of the Universe will be hitting American movie theaters.

[00:00:33] And one would think that an 80s Movie Podcast might spend time talking about the original 80s Movie the week its remake, slash update, slash whatever is, is opening in theaters. Of course, long time listeners of this show know that's not how I operate. But that doesn't mean I'm going to completely ignore the kind of action fantasy adventure film this episode because there were a lot of those types of movies in the 1980s.

[00:00:59] Some like Excalibur were great in their own way and others like Master of the Universe just plain sucked. This week's movie? It's somewhere in between. A silly little endeavor that makes perfect sense once we put it into proper context. The Italian action fantasy adventure film Hearts and Armor.

[00:01:18] A fantasy adventure loosely inspired by the 16th century Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto's epic 1932 poem Orlando Furioso takes place during a mythicized war between Christian and Saracen forces. In the midst of this conflict, the armored Christian warrior Bradamente travels through a landscape of battles and rival knights and becomes entangled with the Saracen warrior Ruggero, a Moorish prince.

[00:01:47] Despite belonging to opposite sides, they fall in love, even as prophecies and politics threaten to tear them apart, including a foretold fate in which Ruggero is destined to be killed by the paladin Rolando. The romantic entanglement spread outward onto a wider network of doomed relationships. Rolando himself is connected to Ruggero's family through his love for Ruggero's sister Isabella, while Isabella is pursued amid shifting loyalties and constant warfare.

[00:02:14] A sorceress warns Bradamente that love and destiny are on a collision course, and the wizard Alanta tries unsuccessfully to protect Ruggero from his fate as he becomes distracted by love and competing allegiances, including the warrior Marfisa. These overlapping relationships push the characters toward an unavoidable conflict, especially as duels and the battlefield confrontations loom.

[00:02:39] As the prophecy edges toward fulfillment, Bradamente attempts to prevent the fatal duel between Rolando and Ruggero. In the end, Marfisa intervenes and is killed in place of Ruggero, breaking the cycle of violence and forcing a pause in the expected tragedy. Ruggero initially seeks revenge but ultimately refuses further conflict, and forgiveness replaces vengeance.

[00:03:02] Their surviving lovers are separated and reshuffled by loss and revelation, but the story resolves with reconciliation and the possibility of a new life beyond the war. I mean, that sounds really cool, right? So when Hollywood started pumping out movies like Excalibur and Clash of the Titans and Conan the Barbarian and Beastmaster and Deathstalker and Sword and the Sorcerer,

[00:03:28] Italian film producers Nicola Carano and Franco Cristaldi started looking around for an Italian property that could possibly do for Italian cinema in the 1980s what the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns did two decades earlier. And what better place to start than an epic masterpiece of Italian Renaissance literature, one that because it was more than 450 years old would not cost them a lire to purchase the rights to.

[00:03:54] They would hire Italian television writer and director Giacomo Battiato, who had been making hit television movies and miniseries for nearly a decade, to be making his feature film debut. The job of adapting a 1200-page text down to a 120-page screenplay would take Batiatto more than a year to complete. But the producers were satisfied enough to start sending the script out to both Italian and American actors in the hopes of making a global crossover hit.

[00:04:23] To this effect, they would hire the American casting directors Jane Feinberg and Mike Fenton, whose individual or shared credits would include American Graffiti, The Bad News Bears, Breaking Away, Chinatown, The Godfather Part 2, Marathon Man, Norma Rae, Shampoo, Slapshot, and Young Frankenstein, just to name a few, who would be brought on board the production to work their magic here.

[00:04:49] For the local audiences, Feinberg and Fenton would hire the devastatingly beautiful 22-year-old Italian actress Barbara De Rossi. Already a household name in Italy, thanks to her supporting roles in the 1978 Marcello Mastroianni, Nastassja Kinski drama Così Come C'è, and the 1980 drama Le C'è Cala, featuring American actor Anthony Francioso,

[00:05:14] would be cast in her first leading role as Bradamente, the warrior woman with an invincible suit of armor who falls in love with an enemy after meeting on the battlefield. Ron Moss, the bassist and singer for the 1970s band Player, best known for their 1978 hit song Baby Come Back, the best Hall & Oates song they never wrote or sang, would make his acting debut as Bradamente's love interest Ruggiero.

[00:05:38] American actor and former model Rick Edwards, whose only previous movie acting experience was as Uncle Sam in the 1979 Scott Baio roller disco movie Skatetown USA, would be cast as the paladin Ronaldo, destined to kill Ruggiero, while also being in love with his sister Isabella. Isabella would be played by Tonya Roberts, the American actress best known for her role as Julie Rogers in the fifth and final season of Charlie's Angels,

[00:06:05] who had just been seen on movie screens as Kiri in The Beastmaster. Also cast was American actor Leigh McCloskey, who would become more well-known to 80s movie audiences in 1985 as Kevin, the cad boyfriend of Joyce Heiser's Terry Griffith in Just One of the Guys, and as Charles Lalor III in Fraternity Vacation. And Ethiopian actress Zudi Araya, who sadly passed away just two weeks ago as of this recording, as the warrior Marfisa.

[00:06:35] The film would be Italian cinematographer Dante Spinotti's second feature film as a director of photography. You would know Spinotti as the two-time Oscar-nominated lenser of Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential, and Michael Mann's The Insider, who also shot Mann's Man-Tunter, The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, and Public Enemies. To design the production, they would hire Luciano Riccieri,

[00:07:03] who had gotten his start in cinemas as an assistant art director on Fellini's Eight and a Half 20 years earlier, whose credits would also include being the production designer of Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits. Costume designer Nanna Cecchi, who had worked with Giacomo Battiato and Dante Spinotti on the 1982 Italian television series Colomba, would make her feature debut on Hearts in Armor. I normally wouldn't highlight a costume designer on the show,

[00:07:31] but it bears mention that Richard Donner would catch a screening of the film sometime in late 1983 and hire her to do the costumes for his own action-fantasy-adventure film Ladyhawk, which was about to go into production while Hearts in Armor was in post-production. Once the production team and cast were in place, filming would begin on location in Etna on the eastern coast of Sicily, near the active Stratovolcano of the same name, on September 27, 1982,

[00:08:01] and would last approximately seven weeks. And because this was being made for global release, it was decided to have each actor speak their native tongue during filming. Although because more of the people on the planet spoke English over Italian, that would be the default language used to sell the movie outside of Italy. The American distributor, Warner Bros., would come aboard before production, buying the global rights for the film outside of Italy for $4 million, which would cover most of the $6 million budget.

[00:08:32] Once the film was done shooting, producer Carano would exit the film to begin work on his first solo production without his longtime producing partner Castaldi, when Federico Fellini tapped the producer to supervise the production of his and the ship sails on. While in post-production, David Hughes, a British keyboardist who was a member of Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark for most of 1980, would be hired to create the musical score for the film.

[00:08:59] Hughes would bring in his former OMD collaborator, keyboardist Martin Cooper, to work on the score, which, unlike most sweeping orchestral scores recorded for an action-fantasy-adventure film of the day, with a full accompaniment of brass horns and strings, would feature one of the earliest, highly stylized synth-pop progressive electronic soundtracks that would become standard for this type of film later in the decade. The film would first open in Italy on September 21, 1983,

[00:09:29] through the local distributor P.I.C. Produzene Intercontinente Cinematografia. While popular in Italy, the film would not make the country's top ten box office hits of the year, though Nanaceci would be nominated for a David D. Donatello Award, Italy's version of their Oscars, for Best Costume Design. Two months later, Warner Bros. would open the film in Australia on November 17, to capitalize on Tanya Roberts' newfound fame down under,

[00:09:58] thanks to The Beastmaster. However, Warner Bros. would not end up releasing box office grosses for the film there. It would next play at the Armand Theater in Haifa, Israel, beginning March 2, 1984, although there are no reports of how well the film did there. Hearts and Armors would then screen at the 1984 American Film Market, held in mid-March in Los Angeles. From there, it would open on 11 screens in the Philippines on April 25,

[00:10:27] where it would be marketed as a generic sword and sorcery film to capitalize on local moviegoers' taste. And, the film would return to Sydney, Australia, on August 31, as a second feature at three drive-ins, supporting Warner Bros. Greystoke. In an August 1984 interview with the Atlanta Constitution staff writer, Scott Cain, while promoting Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Tanya Roberts noted that she had completed Hearts and Armour before she began shooting Sheena,

[00:10:57] and that with fairytale movies seemingly making a modest comeback, she had hoped that Warners would take it off the proverbial shelf and release it into American theaters. But they never did. In America, Warners would conduct several test screenings in cities like Columbus, Ohio, Denver, Las Vegas, and San Diego in the fall of 1984, where the film would baffle audiences who were expecting another Conan the Barbarian, and were thrown off

[00:11:25] by the differences between the native English speakers and the Italian speakers whose lines were dubbed into English but did not necessarily match how the lines were delivered on screen. The lower-than-expected test scores would scare Warners' executives into removing the film from their theatrical release list completely and eventually sent out direct-to-video stores for Betamax owners in a traditional cardboard slipcase and inside one of Warners' infamous big puffy boxes for VHS

[00:11:53] on October 7, 1985. Shortly thereafter, the film would occasionally be shown in the middle of the night on HBO during the later months of 1985 and early months of 1986 according to some online databases. But searching through available program guides online, I cannot find any airings on HBO or any other cable movie channel during the decade. One persistent rumor about the film that seems to be tied to a contemporary Leonard Maltin movie guide

[00:12:22] is that the film was severely butchered down from a four-hour Italian miniseries to a final movie cut of 101 minutes. However, there are no records of the movie ever appearing on Italian broadcast television as a miniseries. The film was given a second VHS release in 1991 and has never been released on Laserdisc, RCA's Video Disc, or on any new video format introduced after 1991.

[00:12:51] In June 2026, you can find poorly digitized copies of the film across the internet or you can buy a used open VHS copy of the film for less than $20 on eBay. I myself am hoping to experience this film for the first time this weekend at a private movie club screening in the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area sometime during the weekend after I release this episode. This kind of semi-secret underground screening of practically lost media is a new adventure

[00:13:20] for this film's scholar and historian and I'm excited for the new experience. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, the80smoviepodcast.com for extra materials about hearts and armor. The 80s Movie Podcast has been researched, written, narrated, and edited by Edward Havens for idiosyncratic entertainment. Thank you again. Good night. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.