Columbia Pictures was so certain Sean Connery was finished that it pulled its financing the moment he was cast. After a long run of flops, the studio wanted nothing to do with a medieval murder mystery built around a washed-up Bond.

THE NAME OF THE ROSE (1986) got made anyway, with financing assembled from a patchwork of European television networks.

Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Umberto Eco's dense medieval bestseller became Connery's comeback. He won a BAFTA and walked straight into The Untouchables and an Oscar.

Annaud had no interest in movie-star faces. He wanted the Middle Ages, so he cast the most weathered, distinctive actors he could find, by his own admission the ugliest, down to the silent monks lining the abbey halls. He spent four years assembling them, and nearly every face in the film looks carved out of the period.

Eco kept his distance from the result and disliked Connery's casting. The film does not even claim to adapt the author. Its credits famously describe the movie as "a palimpsest of Umberto Eco's novel".

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The Name of the Rose was an international co-production between West German, French, and Italian companies, including Neue Constantin Film, Cristaldifilm, and Les Films Ariane. Shot in English, it was filmed on location at the historic Eberbach Abbey in Germany and on massive exterior sets constructed near Rome. Distribution was handled regionally by various studios, with 20th Century Fox distributing the theatrical release in the United States and Canada, Columbia Pictures in Italy, and Neue Constantin Film in West Germany.