With Hollywood seemingly unable to come up with anything better than yet another treatment of Jane Austen, Eugene Volokh thinks The Last Duel would make a good movie. It’s a history of the last judicial trial by combat authorized by the French central government, in 1386:

It’s got friendship gone sour; a battle to the death; a complaining witness (the wife of one of the combatants, who had accused the other of rape) who would face immediate burning at the stake (on the grounds that she had been proved a perjurer) if her husband and champion was defeated; and a battle scene that’s shocking even to me, after all the battle scenes I’ve read about and watched in movies.

I doubt any Hollywood heavies read either of these two blogs. But who knows?