La tour de Nesle is based on an actual incident in French history involving Quenn Marguerite de Bourlonge, one combining all the elements any 19th-century playwright could ask for in a melodrama. The hero, Buridan, was the lover of Marguerite de Bourlogne as a youth. They had two children in secret, Phillipe and Gautier, and Princess Marguerite persuaded Buridan to rid her of her father, making her queen (at which point, she tried to kill him and her sons, a latter day Medea). Young Buridan escapes, believing his children murdered, but Landry, the man assigned to kill the boys, spares them and raises them. Twenty years pass and Marguerite and her ladies in waiting have contrived a scheme to get their thrills with minimum risk. They've made a secret brothel of the Tower of Nesle on the Seine, where they lure young men for a night of passion, after which their minions murder the handsome young men and dispose of them in the Seine so they can never expose what the women are doing.

DVD-R is in French with switchable English subtitles. Approx. 119 mins. See film sample for audio and video quality!