King Arthurathon: "Sword of Lancelot" (1963)Hey there, Trash Muties, it’s been some time since I spoke with you, hasn’t it? So I thought I’d remedy that by talking to you about a King Arthur movie. I like King Arthur stories. But I tend to be very picky when it comes to The Matter of Britain. There have been a lot of King Arthur movies, and some of them are pretty good, and some are an atrocity that should never have entered this plane of existence. So I want to go through some of the King Arthur-centric movies that are out there and tackle what works and doesn’t work about them. But this isn’t exactly a review. This is more me being nitpicky about what I consider to be part of “my” King Arthur canon. And we all love nitpicky fanboys, right? So let’s get started!
The first movie I’ll be tackling in my digital road trip is the 1963 film Sword of Lancelot (also sometimes known as Lancelot and Guinevere, I guess) directed by and starring Cornel Wilde as Lancelot, the best knight of King Arthur’s court. Our movie begins with Arthur ready to marry Guinevere, but when her father challenges Arthur’s legitimacy to the throne, Lancelot goes and fights on Arthur’s behalf, bringing Guinevere back with him. And unless you have never heard of Lancelot and Guinevere, then you know these two crazy kids fall in love, despite their duty to their king and husband, in the case of Guinevere. After an evil knight named Modred reveals the affair to Arthur, a bunch of plot stuff happens in rapid fire. Arthur reluctantly has to burn Guinevere at the stake for her treason, but Lancelot rescues her. Then after sometime away from Camelot, Lancelot wants Guinevere to return, where she can live without the consequences of their affair, while he lives in banishment. But the banishment doesn’t last, as we find out Mordred killed Arthur, so Lancelot comes to kick butt and take names. Our movie ends on a downer note, with Guinevere ready to take vows to become a nun, throwing away her romance with Lancelot. Aww. So I actually came to own this movie as part of a collection of 4 King Arthur movies that I bought at a Library sale for a dollar. So if I’m being honest, based on some of the other movies on that collection, I didn’t have very high expectations going into this one. That and, this movie being from the early 1960s, I was worried the pacing was going to be very slow and make this a boring experience for me. This probably makes me a bad nerd or whatever, but I generally don’t watch movies from the 1960s. Sure, you’ve got Hitchcock, who is a master and all that, but most of the time, I have to have newer movies with a faster pacing to keep my attention. But while this movie did have some issues that I’ll get to later, boring it was not. So as a King Arthur fanboy, let me first get into some of the negatives I didn’t like, so I can talk about the stuff I liked last and end on a positive note. So anyone who does know about even the very basic bricks and mortar of the King Arthur mythology knows that Lancelot and Guinevere are having an affair. And if your movie is sometimes known as Lancelot and Guinevere, then it’s a very good bet their affair is going to feature heavily in the plot here. And while it is the crux of the movie, I don’t feel like their romance is earned. Part of that is that there are centuries of King Arthur stories, and some stories have Arthur’s reign lasting anywhere from 25 years to more than 40 years. So trying to squeeze a sordid affair into a just barely 2 hour movie is going to be difficult. The trap this movie falls into is that it feels like Lancelot and Guinevere are in love as soon as they meet, so that the movie can get on with the rest of the plot. And in playing their romance that way, I don’t really know much about either of them, or why they love each other. As near as I can tell, Lancelot likes Guinevere because she’s pretty, and Guinevere likes Lancelot because he’s hot and does manly stuff like kill bad guys and read Latin. (Note to self, learn Latin so I can woo the Queen. Further note to self, edit that last part out of the article before I submit it.) The romance feels so rushed, and I don’t know how it could be handled better. This movie is already almost 2 hours long, so I wouldn’t want it to be much longer to allow for more breathing room with this subplot. This kind of thing almost makes me feel like King Arthur’s story cannot be squeezed into one single movie. If you were going to do multiple movies and spread it out so it could be done at the right pace, that’d be fine, but nobody’s ever done that before. (Guy Ritchie was going to, but since King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was a financial bomb, I don’t think we’ll be seeing that happen.) And this isn’t even Arthur’s full story, but just a small portion of the story, and it still feels cramped. Speaking of me not really knowing what a character is about, I also don’t really have a clear idea of who Arthur is in this movie, either. Now I guess they were trying to let this be Lancelot and Guinevere’s movie, and giving more screen time and any characterization to Arthur would decrease from Lancelot and Guinevere’s story. And it’s true, that probably would have happened, but when Lancelot and Guinevere already feel so empty, I’d like for at least one of the characters here to have something I could describe as a character trait so I can have a reason to root for them. Arthur isn’t in the movie as much as Lancelot and Guinevere are, so it’s less egregious, but I still don’t know much about him. He gets nervous when he’s about to meet Guinevere, and when he’s talking to Merlin about Guinevere and Lancelot’s tryst, I do get the feeling he really doesn’t want to do this, but those are 2 scenes that are almost an hour apart, and other than that, Arthur’s not got much going on. And the movie knows this, since it kills him off screen. That’s what you do in a stage production, or for an unnamed character. Arthur deserves better than that, movie. And speaking of Arthur, for a long time, I’ve really liked the idea that Arthur knows about Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair, but he chooses not to do anything, because he sees how much it makes them happy, and he only orders their deaths when it is public knowledge and impossible for him to deny. Realistically, I imagine any husband would be more than a little upset when they found out their best friend and wife were smooshing booties, but Arthur is supposed to be legendary because his kingdom espoused ideals of justice that weren’t the norm. So for him to be deeply hurt at this betrayal, but also keep silent so their happiness could continue, it’s an idea I really love (and you can see just a little bit of it in The Once and Future King, although it’s unclear there just how long Arthur has known), but it doesn’t get its due diligence. I think every time I’ve seen this affair come to light on screen, Arthur reacts exactly like any other king would react, which makes him about as special as every other King, right? Then we have Modred, Arthur’s illegitimate son and the “villain” of the movie. I use airquotes, because he feels like an afterthought in this movie. His motivation to kill or remove Guinevere so he has a chance to succeed his father on the throne is given to us in the first act of the movie, but after that, we hardly see Modred, so I don’t know why we really needed him here. He reveals to Arthur what is going on, but that could have just as easily been accomplished by Arthur accidentally walking in on them doing the nasty. I guess they wanted a big battle at the end of the movie, but that mostly feels like it’s there so that the audience has something juicy to go out on. With Arthur already dead, and Lancelot and Guinevere’s relationship already sizzling out, this battle doesn’t have much substance. It might have been difficult, but I think this movie could have removed Modred, and just done a movie where the entire conflict is Lancelot and Guinevere struggling with their duty to Arthur and their love for each other. It might’ve been tricky, but I think it could have been done.
So if those are all the things I didn’t like, then what did I like about this movie? A few things, actually. One, I was quite impressed that this movie pretty faithfully adapts a good chunk of its story from The Once and Future King. You might argue that a faithful adaptation means nothing if the characters feel hollow, as they do in this movie, but remember, I’m coming at this as an Arthur fanboy. Most of the time in these movies, it seems like people are passingly familiar with the world and the characters, and maybe the broad strokes, like holy grail, affair, illegitimate son causes uprising, but beyond those elements, it often feels like they are making a movie more out of whole cloth instead of using the stories that are already there. Sure, nobody is obligated to adapt the Once and Future King or L’morte d’Arthur. But why wouldn’t you? It’d be one thing if we had gotten a whole bunch of faithful adaptations of the source material, and then somebody came and said they wanted to do something different. But with King Arthur and Greek Mythology (another one of my loves I may dissect some day), it seems like everybody wants to do something different, even though nobody has done the standard yet. So that’s a long way to a short point of me saying I’m impressed the last third of this movie feels like it comes right out of the written legends of Arthur. Lancelot killing Gawain’s brother Gareth and sparking a feud with Gawain (which, admittedly, works a lot better when Lancelot is a mentor and surrogate father to Gareth, which this movie completely skips out on); Lancelot’s rescue of Guinevere feels very much like the same scene in the sources, though it cuts down on the amount of innocent knights Lancelot murders in order to pull off the rescue; Guinevere going into a convent at the end feels like it comes out of nowhere, and it probably could have been explained a little better, but it does come from the stories predating this movie also. These things bring joy to my heart, even if they don’t necessarily work in the context of the movie. And the big thing I was surprised about here that may make me seem like an immature 12 year old is all the sex and violence. This movie is from 1963, so don’t expect Tarantino or anything like that, but the heights this movie did go to surprised me quite a bit. I never expected a 1963 film to show a close-up of a dude with an arrow through his head. Or really any blood at all for that matter. This movie has a lot of blood and somewhat violent scenes. And while I am not advocating for a period-accurate war movie, I do like that this movie isn’t glorifying knights and quests as being all good. There was a bad side to this time period, and it feels like the movie is really trying to show that. As for the sexy stuff, again, this isn’t on par with something you might see today, but I was still surprised by how far this movie went. I Love Lucy had only been off the air for about 6 years when this movie came out, and that series was famous for having a married couple sleep in separate beds. So that this movie is willing and able to even show Lancelot and Guinevere IN THE SAME BED, even if it’s from the shoulder up, it’s still shocking to me. And while the sexy stuff isn’t why I come to a movie like this, if you’re going to do an entire movie focusing on Lancelot and Guinevere, then you do need to make it steamy. That was something I was really concerned about. Like I said earlier, movies from this time period don’t usually excite me, so I was afraid we were going to get a steamy passionate love story without all the steam and passion. So I was pleasantly surprised there. So TL;DR, this movie doesn’t exactly succeed as a film by itself. Most of the characters are devoid of personality, and the big draw of the movie feels forced and inorganic. But as a King Arthur fan looking at a piece of the 20th century lore, I liked a lot of what I saw here. It wasn’t perfect, but I don’t think we’ve gotten a perfect piece of the lore, yet. At least in movies. But maybe someday, we’ll get there. In the meantime, keep it trashy, muties! |
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