clanciai

No one knows what really went on there at the legendary castle of Camelot in King Arthur's court with the round table, if it all really happened in reality or if everything was just a fairy tale, but there can be no smoke without fire, so it is likely that there was some reality behind it all. It is also not known where this fairytale castle was located, tradition has it located in the Glastonbury area in the west of England, but there are many indications that it was in fact in Colchester, England's oldest city northeast of London. On the other hand, the characters, with their passions and tangled relationships, have been so hysterically rewritten that they have become too alive to be denied. This film is a major contribution to the legends. It is three hours long and thus extremely extensive, and these three hours are packed with romance and costume splendor like no other, and all are extremely qualified actors, especially Richard Harris as King Arthur himself who makes a virtuoso show of reveling in his role. He is also fully believable in his characterization, Vanessa Redgrave is almost as magnificent as the liable Queen Guinevere, Franco Nero makes a consummate Lancelot, David Hemmings is just as rudely cheeky and despicable as Mordred should be, and all the others are also excellent. Director Joshua Logan is content here with just making the best of the script, and the music by Frederick Loewe does not reach his level in "My Fair Lady", yet there are some unforgettable elements, most notably Lancelot's great love song about the four seasons and the very moving finale. The musical was President Kennedy's favorite musical, and he liked to make his court in the White House appear like a new Camelot.

This was Joshua Logan's last film, but as a musical it makes a great difference from "South Pacific" and "Camelot" although love is also the leading theme here. The lady is the beautiful Jean Seberg, who is married to two men: Clint Eastwood and a drunk played by Lee Marvin. The action takes place in the 1850s in the Wild West when the gold rush in California has started in earnest and things get wild. Lee Marvin makes an excessively crude portrait of an old drunken old man even though he was only 45 when he made the film. He insisted that all the whiskey drunk in the film, and it is heavily consumed all the time, for his part, should always be the real thing, so he was basically drunk throughout the extensive shooting. Still, he survived the film by 15 years. All the others consistently drank apple juice or tea. The movie is hilarious all the way. It is a burlesque display of rich and drastic American humour. The comedy just rolls on all the time. Joshua Logan makes a lot of use of the unleashed humour and imagination non-stop, and one instant is constantly funnier than the other. Jean Seberg is the only one who doesn't think this chaos of fights and drunken orgies isn't very funny, but when she finally smiles, it's like a sunrise. Clint Eastwood doesn't pull the trigger here at all, but surprises all the more by providing some of the musical's finest songs. The very finest, however, is the first real song, which starts the film in earnest when it is windy and stormy and one of the gold diggers sings about the wind Maria ("We call the wind Maria"). No other melody in the musical gets through right away, but this one does.

The question is what most qualifies the film, is it the music, the actors, the story, the setting or something else. The answer is the whole concept, the fantastic pioneer gold-digging society ("No Name Town", with first only male inhabitants and later only drunks) is just the ideal scene for a magnificent comedy, and the question is whether this is not the best Western film ever made, even if it is just a wildly cheerful and senseless comedy, where everyone has fun or makes fun of each other. And even though the lawlessness is total, there is a deep humanity, and tenderness, as when the rough-and-tumble gold diggers want to pay anything just to watch a newly arrived woman with her infant child, whom they all want to pay to be able to hold just for a moment. Thus the film, with all its crudeness, all its coarseness, all its excessive drunkenness, is a very human story, which, however, finds dizzying expression in comedy and sumptuous comedy.

This is one of the most beautiful films ever made, if not the most beautiful. It gilded my entire childhood and probably became the most significant film ever for my life, as it somehow manifested all the best things about my childhood, my perception of beauty, my happiness and harmony, my passion for music and my euphoric love for nature, because the film portrayed all this with its dizzying beauty in the environmental depiction of the South Seas, (all filmed on the island of Kauai in Hawaii west of Oahu,) a priceless shrine of beautiful melodies that stick immediately, a languishing and tragic passion drama, hilarious elements of humour, and a fresh naturalness that seems spontaneous all the way. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein did many musicals together, where Rodgers was always responsible for the music while Hammerstein was responsible for the lyrics, and they together produced almost consistently qualified musicals that will always stand the test of time, but "South Pacific" took the prize, it ran for years to full houses on Broadway, none of their musicals reached a higher popularity, as everyone loved it. Then it was also made into a film, and then its global success story reached new dizzying heights. In Gothenburg, it had a constant revival for 15 years, the people of Gothenburg called it the most charming of all films, while the film copy was noticeably worn down, until finally it had to be closed down (1973).

It was also based on real fates and adventures. James Michener's first novel, "Tales of the South Pacific", is like a collection of loose stories from the Japanese war in the Pacific, but these small stories from the Second World War have been woven together into a motley web of a unit, where all the fates are connected with each other. This was made into a musical that became one of the most successful of all time.

However, the film was much debated mostly for its colour experimentation. Joshua Logan introduced colour filters only as an experiment and took it for granted that they would be removed before the film was printed, but they remained. And Logan was so upset about this that he demonstrated with placards outside the cinema and publicly pointed out that he was innocent of the permanent damage, and since then it has been debated whether it was really a damage or not. In fact, the colour filter experiment was successful in those particular scenes (such as "Bali Hai", they say Richard Rodgers composed this enchanting song in five minutes by pure improvisation, performed by the incomparable Juanita Hall, who played the same role on Broadway) where the filter experiment came to dominate, it is important scenes that are especially emphasised by the filter improvisation, but the issue continues to provoke debates. Of the actors, all are excellent, especially Rossano Brazzi, John Kerr and Ray Walston (the film's big comic draw) while Mitzi Gaynor didn't arouse everyone's enthusiasm. She comes across as quite simple and stupid, but the role is like that, and she is just right for it - she is supposed to be simple and stupid. And Ray Walston's follies appear as perfect contrasts to the war and the dark drama it entails. The result is frankly an ideally well-balanced and well-composed film that must be considered Joshua Logan's masterpiece.

None of the actors would surpass their excellence here, they triumphed here once and for all, and Joshua Logan would never dare to experiment with colour filters again. With the experimentation in "South Pacific", he had once and for all played a trump card for all times, no matter how much it would be debated.