Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The Sword of the Valiant looks like an exciting film. It stars Sean Connery, Miles O'Keefe, Trevor Howard, Peter Cushing, Leigh Lawson and Ronald Lacey.... with a cast like that, you feel sure that it must be a big, expensive, epic-scale production. Furthermore, if the script was rubbish, then surely they wouldn't have been able to persuade so many top actors to appear in it. Armed with this sense of certainty that the film is going to be a good one, you sit down to watch it with a degree of eagerness. Only then do you realise what a terrible, terrible mistake you've made.....

Yes, The Sword of the Valiant is a stinker! It stinks to high heaven in fact! It marks a career low point for Connery, and is only slightly better than O'Keefe's most legendary bad film of all, Tarzan the Apeman (1981). The story follows O'Keefe (sporting a laughable blond wig) as he sets out to solve a puzzle set for him by the evil Green Knight. He has just one year to solve the riddle, and if he has not reached an answer after that time he will die.

The make up department emerge with some credit. They've made Connery's Green Knight look quite good. Other than that, the film is a failure on every conceivable level. The music is awful, the supporting performances are embarrassing, the script is amateurish, the pacing is tedious, the climax is dreary, even the hairdressers (!) have failed to do their job competently. If you insist on watching The Sword of the Valiant (and believe me, you'd be best advised not to) then prepare yourself in advance for one of the most stupefyingly inept experiences you are ever likely to put yourself through.

The old English tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is brought to the screen with a charming blend of action , imagination ,thrills , adventure , and tongue-in-cheek humor . The medieval legend of a supernatural chivalrous young squire who challenges the king's men to kill him . Being middlingly starred Myles O'Keefe as Gawain , Sean Connery as the Green Knight, and appealing Cyrielle Claire as Lynette ("The Lady of Lyonesse"). In Camelot on New Year's Day, King Arthur's court is waiting for the feasting to start when the king asks first to see or hear of an exciting adventure. At this a gigantic figure, entirely green in appearance and riding a green horse, rides unexpectedly into the hall. He wears no armour but bears an axe in one hand and a holly bough in the other . He insists he has come for a friendly "Christmas game": someone is to strike him once with his axe on condition that the Green Knight (Sean Connery) may return the blow in a year and a day . There appears Gaiwan (a wooden Miles O'Keefe) , a rookie knight in the court of King Arthur (Trevor Howard) who is sent out on a quest brought on by a challenge issue by the magical Green Knight . Gaiwan must solve a riddle in one year or die .

This flabby fairy tale adventure contains witchery , fantasy , cheesy special affects, stagy acting , surreal imagery and grimly marches . The picture has good settings , as thick rolling fog , deep forest , dark castles and rocky seacoast ; this movie delivers on locations ; however , it results to be mediocre and a little bit boring . Connery can only be on-screen for a few scenes but he adds zest to his character , he steals the show as an ironic Green Knight . Ronald Lacey, who played the character Oswald, also played the same character, also called Oswald, in "Gawain and the Green Knight" which was made in 1973, and basically, it was the same movie, same actor, same role .

This lumbering film version of one of the Arthurian legends is badly done , as the motion picture was regularly directed by Stephen Weeks . Filmmaker Weeks was one of two young British directors to emerge in the terror field in the late sixties , the other , Michael Reeves died at 25 . He began his professional film career at age 17, directing a series of short films . He made his film cinema short film, 'Moods of a Victorian Church' (1967) at age 19, and his first cinema drama, a film set in the First World War in France '1917' . Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was Stephen's second picture at age of 22 and he realized other horror films such as ¨Madhouse mansion¨ or ¨Ghost story¨(1979) and adventure movie such as ¨Gawain and the Green Knight¨ (1973) also with Peter Cushing , Ronald Lacey , Murray Head as Sir Gawain and Nigel Green and its remake titled ¨Sword of the valiant¨ (1983) and not much of an improvement . Rating : 5/10 . Well worth watching but only for Sean Connery fans .

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English chivalric romance. It is one of the best known Arthurian stories, and is of a type known as the "beheading game". The Green Knight is interpreted by some as a representation of the Green Man of folklore and by others as an allusion to Christ. Written in stanzas of alliterative verse, each of which ends in a rhyming bob and wheel, it draws on Welsh, Irish and English stories, as well as the French chivalric tradition. It is an important poem in the romance genre, which typically involves a hero who goes on a quest which tests his prowess, and it remains popular to this day in modern English renderings from J. R. R. Tolkien, Simon Armitage and others, as well as through film and stage adaptations. It describes how Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table, accepts a challenge from a mysterious "Green Knight" who challenges any knight to strike him with his axe if he will take a return blow in a year and a day. Gawain accepts and beheads him with his blow, at which the Green Knight stands up, picks up his head and reminds Gawain of the appointed time. In his struggles to keep his bargain Gawain demonstrates chivalry and loyalty until his honour is called into question by a test involving Lady Bertilak, the lady of the Green Knight's castle.The poem survives in a single manuscript, the Cotton Nero A.x., which also includes three religious narrative poems .

I thought the movie was entertaining. Sean Connery looked a little ridiculous as the green knight. I saw the movie as a love story between Sir Gawain, Miles O'Keeffe, and the Lady of Lyonesse, Lila Kedrova. It was amusing and cute.

This is certainly a dodgy film on many levels, but it has some redeeming moments. Sean Connery is terrific as The Green Knight, he obviously has a heap of fun in the role and steals the show.

If you come across this film you could do a lot worse.

Both the stories of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Owain a the Lady of the Fountain are classic remnants of an oral tradition more ancient than the French Norman Romances and 14th Century Welsh Mabinogion story collections, yet both thought these two stories worthy of retelling and recording in written form much like Tristan and Parzifal. And there's a good reason for it, obviously good enough reason to get the likes of Sean Connery, Trevor Howard, Lila Kedrova, and John Rhys-Davies to take part in this admittedly cheesy production. (The fact that this was a Golan Globus production should have been a clue to any movie fan.)

The ancient Celtic bards had to memorize some 100 major stories and 200 minor ones to entertain the folks during those long cold winter nights. While Tristan and Parcival belong to the former, Gawain and Owain belong to the latter. These are ribald entertainments for light late night story telling entertainment much like a James Bond, or a cheesy B-Movie. In fact I have heard one professor of Medieval Studies refer to Owain as the James Bond of the Arthurian cycles. And the middle part of this film that deals with Lyonese captures the whole Bond formula (or I should say formula which Fleming followed) of impossible predicament (ala Dr. Evil's "No. Intend to set up an elaborate death and walk away assuming it happened."), narrow escape, beautiful damsel, daring do, hand to hand combat against impossible odds complete with tongue in cheek reparté.

I loved the movie for what it was from the moment I saw Trevor Howard's aging Arthur acting line the mean spirited cranky old fart the Welsh triads depict (not the "boyish" one of the Gawain poem) , through Lina Kedrova's scary horny old widow queen, Rhys-Davis's Fontenbras playing with toy soldiers, and of course Connery's transcendental Green Knight. Sure I missed some of the original story elements of both stories - the fountain and the ogre with the giant club - and I hated that cheesy last scene with Linet that they added on the end of the perfect ending scene with the Green Knight.

But this one captured the spirit of the older tales of the Mabinogion (from which we get the oldest Owain and the Lady of the Fountain) much better than the Saxon-Norman poetic retelling of the Gawain story. Ribald, cheesy, fun with a few moral lessons thrown in for "redeeming social value." In this film's retelling one gets a much better feel for the kind of story the bards might have told the assembled drunken retainers in the King's Hall on a late mid-winter night.

I give it a 7 for capturing the spirit of the tradition (that Monty Python Holy Grail feel that one detractors here noted as though it were a bad thing) , great acting by the legendary actors in smaller parts noted above and the James Bond pulp fiction feel. I'm detracting points for the music, skipping the fountain/storm and the ogre/giant, and that dumb ending scene.

(PS contrary to one reviewer's accusation that it looked like a back lot in Pasadena, these were real Welsch castles including Cardiff and the former Palace of the Pope in Avignion.)