I cavalieri della tavola rotonda

When I used to teach world history, I invariably got questions such as "When are we going to learn about King Arthur?"...and invariably I had to explain to my students that there was no Arthur...at least when it comes to history. And, because there are many different fictional accounts of Arthur and his reign, the studio had lots of room to craft whatever sort of story they wanted...provided, of course, they included the familiar Arthurian characters.

I have an odd confession. Although I love history and have enjoyed such films as "Ivanhoe", "The Vikings" and "Robin Hood", I am not a huge fan of medieval costume dramas. I find, generally, they are pretty dull affairs...with too much emphasis on costuming and stilted dialog. Heck, my favorite Arthurian film is "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"! Keep this in mind as you read the rest of my review.

The film is the story of Sir Lancelot (Robert Taylor) and his career from joining King Arthur to saving Guinevere from captivity to marriage to betraying the king. It's all very familiar stuff if you are acquainted with the legends.

So is it any good? Yes and no. The costumes are nice and one of the horse battles is really nice. But it's also very cold and the dialog very dull and stilted....as I pretty much expected. I give it five stars simply because it looks nice....period.

The Arthur legend gets a grand production here, good photography and rousing battle scenes. The leads kind of go through the motions in their roles though, some of the supporting players really carry this film.

Robert Taylor was never comfortable in those 'iron jockstrap' movies as he called them. But he was the most dutiful employee MGM had and like Errol Flynn with westerns, Taylor just went with the flow. Funny thing is Taylor much preferred doing westerns as he reached his forties.

Was there ever a more beautiful Guinevere than Ava Gardner? I sincerely doubt it. If she never spoke a line in the film, you know this is a woman for whom you toss convention out for. Ava was in the middle of her tempestuous marriage to Frank Sinatra at the time, so I'm sure she was preoccupied.

And next to Richard Burton on stage and Richard Harris on the screen Mel Ferrer looks positively colorless. Not the guy to command the loyalty the legendary king was supposed to do.

But I did like the performances of Felix Aylmer as Merlin, Anne Crawford as Morgan Le Fay and Stanley Baker as Mordred. Felix Aylmer was never bad in anything he ever did, always a figure of wisdom and dignity in any role. Morgan Le Fay is quite the schemer here and Anne Crawford brings her to life. Sadly Ms. Crawford died only two years later of leukemia at age 36. American audiences probably only know her for this film, but she's fantastic.

But the best performance in the film has to be Stanley Baker. He was a rugged tough man in every film he did, good guy or bad guy. His Mordred has depth and passion and he's unrelenting in his plans to topple Arthur and the Round Table.

If they gave Oscars out for performances by animals than Robert Taylor's horse Varick would have won it that year. Except for Roy Rogers's Trigger, I don't think we've ever had a smarter movie horse. He's obedient and well trained and knight's horse certainly had to be back in the day. And he saves Taylor's bacon on one occasion.

It's a good film, not the best from either of the stars, but I think you'll like it overall.

This is another one of those lavish 1950s historical epics that achieves visual beauty and grand action but cannot muster up a bit of audience involvement. The tragedies of the Lancelot and Guinevere affair and Arthur's kingdom are lost in this bland re imagining.

The characters are thinly drawn and none of the actors emote even once. They all just read through the script flatly, not a shred of feeling to be found, Robert Taylor and Mel Ferrer being the worst offenders. The supporting actors steal the show.

Once again, the music, costumes, and sets are nice, but good production values cannot save a mediocre movie.

Although Robert Taylor is top-lined alongside Ava Gardner in this MGM historical romp, he plays Lancelot, not Arthur. The King himself is played by Mel Ferrer with utmost seriousness. Despite a lot of bad reviews over the years, this movie from Richard Thorpe is actually quite enjoyable.

Taylor and Gardner (playing Guinevere, of course, and looking every inch the part) are particularly watchable, but there is sterling support from icy Brit Anne Crawford as Morgan Le Fay; Stanley Baker as Mo(r)dred; Felix Aylmer as Merlin; Maureen Swanson as Elaine (whose midsummer wish brings Lancelot into her life and into his first meeting with Arthur); and Niall McGinnis as the argumentative Green Knight.

Sumptuous colour and some exciting swordplay keep this film bumping along - just short of two hours and, if it veers away from the legend a bit, well, it is all in the spirit of 1950s cinema.

In his novel "The Lyre of Orpheus" the Canadian writer Robertson Davies made the point that although the Arthurian legend had played an immensely influential role in the history of English literature, there had never been a particularly distinguished dramatic treatment of the story, either in the theatre or in the cinema. (Davies discounts Purcell's opera on the grounds that its plot differs radically from what we have come to think of as the Arthurian story). And yet the story seems to offer great dramatic possibilities, both in its adventure elements and in the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle.

"Knights of the Round Table" was the second in an unofficial trilogy of films on a mediaeval theme made by producer Pandro S. Berman and director Richard Thorpe, all of which starred Robert Taylor. (The others in the trilogy, both based on the novels of Sir Walter Scott, were Ivanhoe and The Adventures of Quentin Durward). It is based upon Thomas Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur", although it makes some changes. The Quest for the Holy Grail plays a less important role in the film than in the book,   Elaine is Lancelot's wife rather than his lover, and their son Galahad, who plays a key role in the book, only appears as a baby. Apart from Lancelot and the villain Mordred (here referred to as "Modred"), the most prominent of the knights is Sir Percival, in this version Elaine's brother.

The film is ostensibly set in the Britain of the 5th or 6th century, after the end of the Roman occupation, but as is usual in films on this theme (the recent "King Arthur" being an exception) the costumes, armour and buildings are all based upon those of the High Middle Ages, that is to say of Malory's day rather than of Arthur's. Arthur's kingdom is always referred to as "England", even though the historic Arthur (assuming that he was a real person) would never have used this term. The Celts would always have referred to "Britain", the name "England" ("Land of the Angles") being used only by their Anglo-Saxon enemies.

The story begins with Britain in turmoil, divided among various warring overlords. Arthur, the illegitimate son of the former ruler Uther Pendragon, is able to unite the kingdom and, with the help of Lancelot and the wizard Merlin, to defeat his main challengers, his half-sister Morgan Le Fay and her son Modred. (Anne Crawford who plays Morgan was only eight years older than Stanley Baker, who plays her son. Presumably the explanation is that Morgan's enchantments have been able to preserve her youthful looks, and things could have been worse. The original choice for Modred was George Sanders, fourteen years older than Crawford). After his victory Arthur pardons Morgan and Modred, against Lancelot's advice, but they continue to plot against him, and see the growing attraction between Lancelot and Arthur's wife Guinevere as their chance to make trouble.

One of the problems with Arthurian films and plays is that the love- triangle is so central to the plot that it requires three high-quality performances if it is to succeed. Taylor here makes an attractively dashing Lancelot, although the film misses one of the key themes of Malory's work. In Malory Lancelot, an otherwise ideal knight, is morally compromised by his adulterous affair with Guinevere, but in this version their love is not physically consummated, possibly in order to keep the censors happy, and the result is that he seems a much less morally ambiguous figure. The film tries to contrast the "flawed" Lancelot with the idealised Percival, but Lancelot's flaws seemed to me very minor ones.

Arthur is another complex character, difficult to realise on screen, because he is on the one hand a powerful, heroic monarch and on the other someone compromised by his status as a cuckold. In mediaeval literature cuckolds were generally seen as weak, pitiable or ridiculous, like Alison's husband in Chaucer's "Miller's Tale". Probably the best screen Arthur I have seen was Sean Connery in "First Knight", but that film subtly altered the traditional tale by making Arthur much older than Guinevere or Lancelot. Here Arthur comes across as a forgettable nonentity when he should be at the film's centre, and this is due partly to the wooden acting of Mel Ferrer and partly to the sanitising of the Lancelot/Guinevere relationship which also removes much of the interest from Arthur's character. As for Ava Gardner, she certainly makes a lovely Guinevere, but she was capable of much better acting than this. (As, for example, in "The Barefoot Contessa" the following year). Baker is not bad as Modred, but I think that Sanders, who had been so effective as Brian de Bois-Guilbert in "Ivanhoe", would have been better.

The film is visually attractive, with much emphasis on pageantry and spectacle, but I did not enjoy it as much as "Ivanhoe". (I have never seen "Quentin Durward"). It is certainly better than the dull and turgid "King Arthur", but the problems with characterisation made me aware just why it can be so difficult to make an effective Arthurian drama and to understand what Robertson Davies may have meant by his dictum. 6/10