It seems so odd that there has yet to be a definitive portrayal of King Arthur in movies or TV. There is so much material to work with, and no shortage of ways it could be done. It could be a political drama like Elizabeth of Arthur consolidating his realm. It could be a love story between Lancelot and Guinevere, Erec and Enide or any of the many other couples. It could be an adventure film based on any of the romances. There are even some great possibilities for introspective character studies based on Gawain and the Green Knight or Silence.
Despite this, the closet we have to a classic Arthurian movie is Monty Python. I have no intention of calling that films brilliance into question, but it does not really tell an Arthurian story, so much as it shows a series of vaguely related sketches framed around the concept of King Arthur and the Grail. While it doesn’t quite fit the idea of what I mean by an Arthurian film masterpiece, it does illustrate a point professor Wenthe brought up in class. We seem to be unable to conceive of Arthur as anything but humorless and overly dramatic, or a parody of the that humorless drama. This means that outside of parodies of Arthur what we get is mainly over the top and cheesy. This might stem from the way the Arthurian classics are written. The old English and French verse, with discussions of honor and the nature of love, must make producers and writers think “stuffy” or “overly-dramatic” are the only correct feelings an Arthurian movie. Unless of course they are doing the “gritty realism” thing that has been so popular in films recently and you get the supposedly accurate Clive Owen King Arthur from 2004. In this instance the filmmakers abandoned the feel of previous Arthurian films, but they also abandoned most of what was true to the original story as well. Having King Arthur be a roman soldier might be the most hilariously nonsensical change I’ve ever seen in a movie. Hopefully we won’t have to wait too much longer before a script gets written by someone who appreciates the Arthurian legend enough to give it the respect it deserves.
My final thought on this is that a movie based around Sir Marrok, the Round Table Werewolf would set the record for most Academy Awards if there were any justice in the world.
It’d be interesting to compare the number of Arthurian films with the number of Arthurian books written since the invention of film, and study the quality and entertainment value of each. I suppose one of the reasons there haven’t been alot of wildly successful films is the high cost of making period pieces. The costume design alone, in order to be authentic would be an enormous challenge, not to mention locations. There’s also the problem of needing to be visually interesting, which pure authenticity may not offer. In order for contemporary viewers to be engrossed in an Arthurian film, there needs to be some way of visualizing all the complex metaphors of written texts, which may be difficult to do while still managing to be entertaining.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Arthurian films don’t have to be set it the past, and many aren’t. However, modern movies like The Fisher King aren’t always blatantly Arthurian. Re-imaginings seem to do pretty well, but films that attempt to be by-the-book Arthuriana just can’t seem to keep an audience.