The Death of the Arthur #1: Le Bore D’Arthur

First in some kind of a series on Arthurian adaptations.

BEFORE THERE WAS SPAMALOT…

Is that how they’d advertise a re-release of the Joshua Logan CAMELOT, the first all-non-singing, all-non-dancing musical? I suppose it’d have to be.

Bunged this one into the Sony because it seemed like the right kind of holiday fare: dull, spectacular and vaguely diverting when you’re feeling dozy. And it certainly fit the bill, from overture to end credits, clocking in at around three hours which I don’t want back unless you promise I can spend them doing something else.

But it’s rather beautifully and inventively designed — it’s a big Vanessa Redgrave fashion show, a contest to see how much money the various departments can spend. Enormous, miscast and poorly staged, but splendidly mounted.

A friend once dismissed Richard Harris as an unpleasant, preening fellow, and I now suspect he must have been introduced to RH in this film (have confirmed this — he’d seen MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY but didn’t make the connection) — our regal star is curiously repellant in blue eye-shadow and the worst hairpiece of his career, simpering and mugging right at us, the fourth wall in smithereens around him. I have a suspicion he’s somehow seen Burton in the role (800-plus perfs on Broadway, plenty of opportunity) and is turning in an impersonation, but this shit plays differently if you’re a proper baritone, I guess. Burton couldn’t seem fey if he wanted to, which became its own problem in the jaw-dropping STAIRCASE.

Harris’ other role-model is surely Rex Harrison, which leads him to believe he can get by without being able to sing. He can sort-of sing, and act-sing, and all that, but can he really sell a song? Again, sort of. Vanessa Redgrave can just about sing, and Franco Nero is dubbed by a singer, so he’s OK except that he has an Italian accent only when he’s talking, which is peculiar.

The design is fab — costumes and production design by John Truscott, but with Edward Carrere as art director doing some kind of uncredited assist on the massive sets. Sometimes things are disconcertingly sixties, but this isn’t any kind of historical realism. There is no mud whatsoever. Everyone rides about in suits of armour even when they’re not going into battle.

Richard H. Kline photographs it — as he did THE BOSTON STRANGLER, THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, THE TERMINAL MAN. A good man to have on your team. It’s 1967 so he does rather pour on the soft-focus, but only in flashbacks, and the zoom lens is slightly too active. And his director is no help, I fear. But he’s got lots of great stuff to photograph, and it’s EVERYWHERE, so he can hardly go wrong. Dig those snowy forest sets!

Apart from the direction, the editing seems like the weak spot, and not just because of the interminable length (long film’s aren’t badly edited, they’re just LONG). Poor continuity on facial expressions between wides and close shots, which you can’t really get away with — what else are we supposed to be looking at? That fireplace? Well, possibly, it’s very nice. I don’t rate continuity as supremely important — pre-codes tend to be very dodgy in this dept, and I love those — but it’s an issue here, and lets down the splendiferous effect the other departments are striving to achieve. Harris crosses a room, monologuing insufferably, without moving his lips. There’s one nice bit, where Redgrave is intercut on a swing, a see-saw, and bouncing on a blanket, which is proper sixties cinema.

Cutter Folmar Blangsted did RIO BRAVO, and a lot of other films for a lot of other big directors — too many, in fact. One notices that none of them asked him back, and one has to wonder why not? Why do the titles play over a misty forest, then fade to black, then fade up again on the same scene?

Alan Jay Lerner’s misogyny problem is ongoing, so Guinevere is a horrible character who not only cuckolds Arthur (who can blame her?) but provokes a bunch of jousts to get Lancelot hurt, before she even knows him. Merlyn (sp) is Laurence Naismith, which is fine indeed, but is given the biggest delayed entrance in screen history — except they bugger this up by throwing him into the first scene, with his ball-bearing eyes and shoulder-owl. Madness.

David Hemmings turns up after the intermission to liven things up — so we get a preen-off between him and Harris, which is entertaining, and if you don’t find it so, you can pass the time counting the highlights in DH’s hair. Mordred is from Scotland in this version, but we’re not worrying about accents. If we started doing that, Lancelot would be screwed. But he gets some natty outfits, leather trousers and jerkin, and a sort of highland rogue cossie in which the taran is replaced by streaks of charcoal. If you get bored counting the little squeaks his trousers make, you can count the different highlights in his dark ages hair.

The stunts are good — I usually find jousting tedious until the participants are unhorsed and can get the maces out, and even then, they’re scarcely nimble. But here we have the Canutt brothers, Joe and Tap, devising a series of spectacular falls. Not well shot, but the best tournament outside of THE COURT JESTER and Bresson’s flashy off-camera business in LANCELOT DU LAC.

In common with a lot of Arthurian romps — EXCALIBUR, for one — no sooner has the round table been carpentered into existence than things start falling apart. The story of happiness is written in invisible ink, and probably the best way to treat the glory of Camelot is to skip it, either ending the story when it’s founded, or starting as it ends, but here we’re trying to do the whole legend, with flashbacks of a sort to Arthur’s boyhood as Wart. A principle rule is being broken: NEVER try to tell the whole story. T.H. White did, more or less, but he had the sense to spread it across three books. Incidentally, they don’t deign to credit him here.

There are some surprising moments approximating cinema — Harris rides a camera crane, like Gene Kelly or the kid in IVAN’S CHILDHOOD, either of whom seems a possible inspiration. Harris matching his costume and posture with little Arthur is arresting. So are Merlyn’s silver eyeballs, but they totally prevent any screen relationship forming between Laurence Naismith and his regal charge. Logan failing to ever put them in a set-up together is also a contributing factor.

It’s not even a good PLAY, at least for screen purposes — servants are continually introduced as a series of Basil Expositions, so we get alluring moments of Estelle Winwood and the like flashed across the screen, only for them to vanish forever leaving us with the mismatched leads.

Did Vanessa Redgrave invent ugly-crying? She does it all through one scene here, and it’s a blast of the New Realism but maybe that doesn’t belong in this MYTHOLOGICAL MUSICAL? And even if we welcome it in, it could stand some modulation. Looking at someone gurning wetly for minutes on end is rather a strain.

You have to respect the scale of a production that can even manage to get Richard Harris out of bed before dawn.

For all that — and more, much more — the film at least does have some idea of what the idea of Camelot means to it — peace and civilisation and that — which comes to clarity in the final scene, “for one brief shining moment,” the rather mad ending where Harris does the latest in a long line of reprises — none of Lerner & Loewe’s songs is that catchy but that one got earwormed into me like a corkscrew through sheer force of repetition — and Arthur gets his inspiration back and the film abruptly STOPS. One would usually expect a battle or something, but I suppose that wouldn’t work here, after a song about peace and civilisation.

“Too much beauty is disgusting,” said Bresson, brilliantly, a filmmaker who also tackled this story, or a chunk of it. I didn’t get that surfeit-of-pudding nausea, though, maybe because the gorgeous design was the only thing to hang onto.

CAMELOT stars Dumbledore; Isadora Duncan; Django; Dildano; Prof. Joseph Cavor; Argos; Hold Me Touch Me; and Miles Gloriosus (uncredited).

New!

Peplum Pudding

Anne Heywood is an inflection point of cinematic eroticism. Like the late Catherine Spaak. Nudity had only just gone mainstream in 1968, and immediately Spaak was being full-frontal, and getting up to all manner of kinky BDSM stuff in THE LIBERTINE. And she had just made a bland Hollywood movie, HOTEL. How did she know this was a good idea? How did she know it wouldn’t hurt her career, as actors have found in the years since, when they go just a little bit too far?

Heywood has always been saucy. She made her debut as a beauty contestant in LADY GODIVA RIDES AGAIN, spent most of FLOODS OF FEAR soaking wet and some of it barely clothed, and then here she is in CARTHAGE IN FLAMES, a hokey peplum, apparently about to be be human-sacrificed in a blatant riff on CABIRIA (our old friend Moloch). Since, unlike Cabiria, her character’s not a little kid, someone’s decided she might as well play it in diaphanous veils and a thong. So she does. In 1960. The nudity is fleeting, but it basically kept me watching to the end of the movie in (vain) hopes she might do it again.

She still has to look forward to THE VERY EDGE (nudity, rape), THE FOX (nudity, lesbianism), I WANT WHAT I WANT (nudity, gender reassignment), THE NUN AND THE DEVIL (nudity, sadism), GOOD LUCK, MISS WYCKOFF (nudity, rape, interracial), RING OF DARKNESS (nudity, satanism)… probably some more outstanding sexual deviations lurk in her filmography.

A number of the sword-and-sandal flicks were piloted by old timers — Viktor Tourjansky, who had made his name in Russia and France, ruined it in Nazi Germany and wound up in Italy playing traffic cop on Biblical, classical and other historical epics, With committed leftist Damiano Damiani as co-writer on most of them. They were churned out with unbelievable speed, with a thrifty reuse of sets and even footage from one to the next, whether the setting was Ancient Greece or Tsarist Russia. But this one, intriguingly, is under the control, barely, of Carmine Gallone, whose career stretched back to 1913. He made the original AVATAR in 1916 (no relation to Cameron’s movies), MALOMBRA with Lyda Borelli the following year, and the 1926 version of THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII.

By now I’d say he’s pretty exhausted, but he has a surprisingly good multinational cast — Daniel Gelin, Pierre Brasseur, Paolo Stoppa, Terence Hill when he was still using his birth name, Mario Girotti, before he was a NOBODY, and of course la Heywood, whose own birth name is Violet Pretty, which I guess everybody decided was altogether too much of a good thing.

It’s not exactly GOOD. But it trumps the Wyler BEN-HUR by staging its sea battle full-sized. I’ve seen this goofy ship before, in a Hercules movie I think. Oh no, my mistake, a MACISTE (pronounced McChesty). This one. The design throughout is good camp fun.

It’s evidently been dubbed in London, and I kept expecting to be able to recognize the plummy tones emerging airlessly from the flapping lips onscreen, but I never could. Everybody sounds very proper and distinguished, like they assembled a roomful of Leo Genns of various sizes and pitches. You can’t quite believe these sounds emerging from a callow Terence Hill. Imagine Matt Berry dubbing a man in a skimpy tunic. It’s the world’s plummiest peplum.

It’s a shame to be missing Pierre Brasseur’s mighty voice, but whoever’s dubbing baddie Gelin, the best character, does a decent job. An oily purr with a bit of gravel thrown in.

The most interesting choice is Sarepta the Black maidservant, played onscreen by Edith Peters and on the soundtrack by some anonymous interloper. Her dialogue suggests she’s been intended as a somewhat comic character, an opinionated and backtalking figure in the Hattie McDaniel mode. Yet all the offensive possible approaches the dubbing artiste could have taken are somehow skirted, and the character speaks in moderately posh, extremely wooden tones with very occasional hints of a northern English accent. Flat, awkward and ridiculous, but at least not stereotyped. And she gets a below-stairs interracial romance with Paolo Stoppa.

The writers have tried to concoct some characterisation, so everyone’s in love with the wrong person. It’s like The Seagull with short swords.

Big fire at the end — only five minutes worth, but mostly full-scale and quite impressive.

CARTHAGE IN FLAMES stars Frédérick Lemaître; Louis Bernard; Roy/Wendy; Giraffa; Don Calogero Sedara; Inspector Alberto Bassano; Dr. Frankenstein; Inspector A; Oedipus – King of Thebes; and Trinity.