Excalibur

Overview

Excalibur is the Arthurian legend told as full-throated myth. John Boorman's film, released in the United States on April 10, 1981, compresses nearly the whole of Sir Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century Le Morte d'Arthur into some two and a half hours: the sword in the stone, the Round Table, Lancelot and Guenevere, the quest for the Grail, and the last battle. Its knights wear polished plate that reflects green forest light; its Merlin is a sardonic, half-comic trickster; and its soundtrack sets Wagner's funeral music and Carl Orff's "O Fortuna" against Trevor Jones's original score.

Opening at No. 1 at the American box office, it became the defining screen version of Arthurian Fantasy for a generation and set the mythic, operatic register for the fantasy films that followed in the early 1980s, from Conan the Barbarian a year later to the more whimsical fairy tales of mid-decade.

Origins

The film grew from a project that never happened. In late 1969, United Artists, which then held the screen rights to Tolkien's books, commissioned Boorman to write a live-action The Lord of the Rings. By 1970 the script was judged too expensive, and the rights later passed to Saul Zaentz and Ralph Bakshi's animated version, a chapter of the Tolkien Rights Saga. Boorman carried much of the imagery and design he had imagined for Middle-earth into his Arthurian project instead.

Boorman wrote the screenplay with Rospo Pallenberg, working directly from Malory rather than from modern retellings such as T. H. White's The Once and Future King. Orion Pictures produced; Warner Bros. distributed in the United States. The whole film was shot in Ireland, on locations in counties Wicklow, Tipperary and Kerry and at Ardmore Studios, on a reported budget of $11 million. The cast was led by Nigel Terry as Arthur, Nicol Williamson as Merlin, Helen Mirren as Morgana, Nicholas Clay as Lancelot and Cherie Lunghi as Guenevere, with Irish and British stage actors, many of them then little known, filling the court.

The story

Merlin obtains the sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake for the warlord Uther Pendragon, then, at a price, transforms Uther into the likeness of the Duke of Cornwall so that he may lie with the duke's wife, Igrayne. The child of that night, Arthur, is taken by Merlin. Uther, dying in an ambush, drives Excalibur into a stone, where it waits until the young squire Arthur draws it.

Arthur unites the land, founds the fellowship of the Round Table, and marries Guenevere, while his greatest knight, Lancelot, falls in love with the queen. Arthur's half-sister Morgana learns Merlin's magic, traps the wizard with his own magic, and takes Guenevere's form to seduce Arthur, bearing him a son, Mordred. As king and land sicken together, the knights ride out after the Grail; only Perceval finds it and learns its secret: "You and the land are one." Restored, Arthur rides to a final battle against Mordred's army, and father and son kill each other. Perceval, at the dying king's command, casts Excalibur back into the lake, and a barge carries Arthur away.

Reception & impact

Reviews were sharply split. Roger Ebert called the film both "a wondrous vision" and "a mess," and Vincent Canby of The New York Times thought Boorman used the myths with a pretentiousness that obscured his vision. Pauline Kael admired its "crazy integrity" while finding its dialogue weak. Audiences were more decisive: the film opened at the top of the U.S. box office and earned about $34.97 million in the United States and Canada, making it one of the eighteen highest-grossing films of 1981.

It won the prize for Best Artistic Contribution at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, and Alex Thomson's cinematography was nominated for an Academy Award. Bob Ringwood's costumes received a BAFTA nomination. The cast list became a roll call of future stars: Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart and Ciarán Hinds all appeared in early roles.

Legacy

Excalibur arrived in the same years that fantasy was booming on tabletops and paperback racks, and it gave the Arthurian corner of that world a vivid, adult visual vocabulary of armor, blood, mist and ritual. Four years later Chaosium published Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon, a roleplaying game also rooted in Malory, showing how much appetite there was for Camelot as a playable world.

Its reputation has only grown. The director Zack Snyder called it, in 2009, "the perfect meeting of movies and mythology." The invented words of Merlin's spell, later reconstructed by the linguist Michael Everson as an approximation of Old Irish, gave the British extreme-metal band Anaal Nathrakh its name.

Did you know?

Alex Thomson, whose cinematography earned Excalibur its Oscar nomination, went on to shoot Jim Henson's Labyrinth in 1986.